Crashing the Gates starts with a reality check and a brief review of the last fifteen years in American politics.  There's a profile of Clinton's eight years, and the opposition.  Clinton was successful at governing, but his vision and political abilities weren't able to stem the gathering clouds of Republican ascendance and Democratic fecklessness.  The Republicans - the Corporate cons, the TheoCons, the NeoCons, and the PaleoCons - are a radical and diverse set of people, with different aims, who have come together to form a political coalition.  They are organized, they have a set of powerful and coherent institutions, and they are serious about wielding power, though they are not serious about governing.  That much we know.  What is interesting about Markos and Jerome is their thesis that the Democratic Party's failure is not so much ideological, but practical.  It is our job to stand against the right and for the people, they argue, and in failing to do so we haven't acted as the Democratic Party should have.  The rest of the book moves forward from that premise.

Markos and Jerome continue with an overview of the party itself, which to them is a series of atomized constituencies epitomized by the single-issue groups.  The critique of the progressive single-issue group infrastructure is specific, and conceptually it's not difficult to grasp.  Progressive organizations were built during a time of a natural Democratic majority; therefore their main task was lobbying Congress.  These groups are almost completely unequipped to do mass persuasion and organizing in a divided America that is not entirely convinced of basic assumptions, like that government can competently build infrastructure or that civil rights are important.  My favorite piece of this section is when Markos and Jerome describe a gathering of progressive leaders doing lame trust-building exercises and demanding fealty to their pet issue.  Sure it's a liberal stereotype, but it's also a nice metaphor for the culture of liberal middle management.

But the two of them don't just snipe at the issue-groups; they also show where Democrats are doing things right, and describe how it's happening.  In Colorado, the groups were brought on board through an ingenious set of incentives, while in Montana they were simply pushed out of the process entirely.  Both are models for victory, depending on the locale.  There's a subtle warning in here, naturally, but it's not a book savaging our party.  These guys are partisans, and are trying to point out how the divergent groups can become greater than the sum of our parts.

But a book like this wouldn't be complete without tackling the, drumroll, consultants.  

I have to say, the single most satisfying part of Crashing the Gates is the chapter on consultants.  It's titled 'The Gravy Train'.  I'm just let that sink in for a second.  Oh yeah.  If you want to know where your money went in 2004, you'll find out here.  I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm just going to name the sub-headings.  The Beltway Mafia.  The Commission Racket.  Old Ads, New Age.  The Changing Media Landscape.  Information Age Campaigns.  The Cost of Failure.  Be scared, consultants, because these guys name names, and they have talked to enough experienced Democratic operators around the country so that what they say can't be dismissed.

The book continues with some important discussions about the role of infrastructure on the right and the new infrastructure on the left.  You'll read about the Democracy Alliance, the Noise Machine, the right-wing leadership and mentorship process, and how the bad pay on the progressive side creates a massive leadership and talent gap that leads to the Republicans winning elections they shouldn't.

Finally, Markos and Jerome describe the rise of the netroots, Dean's run for Presidency and the Beltway's successful counter-attack, and Dean's rise to the Chairmanship of the DNC, which they use as a metaphor for the entrance of lots of normal people back into the Democratic Party.

I've been trying to figure out how to review this book for a few weeks now, because while I really liked it, it wasn't an academicky book with a thesis and a set of data designed to prove that thesis.  Instead, it hits a problem that is very close to my heart, the capture of our political machine by a middle management mindset that has been nearly total, from polling, to database management, to funding, to field, to mentorship and career management, to issue advocacy groups, to organizing, to training.  It's an attempt to outline this problem, and sketch some solutions to it.  

There hasn't been a real conversation within the party about the how to organize ourselves in my political lifetime.  Crashing the Gates will hopefully be the start of this conversation.  If you are a regular reader of the liberal blogosphere, you'll recognize some of the themes, though much of the content and stories will be new.  Many of you will read this book and recognize, in your own way, how you experienced this culture and how the only answer is to work harder.

For my money, I'm going to buy a copy of this book for a lot of people I know, because they haven't all been reading blogs for the past few years and so they haven't been able to understand why us Democrats act the way we do.  This book isn't meant to be read and pondered, it's meant to be provocative, talked about, and argued over.  It's meant to create that sense of 'us' that's been missing from the party for so long.

It's meant to have us Democrats change our pronoun, so that when we talk about the party aren't talking about some airy abstraction run from DC but are talking about our party, the real party of the people.