Keep gilding that lilly

Karen Carter-Peterson has a blog now, apparently. She begins,

"The state of the Louisiana Democratic Party is unquestionably stronger than where we were just four years ago."

And we all get up and walk outside to scream/laugh for twenty minutes before continuing.

In the meantime, take a look at the back and forth between Mike Tomasky and some other people and Charles Pierce.

If the question we're really asking is as stupid as, "Should the Democrats abandon the South?" then, obviously, Pierce is on the correct side of that. On the other hand, we might be asking the wrong question.  Anyway, here's Pierce.

I sympathize with Mike. I truly do. But I still will stand with Governor Dean and the 50-state strategy, at least applied judiciously. To me, the key to the problem is to break the stranglehold of the Washington-based consultant class over what candidates will be run in what places. It wasn't the Beltway crowd who found Jon Tester in Montana, or Jim Webb in Virginia. The national party should be involved in these races only as a means by which money can be shrewdly spread around, and as a means of employing some sense of party discipline. No, Mr. Breaux, we won't be following your easily rented ass any more. We will find progressive populists, white or black, and we will run them and support them, and maybe the first five tries won't work but, sooner or later, there will be a breakthrough, and it will not be led by the next Bill Clinton and the next DLC.

For example, Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds in South Carolina and in Mississippi. He wouldn't come close to winning anything in either of those states, but there is a working-class audience there that is interested in listening to him, and that is worth respecting in our politics.

Wait, stop. Notice something?  Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat.  Also, Howard Dean was fired by the Democrats as soon as Barack Obama became President.  Pierce goes on to talk about the populist tradition in the South and the importance of what, quite frankly, should be the central focus of any American political movement worth its salt. 

But it's 2014, and forging an actual alliance of working people, black and white, in the places that need it the most, is a worthwhile effort whether it fails initially or not.

But if the Democratic Party has taught us anything over the past 30 years it is that it is either unwilling to or incapable of taking that mission seriously.  But it is the most important mission in American politics and the South is its front line.  The people who are working hardest at it are either not Democrats or are working on the fringes of the party. 

Maybe the question we should be asking is whether or not it's time for the South to abandon the Democrats.

50 state strategy

Once upon a time there was a man named Howard Dean who had this idea that in order for Democrats to be competitive nationally, they should put a genuine effort to... compete nationally.

The D.N.C. created his job — along with a position for a communications director — last year as part of Dean’s signature program, known as the 50-state strategy. Under this program, the national party is paying for hundreds of new organizers and press aides for the state parties, many of which have been operating on the edge of insolvency. The idea is to hire mostly young, ambitious activists who will go out and build county and precinct organizations to rival Republican machines in every state in the country. “We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”

And it worked.  It worked because it was the right thing to do, not just strategically, but also morally. If you believe in your party's message, then you take that message out where people need to hear it.  It requires also that you believe in the local people and invest in them.  And that you don't just abandon places where you aren't currently doing well.   Here's Dean talking about this in Salon today.

I believe in the South the Democrats will come back, but you can’t do it if you don’t pay attention. I went down to Mississippi to a dinner when I was chairman. A guy gets up, he must have been born in 1920. A wizened old guy with a deep Southern accent. And I’m thinking oh boy. The next thing I know, he introduces the chairman of Ways and Means, which is one of the most powerful, and the guy’s a young black guy. What it said to me was, the Democratic Party is a big tent, and all we have to do is fund this stuff and we can make some inroads. And I think we can. Alabama is going to change because of all the car plants coming in. When you raise the standard of living, and education gets better, you get more competitive. We had two great candidates in Georgia this year, for governor and Senate. It was a terrible year for us, but what if that would happen in a presidential year that pulls out the people that Obama pulled out?

The point is that if you give up before you start, then you give up. The 50-state strategy was never about giving the same amount of money to Alabama as you give to Colorado. Never about that. But it was about giving everybody a base, and some competence level to work off, and then they were on their own. And it’s amazing what people will do if you give them a chance. Especially people who have been beaten down for years by the national party, who feel that nobody cares about them. The DCCC and DSCC wouldn’t put any money into these places for years, they didn’t care. And anybody who could self-fund, they became the candidate. That’s no way to run a party.

This was, as much as the candidate himself, what got Obama elected in the "wave" election of 2008.  After that happened, Obama hired his cynical piece of shit friend Rahm Emmanuel to run the White House and they fired Dean from the DNC.

And that's how that story ended.  Oh well.