The Wall Street Journal
January 11, 2005
COMMENTARY
The Terry McAuliffe Syndrome
By DAN GERSTEIN
January 11, 2005; Page A20
When John Kerry ripped defeat from the jaws of victory last November, losing to a wounded president with a failed record, a few of us Democratic outliers took some solace in thinking that his campaign's dismal performance might actually force the party to own up to its mortal electoral weaknesses. Turns out we grossly underestimated the national Democrats' capacity for self-delusion and self-defeat.
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And now we hear there's a move afoot to choose Terry McAuliffe -- another decent, honorable man who nevertheless presided over two consecutive election cycles in which the number of elected Democrats at almost every level shrank, and who will never be mistaken for a base-expanding communicator -- for another term as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The "Keep Mac" pack's rationale? He'll save us from Howard Dean, who most believe would have led the party to an even bigger catastrophe last fall had he gotten the nomination. Call me a curmudgeon, but that seems like an odd way to project strength at a moment an historic political realignment is taking place -- at least the old guy won't humiliate us!
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Stop and think about it. The national party had back-to-back election seasons in 2002 and 2004 that were successively despairing and disastrous -- the kind of record that if it were experienced by a pro sports team would have prompted the owner to clean house. And what are we doing? Mostly wringing our hands about changing the floor wax. Now, is Terry McAuliffe or any other single leader wholly responsible for our failures? Certainly not. In fact, Mr. McAuliffe did a lot of important work to modernize the party infrastructure and strengthen our long-term financial stability. But the fact is, politics provides clear, irrefutable ways to measure performance, and by most any standard our recent performance stinks. That begs a few questions. Such as, what does it take to hold someone accountable for losing? And more importantly, when do we stop beating our heads against the wall and try something -- and someone -- different?
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But I am guessing these are many of the same folks who urged Mr. Kerry not to respond to the deeply damaging calumnies that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were slinging at his war record. God forbid we dignified those tactics by standing up for ourselves and actually fighting back (instead of robotically telling people we'll fight for them)... So if we hope to win, we Democrats have to get over our predilection to preserve people's self-esteem at all costs, stop engaging in the politics of self-destruction, and start making some hardheaded calculations about what it takes to become a majority party again.
Of course, upgrading the salesmen won't dramatically change the results if we don't also upgrade the product we're marketing. Right now the clear majority of voters -- including large swaths of the country -- don't trust us to keep them safe or share their values, and we have a long way to go to rethink our messages and policies and ultimately rehabilitate our credibility. But we have to remember that politics is the art of persuasion, and in this era of diminishing party identification, elections more and more are tough tests of individual leadership. This last presidential campaign proved that in spades. And our test now as Democrats is whether we can select and empower strong, savvy and compelling men and women to not only chart our course but change it... We desperately need "ends people" -- those who are committed more to building winning coalitions than to feeling morally superior and placating pariahs like Michael Moore, and who have the vision to think ahead of the curve and the guts to run straight over people when necessary to get more votes than the other guy.
A good place to start is in the DNC race. Of all the candidates in the mix, the only one I know of who can imagine a different kind of politics that transcends obsolete clichés of left and right, harness the power of new ideas to win over new voters, and be tough as hell when it's called for is New Democratic Network Chairman
Simon Rosenberg. He can do all those things in large part because he's already shown he knows how to win, having been an integral part of the take-no-prisoners Clinton war room in 1992. I'm not crazy about the fact that he has often worked closely with Mr. McAuliffe and the rest of the current Democratic leadership. But that may ultimately prove to be an asset in helping to bridge the differences in the party and build the broader coalition we need to win again.
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URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110540658348622354,00.html Mr. Gerstein, an independent consultant in New York, was communications director for Sen. Joe Lieberman and a senior strategist for the senator's presidential campaign.
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