I posted it on the misnamed Moderate Thread where it seems to have been ignored. The Washington Post ran a companion piece yesterday on the success of the Mini-Deans.
story.news.yahoo.com
The Democrats' Mini-Deans
Tue Mar 1,11:30 PM ET Politics - washingtonpost.com
By Terry M. Neal
Democrats didn't have a lot to smile about in November, particularly in the South, where North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley was one of the party's few bright spots. The incumbent from Rocky Mount raised and spent more money than his Republican opponent on the way to an easy reelection.
But three months after defeating Republican challenger Patrick Ballantine, 55 percent to 43 percent, Easley found himself rebuffed by the state's Democratic Executive Committee last week. The governor's choice for state party chairman, attorney and party insider, Ed Turlington, was rejected in favor of attorney and 34-year-old party activist Jerry Meek.
In the News & Observer of Raleigh, reporter Rob Christensen called Meek's election "a rebuke to Gov. Easley and party insiders."
Meek ran an insurgent's campaign, accusing the governor and the party's power structure of being unresponsive to the interests and needs of the local party activists.
"I believe that our party has lost touch with the local party,' Meek told a packed room at N. C. State University's McKimmon Center" after the vote, according to the News & Observer. "'I'll create a party of inclusion where grass-roots workers have a real say and power isn't just limited to the Raleigh insiders.'"
A few weeks before Meek's election, Democrats in Arkansas bucked the system, too, by ousting two-term incumbent state chairman Ron Oliver of North Little Rock for 34-year-old Jason Willett of Jonesboro. Willett argued, among other things, that the party had ignored its grass-roots base.
So why should anybody care about some inside politics stories from Arkansas and North Carolina? Because in some ways they mirror what happened on the national level with the election of Howard Dean (news - web sites) as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (news - web sites), and because they underscore a restive force that could reshape Democratic Party politics in the years to come.
The Washington Post's Dan Balz noted in a Feb. 20 story that Dean has called "for 'bottom-up reform' of the Democratic Party and the further empowerment of grass-roots activists who flexed their political muscle in his unsuccessful presidential campaign."
Balz's story examined the national ramifications of Dean's election; but it's clear that Dean has been an inspiration even to the activists on local and state levels, who see his election as a clarion call to take over their increasingly institutional party.
The movement is less ideological than it is strategic and structural. Activists from the local level to the national level believe the party has become hierarchical, too much like the GOP. Democrats, they argue, aren't Republicans and respond better to a bottom-up campaign process.
There was a time when Democrats, despite their seemingly eternal financial disadvantage, beat Republicans by doing what they did best: winning the ground game. But Republicans caught up, largely by out-organizing Democrats. Last year, Karl Rove's strategy of energizing evangelicals and social conservatives trumped the Democrats' unprecedented money-raising apparatus.
Even as the Washington-based Democratic power structure caught up with the GOP in its ability to finance costly television ad campaigns and target voters through high technology, the grass-roots activists complained that they were being ignored in the trenches.
"I don't think you've seen the end of it [with North Carolina and Arkansas]," said former Gore presidential campaign manager Donna Brazile, whose expertise is grass-roots organizing. "[Dean's election] marks the end of the Terry [McAuliffe] era and in a way the end of the Clinton era. What you see is Deaniacs really asserting themselves across the board.
"I don't see this is a bad thing, because when you infuse new blood in the party you bring it alive and bring new energy. My only caution, though, is whether this new group is going to really be willing to get down and do the hard, dirty work of rebuilding the party."
One of the things motivating activists in southern states in particular, according to both Meek and Willett, is that party leaders have focused too narrowly on winning state and local races, while ceding presidential elections to Republicans. And in some cases, Democrats have become too dysfunctional to win state races. In Arkansas, Willett ran on the need to regroup and build a cohesive state organization for next year's election to replace Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, who is term-limited.
Democrats still control the Arkansas state House and Senate and hold five of the seven statewide constitutional offices. Willett said that proves Democrats can still win in the South -- but not with a top-down strategy.
"If Dems are going to run and win, they've got to get back out on the grass-roots level," said Willett, a district director for U.S. Rep. Marion Berry (news, bio, voting record) (D-Ark.). "Republicans are picking up these states that are turning red because we've let them outwork us and turn around some of these issues that have been our issues into their own."
In his campaign against Oliver, Willett argued that while state Democrats were becoming ever more proficient at the fundraising and technical part of running campaigns, the insular Little Rock-based party had virtually ceded vast swaths of the state outside Little Rock to the GOP.
"I was very very impressed with Howard Dean and what he was wants to do. I have every intention to work with him to rebuild the Arkansas party the same way as he wants to rebuild the national party," Willett said. "We're not just going to roll over and play dead in these states. And I'm looking forward to developing a southern strategy that allows us to go back into some of these states, like Mississippi, where Democrats are no longer competitive."
The natural inclination is to assume that the grass-roots surge is the equivalent of liberals taking over the party. But Meek, Willett and others insist that the movement isn't ideological. It's more about moving the party back to the organizational model that has worked in the past.
Willett said Dean -- who was endorsed by the NRA in eight consecutive gubernatorial races and pushed for balanced budgets in Vermont -- plays better in Arkansas than some might believe. Nonetheless, the grass-roots movement is not so much ideological as it is practical, he and Meek insist.
In North Carolina, Easley -- who campaigned on the state's improving economy and rising public school test scores -- was seen by the grass roots of his party as aloof, according to some state Democrats and media reports in the state. He skipped major gatherings and did little to personally court the people who do the door-knocking and phone banking in far-flung places.
"There are in North Carolina thousands of people who work very hard in the trenches to make things happen, and they don't think their voices matter very much to the institution," Meek said. "I think it's largely an issue of having a voice, feeling like they're valued and have an important place within the party and have access to the resources on the ground to get the job done."
And the job includes more than electing one politician. The way Meek and Willett see it, it's about rebuilding a tattered party from the bottom up, one step at a time. |
