Here is another
danger of thinking there is an all-powerful strategist at the top of your political machine:
"Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed
Newsweek his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House -- enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists -- to study just how wrong the polls were."
Republicans thought that they could defy everything, and that their strategies, tactics and political leaders were all-powerful. They thought that polls didn't matter. They thought that the country's desire for change didn't matter. They thought their political machine could trump it all.
They failed, and badly. They had more money, more voting contacts, and more early voting than ever before. They followed the same strategy of trying to endlessly pump up the base, and to campaign on fear and hatred. And they still lost, badly. The important thing to remember is that they were matched not only by the voters and American democracy, but they were matched by a far more varied opponent running numerous types of campaigns at once. It is better if everyone takes credit not only because everyone deserves credit, but because it is important to maintain strategic debates in our own party. After 1992, the Democratic Party concluded that its strategic debate was settled, and it was triangulation, moderation, mushy middle, low-information voters all the way. When that strategy failed miserably in 1994, we still never bothered to develop a backup plan or a set of competing strategies to employ. It was only when we started deploying a wide variety of strategies in 2006 that we were able to win. Our own competition of ideas allowed many of our better ideas a long-needed shot in prime-time
Paul Kennedy's classic
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, argues that smaller, often less advanced European nations were able to surpass much larger, more advanced Asian nations from the period starting in 1600 to the period ending in 1950 because there were multiple, competing European nations and no one, single poor ruler could set the entire continent backward (and the varying geography helped Western Europe in particular). The problems Republicans now face is that they have one strategy, and one leader. If that strategy or leader fails, they have no backup plan whatsoever. Having multiple, competing ideas on the Democratic side on how to run campaigns is a major intelligence asset that should help us for a couple cycles. If we instead choose to subsume everything into a single leader, a single political genius, and a single electoral strategy, then we will be similarly up a creek should that plan fail, ala 1994, and we would be once again doomed to a long electoral backward slide.
Embrace that we have a big tent and multiple factions in many areas, including electoral strategy. What if the fifty-state strategy failed--would the progressive movement insist on continuing it indefinitely anyway? That strikes me as just as bad an idea as endlessly continuing triangulation after multiple, repeated failures of that strategy. If you don't have multiple plans and multiple fail-safes, one failure could doom you for a long, long time. Given this, pluralism should not just be considered a core value of progressive ideology, but of progressive political strategy as well.
