A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

There is a rather depressing bio-piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The Washington Monthly about the Democratic blogger and fundraiser Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, proprietor of The Daily Kos site.

Depressing, because the one thing that is most wrong with the Republican Party is what Moulitsas and his admirers want more of in the Democratic Party:

The myth of Karl Rove, which looms over American politics, and the conviction that the party's wins or losses are a matter of tactics, not substance, has left the Democrats looking for their own master tactician. And some in the party seem to want to see Moulitsas in that role.

The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic Party in which Moulitsas calls the shots would cater to every whim of its liberal base. But though he can match Michael Moore for shrillness, the most salient thing about Moulitsas's politics is not where he falls on the left-right spectrum (he's actually not very far left). It's his relentless competitiveness, founded not on any particular set of political principles, but on an obsession with tactics...."They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," Moulitsas told me, "I'm just all about winning."  

There is a sense, of course, in which Democrats at the national level have been "just all about winning" for many years now.  They've just been about winning within the Democratic Party.  Amass the largest number of organized Democratic interests -- "the groups," Zell Miller called them -- convinced that you are completely theirs, add a combination of name ID, financial resources and guesswork called "electability," and you've got yourself a Democratic Presidential nomination, or you would have in 1988, 1992, 2000, and 2004.  You'd also have gone 1 and 3 against the Bush family, suggesting the political weakness of the Democrats' orientation toward reaching agreement among themselves.  

As a bonus -- and I'm not really sure how many Democrats care very much about this -- the candidates produced by this orientation pretty much disappear once they lose.  Think about it:  Washington had to deal with Bob Dole for years after he lost his primary campaign to the elder Bush in 1988, and John McCain has rolled the younger Bush's administration twice on major issues since losing his race in 2000.  By contrast Michael Dukakis went into teaching after his one-and-done career as a Presidential candidate.  Al Gore vanished.  John Kerry is back to being a show horse Senator, which to be fair is no less than what he was before running for President.

I wouldn't blame any Democrat for tiring of this pattern.  Their permanent campaign operatives -- those "Party insiders" Wells-Wallace writes about -- in particular, feeling that they lost the last two Presidential elections to Karl Rove, must feel that to win they need to follow someone very like Karl Rove:  preoccupied with tactics, focused like a laser on the next election, doing substance in his spare time.

Let me interject here a disclaimer concerning my own views about permanent campaign operatives, including New Breed internet-based operatives.  It has been suggested that I view them as a lower form of life.  I have never said this and do not believe it is true, not really, or at any rate not literally.  Pollsters, fundraisers and even strategists can be quite useful in the six months or so preceding an election.  It's just that they need to know their place.  Elected officials need to know theirs, and no one should be confused about who works for whom.  In the Republican Party today there is, sadly, a great deal of confusion on this point.  Zuniga's fans appear to want to take the confusion that already exists in the Democratic Party, and multiply it.

Look, the problem the Democrats have isn't that their permanent campaign operatives lose elections.  They may not help very much, but they don't lose elections.  Democratic candidates lose elections, when they are lousy candidates:  when they don't inspire public confidence, when they come off as weak, or as people who think they are entitled to look down their noses at voters, or as public officials who just haven't done that good a job.  

The last time the Democrats nominated a very good candidate for President -- which Bill Clinton was, whatever else might be said about him -- they won.  That Democrats see the defeats they suffered later as the product of deficient campaign strategy or tactics is just perverse.  It isn't just that a party driven by people like Rove or Moulitsas will flounder on substance once its candidates get elected (the gist of a rather mild protest by Kevin Drum today).  It's that Democratic candidates have so often lost recently precisely because they've been seen as dancing to someone else's tune.  They can be as unified and passionate as they want, but if they keep nominating candidates like that they will keep losing.