Dec 23rd, 2003, 11:37 AM
How Dean bit the Dems in the ass......
Below is an article from a 2002 copy of The Nation. Read it, absorb it, and figure out why every anti-Dean Dem deserves to be pulling their hair out now.....
tp://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020121&s=nichols
Primary Predicament
by John Nichols
With little public notice and no serious debate inside the party,
Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe and his allies
have hatched a plan to radically alter the schedule and character of
the 2004 Democratic presidential nominating process. If the changes
McAuliffe proposes are implemented--as is expected at a January 17-19
meeting of the full DNC--the role of grassroots Democrats in the
nomination of their party's challenger to George W. Bush will be
dramatically reduced, as will the likelihood that the Democratic
nominee will run the sort of populist, people-power campaign that
might actually pose a threat to Bush's re-election.
The change, for which McAuliffe gained approval in November from the
DNC rules subcommittee, would create a Democratic primary and caucus
calendar that permits all states to begin selecting delegates on
February 3, 2004. That new start-up date would come two weeks after
the Iowa caucuses and just one week after the traditional "first in
the nation" New Hampshire primary. Thus, the window between New
Hampshire and the next primary--five weeks in 2000--would be closed.
Already, says McAuliffe, South Carolina, Michigan and Arizona
Democrats have indicated they will grab early February dates, and
there is talk that California--the big enchilada in Democratic
delegate selection--will move its primary forward to take advantage
of the opening. McAuliffe's changes will collapse the nominating
process into a fast-and-furious frenzy of television advertising,
tarmac-tapping photo ops and power-broker positioning that will leave
little room for the on-the-ground organizing and campaigning that
might allow dark horse candidates or dissenting ideas to gain any
kind of traction--let alone a real role at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention.
"What McAuliffe is doing represents a continuation of the shift of
influence inside the Democratic Party from volunteer-driven,
precinct-based grassroots politics to a cadre of consultants, hacks
and Washington insiders," says Mike Dolan, the veteran organizer who
ran voter-registration campaigns for the California Democratic Party
before serving as national field director for MTV's "Rock the Vote"
initiative. "This whole process of reshaping the party to exclude
people at home from the equation has been going on for years, but
this really is the most serious change we've seen. And it's an
incredibly disturbing shift. It will increase the power of the
consultants and the fundraisers. But it will also make it a lot
harder to build the enthusiasm and volunteer base a candidate needs
to win in November."
McAuliffe, who is riding high after playing an important role in
securing Democratic wins in November 2001 races for the Virginia and
New Jersey governorships, says reforms are needed to avoid long,
intraparty struggles and allow a clear focus on the task of
challenging Bush. With a wide field of Democratic senators,
governors, representatives and a former Vice President positioning to
run in 2004, he says, "We can't be going through the spring with our
guys killing each other."
McAuliffe makes no secret of his desire to have Democrats mirror the
Republicans' compressed nominating schedule-- which helped
front-runner Bush dispatch the more appealing John McCain in 2000. He
wants his party's 2004 nominee identified by early March. Then, the
nominee-in-waiting can get down to the business of fundraising and
organizing a fall campaign without having to march in Chicago's St.
Patrick's Day parade, visit Wisconsin's dairy farms or jostle for a
position on the stage of Ohio's union halls.
One problem with McAuliffe's theory is that history suggests that
Democrats who beat sitting Republican Presidents usually do so
following extended nomination fights. In 1976, for instance, almost
three months passed between the Iowa caucus and the point at which a
majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention had been
selected. That convention nominated Jimmy Carter, who went on to beat
President Gerald Ford. The next Democrat to beat a Republican
President, Bill Clinton, won his party's 1992 nod after a bruising
primary season that saw him fighting Jerry Brown for New York votes
two months after the delegate-selection process began.
A serious state-by-state fight for the party nod can force the
eventual nominee to build grassroots networks in key states that
withstand the media assaults of the fall; just think how things would
have gone if Al Gore had developed better on-the-ground operations in
states with solid labor bases, like Missouri, West Virginia and
Ohio--any one of which could have provided the Electoral College
votes needed to render Florida's recount inconsequential. Instead of
recognizing the advantage Democrats gain when they tend the
grassroots, however, former candidate Brown says McAuliffe appears to
be steering the party toward a model that mirrors Republican
approaches. "The process is evolving and it's changing so that it
will be even harder to tell Democrats from Republicans," Brown says.
"This means the Democrats will be defined more than ever by money and
the centralized, Washington-based establishment that trades in money.
The trajectory the party is on is not toward greater democracy, not
toward more involvement at the grassroots. Rather, the trajectory
will make it harder for the local to influence the national. A
historic democratic influence on the process is being wiped out, and
with it will go a lot of energy Democratic nominees have been able to
rely on in the past."
Brown touches on another problem with McAuliffe's approach. In a
party already badly warped by the influence of special-interest money
and fundraising demands, the new schedule will greatly expand the
influence of big money--and of Washington insiders like veteran
fundraiser McAuliffe, who can move that money into accounts of
"acceptable," if not particularly progressive, candidates. "Everyone
agrees the financial demands on candidates will be even higher than
in the past, given the breakneck pace at which the contests will
unfold," explains Washington Post columnist David Broder.
That bodes well for the best-known candidates with the strongest
fundraising networks, like former Vice President Al Gore and
Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, and also for well-heeled senators
like Massachusetts' John Kerry and North Carolina's John Edwards. But
low-budget, issue-driven campaigns, like those imagined by Senator
Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio or
outgoing Vermont Governor Howard Dean, will be even more difficult to
mount. That, says former Democratic National Committee chairman Fred
Harris, is bad news for the party and for progressive politics in
America. "If you tighten up all the primaries at the start, it will
limit the serious choices for Democrats to those candidates who are
well-known or well-financed, or both. That takes away the range of
choices, it makes the process less exciting and, ultimately, less
connected to the grassroots," says Harris, a former senator and 1976
candidate for the presidency. "This really is a move in the wrong
direction. The Democratic Party, to win, needs to be more
democratic--not less."
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