[update]
Did you know? We are all the Karl Roves of the Democratic Party. We actually lost in this election.
Al Fromm, Founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council, explains it all to us today:
The big political test will come almost immediately, in the ability of Democrats to offer a compelling progressive agenda for the country, and in a 2008 presidential contest that will be about the future more than the past. If Democrats act as problem solvers, not polarizers, that future will be very bright.
That last point was underscored by Joe Lieberman’s re-election victory in Connecticut, which helps solidify the Democratic Party’s credentials as a broad, inclusive coalition able to compete for the vital center of American politics.
Bruce Reed, writing in Slate, is also featured today on the DLC website, alongside Al From’s piece: He provides the comparison of the Blogosphere to Karl Rove & minions.
Democrats did just about everything right and ran their best campaign in a decade. Field marshals Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer ignored the virtual industry of self-help nonsense (he inserts here a link here to Ed Kilgore’s and George Lakoff’s work – a sly dig at the reading habits of many progressive bloggers) that has paralyzed Democrats’ chattering classes and went back to a simple, proven formula: From the suburbs to the heartland, elections are won in the center.
Emanuel and Schumer went out of their way to recruit candidates that could put the party’s best face forward in otherwise-hostile territory. Despite pressure from various interests, they refused to impose ideological litmus tests. The result? Democrats did the opposite of what Republicans have been doing (and what losing Democratic campaigns usually do). Instead of shrinking their tent, Democrats made their big tent a lot bigger.
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With mainstream Democratic candidates who weren’t vulnerable on values and weren’t afraid to hit back when attacked, Republican social issues were the wedge that didn’t bite.
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In fact, the best news of the 2006 elections is the opportunity it gives Democrats to earn the lasting support of the independents and disgruntled Republicans whose votes just dropped in our laps. Tuesday was the death knell for Rovism–the quaint and now fully discredited theory that majorities are built not by expanding support with ideas that work but by mobilizing extreme minorities with ideas that aren’t meant to be enacted and wouldn’t work if they did.
Ever since watching Rove’s success in 2002 and 2004, some on the left and in the blogosphere have been trying to persuade the Democratic Party to follow suit and develop our own smashmouth politics aimed less at persuasion and more at motivating our base. As Lamont discovered, that approach wins primaries–but as Joe Lieberman showed him, that’s no match for pragmatic problem solving in a general election.
It is clear, that the DLC is operating as if the voters who were independent or undecided or moderate Republicans came to vote against the current administration in some sort of vacuum.
They totally ignore the role of the progressive activists in reaching out to these voters and persuading them to vote for Democratic candidates. That is entirely missed. The DLC is thinking that it is solely appeal to centrist positions that has persuaded people to vote for Claire McCaskill, or Patrick, or Webb or Tester or the several other anti-war candidates. They fail to recall that their strategy didn’t win elections before 2002, either. They don’t count the millions of phone calls, home visits, letters written, talks given, due to volunteers solicited through progressive blogs. No indeed, as the DLC sees it, these people just materialized at the polls, persuaded by the likes of Al From arguing from the Progressive Policy Institute. The citizens of Pennsylvania, for example, were overjoyed to have New York and Illinois pols choose a “safe” Senatorial candidate, in a year when Kermit the Frog would likely have defeated the incumbent.
It is particularly nasty to see the many interconnections of the blogosphere, the courage of ordinary citizen-leadership, the extended group activism, and the fine get out the vote work catalyzed by these relationships compared to Karl Rove’s dirty deeds.
For Shame!