Moving the piggy bank....a DNC power shift to outside DC.

[madfloridian]

There is so much in this interview with Howard Dean which was done at Eastern University, a Christian college in PA. To zero in on a few paragraphs is hard. The part about the piggy bank moving caught my eye, though.

Dean's interview at Eastern University in PA

Moving the piggy bank

For much of the past 40 years, the DNC has served as a piggy bank, to be plundered by political consultants, who receive a percentage of the television advertising costs and had few incentives to invest in the provinces. In the South and West, many local parties withered. During the Clinton years, the Democrats made a crucial breakthrough by adding California and the other Pacific states to their traditional Northeastern and Midwestern base, but important plums such as Texas and Georgia have virtually been ceded to the GOP.

"We had existing parties in every state, but most ... were dysfunctional because they had no resources," Dean said. "Therefore they couldn't produce; therefore nobody would invest in them; therefore they couldn't produce."

The Democrats' status as a national party may have reached a nadir in 2004, when President Bush was re-elected, and they lost five open Senate seats in the South, despite discontent over events in Iraq. The Democrats targeted a minimal number of states in that year's presidential race, to give them just enough votes in the Electoral College to eke out victory. Huge swaths of the South and West were surrendered.

....."Dean reached an epiphany when meeting with angry Democratic state chairmen during the 2004 convention in Boston, said DNC executive director Tom McMahon. Dean vowed to rebuild the local parties by dispatching money and manpower from the capital. The state chairs formed the core of his support in the chairmanship race, and do so today. So was born the 50 State Strategy.

This is an excellent interview. Picking only a few paragraphs is hard. It covers a lot. He really let loose again on the Democrats about doing things business as usual. It tells more about the Carville episode after the election.

Ok, one more paragraph in which he admits Denver for the convention is a risk in some ways. His comment:

"I wanted to do the hard thing, and not the easy thing," Dean said. "It is easy to go someplace where everybody loves you and there are no problems. But if you want to expand the pie to get more votes, you have to go to the places where people don't know much about you, or maybe they don't love you because they have heard the wrong thing about you from the opposite party and you haven't been there to defend yourself."

Democratic chairman Howard Dean says having Denver as host city for the 2008
convention fits the party's 50 State Strategy, signaling Western voters that
the party appreciates their values and wants their votes. (Post special /
Linda Spillers)

[alfredo]

1. So when the MSM says the DNC has no money, there's a good reason

for that.

I can tell you that our operation here in Ky is much more professional.

Our local DFA is dead for all intents and purposes. The state and national parties snatched up much of our talent.

Success can kill ya.

[madfloridian]

2. Rebuilding the party's infrastructure.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/1399