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I found this article on Dean's tenure as DNC pretty good. Dean has put emphasis on local organizing and quiet events around the country, eschewing the media spotlight. Still, there are good grounds upon which Dean ought to garner substantial criticism.
While the candidates do not publicly criticize Mr. Dean, their aides are furious with what they see as his inability to set and stick to a primary calendar, given that the voting is scheduled to start in less than three months.
Mr. Dean, they said, has failed to avoid the hopscotching among states seeking to increase their influence in the process, and has made matters worse by getting into a showdown with states like Florida, which set an earlier primary date than party rules allow. Mr. Dean's vow to strip away delegates from the state prompted the lawsuit.
His critics also worry that the Democratic National Committee will lack the money necessary to support the party's candidate in the long months after a nominee emerges but before the general election formally gets under way. The party chairman's duties include overseeing how the party spends its money and helping set election rules.
Mr. Dean brushes aside the criticism, calling the Florida situation "a spat between politicians." As for worries about the committee being able to broadcast television commercials to support the party's nominee, he snapped, "There will be plenty of money."
The DNC's fundraising has been horrific, and Dean has completely lost control of the primary calendar. There are some good spots in his record, but in my opinion, the lessons to learn here are about what not to do with a party institution when you gain power. First, let's go over the good parts. The technology platform that Dean oversaw to handle voter files is terrific; DNC data geeks are cleaning up data, forcing accountability on vendors, and working to ensure that officials will have the ability to make smart political decisions. That's not a small problem to solve, since keeping lists of who will vote and why they will vote is complicated and had not been solved in twenty five years of fretting by DNC Chairs about technology. Dean has also served as a good moral inspiration to activists. Emphasizing the ability of individuals to get involved, pushing power and funding to the state parties, and branding the 50 state strategy are clearly useful transformative qualities for a party.
There are basically four criticisms, two that are progressive in nature and two that are simply partisan.
One, Dean simply did not operationalize his tenure. Much, though not all, of the technology work the DNC did will probably be ripped out by Catalist when the next Chair comes in, and the 50 state strategy was until recently simply a slogan rather than a coherent strategy. That's changing slightly with new political and research directors, but the initial staffing decisions in the research, internet, and political hindered any long-term stake driving. The DNC could have been transformed into a data-driven progressive force through its very relationships with party officials, but that's not what happened.
Two, Dean has failed to fundraise. Some of that energy has moved to the DCCC and DSCC, but there's a large and inexcusably conspicuous gap in Dean's money take. I criticized Emily's List for losing in 2006 when everyone else was winning, so it's not fair to let Dean off the hook for being destroyed in fundraising by the RNC when everyone else is doing quite well, and the RNC is melting down. I can't remember the last compelling online ask I got from the DNC, which is weird, considering it's Howard Dean's institution. Objectively speaking, he's done a very bad job raising money and this has made the DNC nearly irrelevant, or maybe was a symbol of its irrelevance in the first place.
Three, Dean has failed to control the primary calendar. This was a complicated task, but Dean allowed Donald Fowler Sr. to sabotage and undermine the process from within, which he should have dealt with up front. The Chair must deal with the primary calendar, a bit with the convention, and fundraising. He's fallen down on two of those three tasks.
My real criticism, though, is that Dean's tenure at the DNC has been marked mostly by irrelevance. There are many things that you can do as the central hub of the party; think about Actblue as simply one of many possibilities, or Run Against Bush as another. These are party activities that the DNC should have 'bought' and scaled. It didn't. Think about all the Bush pioneers we could have worked to frustrate, sites like criminalgopdonors.com that would have been fun to launch on a regular basis. Instead, the DNC continued to fly Dean around the country to make speeches and encourage people to buy Democracy Bonds, a program that didn't work. The DNC chose to invest in 'party builder', an irrelevant social networking site, instead of going out and using social networking platforms people liked and used. Finally, the DNC has done very little with blogs, despite tremendous hunger to hit back against the media or GOP funding sources. Howard Dean, despite his original mandate, hasn't even posted on a Dailykos diary.
I write this more in sadness than anything else. The way I think about movement politics is that we must operate as a virus that 'infects' institutions we come into contact with. We have to help decision-makers see that by doing aggressive, data-driven advocacy and organizing against bad faith politics, they can benefit. Once they do this a few times, they become addicted and won't operate any other way. Despite helping put Dean into the DNC Chair position, that institution hasn't really changed. Under Dean, a different group of anti-progressive consultants and state party operatives seems to have taken it over, or perhaps, no one took it over, and that's why the DNC isn't raising money or managing the primary calendar.
In the last fifteen months of Dean's tenure, there is some room for improvement. I'm excited about the research, political, and technology shops. They now have good people and improving tools, and are beginning to operationalize their work. Still, much of the work on 2008 has been done outside the party already, so there's a limit to what can be accomplished now.
All in all, this is making me realize that while the progressive movement might be good at narrative, some fundraising, and candidate recruitment, we need to get much better at follow-up. I'm noticing that the DNC pattern repeats itself with the freshmen we put into office. They were ours, and now somehow, they aren't any different than what was there before.
UPDATE: DNC Internet Director Josh McConaha called me up and said I had multiple errors in my piece. I've invited him on to take advantage of the right to respond, but in case he doesn't, I'll reiterate the gist of our conversation. He told me that Dean has been the most successful chair at fundraising in history, and that the DNC doesn't fly Dean around to push Democracy Bonds. My response is that the overall environment for fundraising has gotten much better for Democrats, and despite a dramatic and new margin for the DCCC, DSCC, and the Presidentials over their Republican counterparts, the DNC has fallen behind the RNC, which is clearly outlier behavior. McConaha also said the DNC doesn't fly Dean around for the Democracy Bonds, and that the program has been successful, with 35K bond holders reliably bringing in revenue.
These numbers can be interpreted in many different ways, so I take Josh's arguments as reasonable though I do not agree with them.
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