Burnt Orange Report

Andrew D,

Just thought I'd take issue with your labeling Andrew Sullivan a conservative pundit. Not really. He is fairly fiscally conservative, at least most of the time, and he supports the war on terror, but he is also quite socially liberal, to put it mildly. Part of the reason he is so down on Bush is he is upset that Bush pushed the FMA in the state of the union. Granted, I tend to agree with Sullivan more often that I disagree with him, but I and most conservatives still disagree with him fairly frequently. It would be more accurate to label Sullivan center-right, or a centrist with hawkish views on foreign policy, than to call him a conservative.

Sherk

Kerry/Gephardt would be a tough pair for Dubya to beat. Just putting my two cents in.

Dean ran a phenomenal grassroots effort to get to the front of the pack and then forgot what got him on top and fell back to the bottom again. - Andrew D.

I don't think it's accurate to say he "forgot what got him on top." A grassroots campaign always faces political and financial obstacles; it would have been a miracle if Dean made it all the way through to the nomination. And this year, he had the ever-so-effective corporate media to contend with.

Apart from that, I agree with your characterization of Dean. As a lifelong Democrat from the party's left wing... which Dean is not... I see him as having done the party a world of good. Could he have beaten Bush? I think so. Will he get the chance? Highly unlikely. My hope is that he finds a position of some influence in the party; we need more of his refreshing and positive approach.

Nobody actually votes for the VP. No one walks into the booth and says "You know, I don't like the guy running for President, but I'm sure his number 2 would do a great job doing whatever it is VPs do." The thing that makes a good running mate it picking one that has a good ground organization to get out the votes and looks presidential enough to help out the party in the future. Also, perception needs to be that the party cares about different kinds of people and isn't all stuffy. Two members of congress ought to be a no-no. Not having a southerner an even bigger no-no. And someone who has no statewide organization anywhere (i.e. has never held a statewide office) the biggest no-no.

So, we need a non-Washington, Southern, statewide elected official (essentially a governor) for the likely nominee, Kerry. Who's my choice? Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen. A very successful and very popular fiscal conservative and attractive candidate that has good organization in TN. I've liked him for some time now and I think he'd make an excellent running mate. Particularly if Bill Frist decides to run for President in 2008- having a Tennesseean VP or even Dem nominee (if, god forbid, we lose this year) would put a huge kink in his plans.

For Edwards I think Bredesen would work as well. Barring that, we need experience and the non-Washington organization stuff. Someone from outside DC with a national organization is Howard Dean. Edwards/Dean would be a formidible ticket. Ed Rendell, Governor of PA would be a good choice or Bill Richardson (an Hispanic former finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize) of NM would be good.

People are more likely to vote against a VP candidate than vote for one. Dan Quayle and Geraldine Ferraro are notable examples.
But a good VP choice can give added "bounce" to a ticket and solidify support among key groups. Al Gore gave Bill Clinton more credibility with environmentalists. Outsider Jimmy Carter reassured skeptical party apparatchiks with his choice of insider Walter Mondale.

My favorite VP choice for 2004, regardless of who gets the presidential nomination, is Bill Richardson.
His resume is impressive: congressman, secretary of energy, ambassador to the United Nations, and governor of New Mexico. As a Hispanic, his presence on the ticket makes it more difficult for the GOP to make inroads among Hispanic voters. And as a native Southwesterner, he brings geographic balance to the ticket.

I'm amazed at the number of obituaries being written for Dean by those who formerly offered fervent support. Why abandon him now after only two states? Wasn't it his unconventional approach, which catapulted him to the front, that attracted us in the first place? Now that he has adopted a new unconventional plan for accumulating delegates I'm surprised by the growing attrition from his once resolved ranks. Isn't defying conventional wisdom the trademark of Dean's campaign? Couldn't this risk pay off in the same way his first one did? Perhaps I'm in denial or just severely disappointed that all of that camaraderie we discovered in the Dean community as volunteers can so suddenly disappear in the very moment that it's value is called upon. Personally, I'm not willing to abandon a candidate whose superior record has not changed. By writing teary sentimental accounts of our experience as volunteers in the Dean machine we serve only to prove the pundits and our opponents correct that we were merely engaged for the movement and not a committed campaign. Certainly this goal of taking our country back and the lessons learned in this brave experiment won't die with the candidate, but we at least owe him our support until he wins, loses or drops out and not before that moment. Especially, as Texans.

Now that he has adopted a new unconventional plan for accumulating delegates

Losing every state? My, that is a very unconventional way of accumulating delegates. Right now it looks like John Kerry might run the table on Tuesday- he leads big in MO, AZ, NM, DE and ND and is only 1 point back in SC and within striking distance in OK. If he wins 5 states, comes in a very close second (with delegates) in SC and a strong 3rd in OK (with delegates) he'll have killed off Lieberman and perhaps Clark. Goes into Michigan and with the overwhelming inevitability complex and a substantial lead in money by this point over Dean he'll most likely win there, ending Dean. Edwards will be hanging on by a thread and if Kerry does what I suspect he will- skip TN and win VA- Edwards will be done. It'll then be time for Kerry/Bredesen or Kerry/Richardson 2004.

I've discussed the parable of the New Economy to the Dean campaign over beers with a friend of mine a couple of nights this week.
There are many valuable lessons to be learned for all involved from the early rounds of the Dean campaign. Here are a few I would take away from it:

1. Failure does not mean the tools are useless. Enron's information markets were and are completely incredible. Akamai Technologies brought revolutionary regional caching technology to the internet yet they went years without a profit and had to trim staff down to famine levels. The implementation of those markets (manipulation and extortion) were the things that brought them down, not the tools.

A failed strategy (we can bicker for days over "was it Trippi?" or "was it Dean?" but I don't think the early results can be called anything other than a failure) is what has temporarily tarnished the Dean Machine. The tools used should not be discarded; in fact I would go so far as to say that the they could provide the Democratic Party with a new set of tools to reinvent their sorely wasted and atrophied grassroots programs.

2. Upfront burn doesn't guarantee you squat. The strategy with an endless number of dot coms was to blow craploads of their venture capital on the most crass forms of material display: Splashy business casual parties for IPO, tacky product launch parties, utterly disposable swag, and expensive new office space with landscaping and lots of glass. Nearly all of those companies are now nothing but a bad taste in many an investor's mouth.

The Dean campaign's early strategy looks strikingly similar. Instead of plowing money into expanding staff to work as state and regional organizers and to do the grunt work of the ground campaign, money poured into advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire. The idea was very much in the same intellectual spirit as those dot coms: Hit them early, hit them hard, hit them often, and your product will achieve dominance. So far it has worked slightly better (no one is bankrupt...yet) but still not the best.

3. Conflict of interests can ruin more than a business (or political campaign); they can corrupt belief. Whether you are talking Dennis Kozlowski, Ken Lay, or Sam Waksal, recent history shows us that the New Economy suffered greatly from insider handoffs of hot IPOs to preferred clients and the distribution of stock options and their subsequent sale by executives while telling their employees to keep buying.

I am not making any criminal connection between the robbers of the New Economy and Joe Trippi and Steve McMahon, merely making the connection that in this case the conflict of interest between the Dean Campaign Manager directing business to an advertising agency in which he was a partner is simply not acceptable. So much of the Dean campaign's and Trippi's message was and is grounded in overthrowing the idea of politics as usual; to have one of the more prevalent examples of "politics as usual" occuring at the very heart of the campaign's executive management is at the very least unethical and blindingly stupid on Trippi's part and at the worst malicious conduct.

4. If you want to survive as a new company, you have to get your product to market and produce a product for which there is demand and the resources to satisfy that demand by purchasing the product. How many biotech companies came and went because they only had R&D and nothing close to coming to market? How many telecom gear companies came and went because their products were too beta and they could never get them into stable production?

The strategy with the Dean campaign was much the same way in the early going. Employing meetup.com, online donations, online blog communities, and a grassroots ground campaign based on Ganz's union organizing techniques held and still holds tremendous promise. But the idea never seems to "get to the market" in my opinion. It seems to me that the logical path this deployment would utilize would be to seed the ground campaign with digital tools of organization then expand the ground campaign with the digital tools (meetup, blogs, donations) beyond the boundaries of the digital world. Perhaps I am simply jaded and uninformed on this particular point of the campaign, but it certainly seems to me that the digital revolution for Dean turned into more of a digital prison for his wider national campaign in terms of hindering the ground campaign from expanding in more states. The over-reliance on digital tools stymied the Dean campaign's most important asset: Expanding the face-to-face grassroots campaign.

5. Train people for the tasks at hand and nest these within the bigger picture. Find people who have the skill sets necessary for your company to succeed. In the telecom world I can't tell you how many people I met with degrees in fields unrelated to their positions and WITHOUT THE training to succeed in their positions. Not having degrees in your field of employment isn't so much of an issue (hell, I run a linux cluster, perform security audits, and I'm a political scientist) IF you have the training to succeed. In political campaigns this is not so much of an issue because there isn't that much of a technical dimension to sharing your story and promoting your candidate with other citizens.

Where I think this parable rings true for the Dean campaign is the apparent lack of preparedness for the Iowa caucuses. Pretty much everyone saw the Dubuque caucus on C-SPAN (well, pretty much everyone I know who is involved in politics) and saw the ineffectual Dean campaign at that position. Looking through the Iowa BloggerStorm and looking though some other blog "views from the ground," one constant theme occured over and over again: Dean's Iowa ground campaign was not properly trained and prepared for caucus situations. Of course there were exceptions, but this did seem to be the rule for the Iowa caucuses. Throwing people who were probably political novices for the most part into a caucusing situation without proper training (like some kind of model-walk-through done a couple of times in preparation for the real deal) was a disaster. I tend to believe that this apparent lack of proper training was more damaging to the Dean campaign's GOTV efforts than poor advertisements and negative campaigning.

Well, there you have it. Pretty long and pretty sad, too. There are valuable lessons to be learned in the Dean campaign's stories from Iowa and New Hampshire; not only for the Democratic Party and the current campaigns (including Dr. Dean's), but for future candidates.

Andrew, I understand that you believe Dean's prospects to be slim, but I wasn't trying to argue that point with you. Instead, I was expressing my surprise on the premature cracking in support for Dean I've seen online. First it was 'kos' on DailyKos, now it's Andrew D on the Burnt Orange Report. Everywhere I went for affirmation of our cause I find early obituaries. I just wonder when you first started volunteering for the campaign did you even believe it was possible he would win the first two primaries or even compete for the nomination? Did he have a better chance back then? Seems like he's up against the same old conventional wisdom.

This all reminds me of the crowds filing out of an Astros/Rangers baseball game when the home team is down entering the ninth inning. They came to be entertained, not lend their support. And if the team ain't winning, why stick around to witness defeat or risk being associated with it? Of course the story is different when it's the last inning of a game put in the win column. However, if you aren't willing to suffer through a final inning of a loss, aren't you missing out on the opportunity to enjoy those rare comeback wins? How rewarding is that last inning of a guaranteed win? I already know the answer, I've seen how fickle Texans are when it comes to baseball. Just like the fans, these Texas MLB teams just can't go the distance.

And now I'm just that cranky fan sitting alone in the stands cursing all the fair weather fans of Dean under his breath. Well, thanks for at least showing up to the game wearing the home team colors.

Kiss my ass clockwerks- I worked 60 hours a week all summer for no money for Howard Dean. I drove my parents broke for the guy. I'm not a fairweather fan. What I am is someone who is smart enough about politics to realize when someone isn't going to win. Get it through your head- there will be no comeback victories. Get ready now because it isn't going to happen. At first when I heard him I thought it'd be a fight but I thought he really could do it if he organized it right. He did exactly what I thought he could do, everything but win. So don't feed me that "who'd think we could compete!" bullshit- I thought we'd win and now I realize that becuase we fucked up we won't.

And great fucking post, Patrick. I don't know if you have a blog or not but if you don't you should get one. Your thoughts are very insightful!

Anybody who believes Dean still "has a chance" is probably new to the political process.
There is a huge difference between the junior high civics class version of American politics and the real thing. Some people catch on quickly while others never do.

Democrats cannot afford to engage in petty bickering among themselves while Republicans stand united with enough in campaign contributions to finance a round trip to Neptune.
In case you need a reality check, this BBC article describes how millions of Christian fundamentalists are ready to march to the polls and monolithically cast their votes for George W. Bush on November 2nd. These are votes which Dubya doesn't have to work for.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3445229.stm

To continue efforts on behalf of a Dean candidacy is like giving blood transfusions to an Egyptian mummy in the hope it will somehow spring back to life.
Being angry and hoping that unrealistic numbers of 18 to 24 year olds will flock to the polls is not a path to electoral success.

I must confess Dean has an interesting strategy at this point. Remember before March 2, only 10% of pledged delegates are selected. Also, Democratic primaries are NOT winner-take-all affairs. Based on unpledged delegates who have indicated they would vote for Dean, Dean actually currently leads all candidates in Delegate support. Finally, like the electoral college, primary voters do NOT vote to elect a candidate - they vote for delegates to the convention, who then vote for a candidate at the convention. This aspect makes the process more complex than who can gain pluralities / majorities in the most states).

So, the strategy is to stick around after the next round of States amassing delegates even if he does not win a state. Then, he waits for some other candidates to drop out and then "goes for the motherloads" against Kerry with New York, California, etc. on March 2 and possibly March 9.

It's a novel strategy, but I would not right it off. His ability to raise prodigous sums of money in small batches over the internet shows that he is able to achieve results via unconventional means.

I do not expect him to be the eventual nominee (though its not impossible), but I do not see his staying around as a drag on the party towards our efforts to derail Bush. Assuming Kerry wins, Dean, appearing to be on the Left, will have made Kerry look more moderate (i.e. electable). (This is not really true, because Dean is NOT the leftwinger people say, but perceptions matter, and he is perceived as such). He will also have tapped a vein among Democratic constituencies that has not been energized in a long time. I seriously doubt the "Deniacs" are going to fold tent and go home if Dean is not chosen. For this bloc, its "ABB."

The key to whether (assuming Dean is not the nominee) Dean's continuing role helps or hurts is how he "bows" out. McCain bowed out with grace and without malice, avoiding a division of Republican voters (or more perhaps accurately a dvision among Republicans and Republican leaning independents). If Dean is not chosen, I hope he has the grace to go out with style and not create problems for the eventual nominee and the Party.

I suppose I deserved having you ask me to kiss your ass Andrew, but I didn't expect it. Many of us Dean volunteers put in a serious amount of effort on the part of the campaign. Personally I went to New Mexico and Iowa and opened my wallet wide - neither are easy when you have a wife and kid, but I figured it was worth it for Dean. I certainly didn't intend to discount your volunteer work. I have to admit that I am new to direct participation and may appear naive. What you're hearing is the sound of people entering the political process and Dean opened the door. I'm just incredulous that after pouring so much energy and emotion into a cause that you would employ such cold rationale to abandon it.

And for some reason I can't seem to get it through my head Dean is done. Must be how green I am at all this, not nearly as smart as you are about politics, but he doesn't seem done yet.

BTW, I'd like to second the idea that Patrick get himself his own blog. Although the media had their stories written months ago comparing Dean's campaign to the flameout of the New Economy, he has managed to actually provide more than an analogy, he provided an accurate analysis.

maybe I was a bit harsh clockwerks, and I apologize. Still, its not about smart or not smart- its like Tim Z said- politics is a lot colder and meaner and harder than it seems on TV or in your Social Studies text. It's a dirty job and a sometimes unhappy process but someone's gotta do it. Dean would make a great president- probably the best out of all the candidates. Unfortunately he is very unlikely to get the opportunity. John Edwards or John Kerry are decent men who will make for good candidates and Dean lives to fight another day.

The saddest part of all this is that I really, in my heart of hearts, do not believe that John Kerry (he likes to be called JFK now... gimme a break!) will be able to defeat George Bush. He's just not going to be able to swing the swing voters and the independents over to his side.

Thoughts of what Bush&Co. will do with four more years scare the living hell out of me!

The saddest part of all this is that I really... do not believe that John Kerry...will be able to defeat George Bush.

At this stage 12 years ago, how many pundits thought that an obscure womanizing governor could beat an incumbent president whose approval rating had recently been near the 90% mark?
It is an uphill struggle, but it's certainly possible.

The most positive aspect about IA and NH is that Democratic voters have cited electability as a prime factor when making their choices. This shows that Democrats are hungry for victory.
If this hunger translates into sustained effort to elect the nominee, Dubya won't know what hit him.

Al Gore, not exactly the best loved Democratic nominee, still got over half a million more votes than the guy the Supreme Court put in the White House.
No candidate is perfect. But at some point you just have to settle on someone who is the most acceptable to all the main factions of the party and unite around that individual.