My fellow North Carolinian hits again on the behavior that has been causing Democrats to lose, lose, lose. Tom Sullivan on the Democratic consulting fraternity/sorority and the money they have wasted for over a decade.
Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: All in the Family
Of course the deflection of this analysis will align along ideological lines and imagining that a local or state candidate can’t possibly know their own local or state issues without being put in the approved DC Democratic frame.
Or it will pretend that it’s all a matter of a sense of purity.
Or it is from people who have not put themselves in action with a lot of effort time after time for candidates they had trouble promoting for reasons that they themselves understood. And oftentimes it wasn’t the candidate, it was the campaign.
“But the candidate is responsible for the campaign. And managing that is a key part of allowing the public to see how they will operate as a politician in office.”
The Catch-22 of Democratic Party politics, and Sullivan lays out exactly the hard complexity of the contradiction when money becomes the all-singing, all-dancing process of marketing politics.
And institutions get sapped of their money, manpower, and motivation through outright expensive foolishness.
First principle: Democrats should not be subsidizing media who sole purpose is defeat of Democrats. Ergo, Democrats should not have expensive media consultants with kickback agreements with production companies.
Second principle: You can’t go negative on your opponent until you have thoroughly sold the requisite number of voters to win on your own abilities. Prematurely attacking without a positive position blows back big time.
Third principle: Democrats cannot succeed doing exactly what Republicans do. Their constituency expects better of them.
Have you not seen these three principles violates recently?
Why is it that these expensive consultants didn’t catch these fundamental errors?
Might it be that they are going through the motions and cashing the checks.
It is not just the money. It is a culture. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas wrote about it a decade ago in “Crashing the Gate.” They begin one chapter with a quote by a Republican operative:
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
The one time when Democrats should do what Republicans say they do. Markos was right. And that was before the seduction of the fraternity for bloggers became so powerful. The sense of being inside the gates.