More About Howard by Matt Singer

[Cheswick2.0]

More About Howard by Matt Singer

http://leftinthewest.com/index.php?p=156

SNIP..."Let’s all repeat it together: this isn’t about liberal-vs-centrist. This isn’t about whether we need to look more appealing to “mainstream” America. Politics is about standing for something.

Politics is about winning and winning involves presenting a compelling message. And something that the DNC (and by DNC, I mean every person stuck in the Beltway mindset) needs to get through its head is that Dean was never running as a left-winger. He was never even running as a hardcore liberal. He was running as a centrist outraged over what was being done to his country."

SNIP..."And the Democratic Party gets ready to act out its own death on stage again. We are a party of hypochondriacs. Every time we lose, we’re convinced we’re deathly ill. In Montana, in 2000, Democrats lost three big statewide offices. They lost the Governor’s race, the US House race, and a US Senate race. They thought the world had ended. But they’d held the Attorney General’s office, the State Auditor’s office, and the OPI office. They made gains in the legislature. The world wasn’t ending. We’d just had a rough year. But people thought things were falling apart. Guess what – we didn’t change party leadership. We just bucked up and kept working. And in 2002, we won a US Senate race, more seats in the legislature, and control of the Public Service Commission.

Then this year, we took back the damn Governor’s office. And we didn’t do it with a namby-pamby-roll-over-and-keep-your-mouth-shut style. We did it by running a candidate with clear contrasts with the Republicans and by pointing out how we would make the state a better place....."

[madfloridian]

1. Great article.....a couple more paragraphs.

SNIP..."You’re actually going to have to work. You’re going to have to draw distinctions. You’re going to have to have a message. A clear message. A concise message (no rants like this one). A damn compelling message.

And if you can’t do that with a sandtrap in one hemisphere and a looming economic collapse in another, well, maybe you aren’t cut out for this line of work. And so when the usual suspect DC press corps types start portraying Howard Dean as “bash-Bush, man-the-barricades liberalism mixed with the latest in Internet-fueled fund-raising and organizing” I get a bit upset. Frankly, we can bash Bush. The man is not very popular. Bashing him is at least a strategy. And that seems to be more than anyone else has"

[ibegurpard]

2. Something that concerns me greatly about using Montana as an example

of Democratic gains:
Number 1: The outgoing Republican governor was LOATHED. She was also involved in a scandal where she supposedly helped a staffer (or some such person) who was involved in killing someone in a drunk-driving episode. This is not to discount a good campaign run by Schweitzer (who had name recognition from a previous senate run). However, something that bugged a lot of us was his choice of a moderate Republican as a running mate. Considering the state of the Judy Martz administration, I'm not sure such a concession was even needed.
Number 2: Legislative gains by Democrats owe a lot to redistricting. This does NOT discount Democratic efforts in the redistricting process...they were ON THE BALL and used every weapon in their disposal to make sure they got a level playing field. Republicans like to complain about how they gerrymandered the state...it's not possible because Montana is very independent (we don't register by party or independent classifications) and conservative on a lot of issues.

The thing that DOES ring true to me is the record of other Democrats getting statewide offices. However, the Secretary of State elected was a Republican. This struck me as odd and troubling. The reason for this is he was a well-known and popular county commissioner from Yellowstone County (Billings, the state's largest city), a moderate to conservative swing area. Considering that, his loss in the face of the opposite trend sends up a red flag to me. Consider: the person now in charge of elections statewide in a state that trended very favorably to Democrats this time is a Republican whose election bucked the trend. Anyone who puts stock in the elections fraud stories should look closely at this, I think.