Dear Democrats:

Congratulations!  You won on Tuesday and you deserved it.  Your planning, development, and evangelizing have earned you a legion of new and happy voters who are tired of the past and interested in your new brand of hope.

However, even though history doesn’t repeat, it frequently rhymes.  With that in mind, I would like to offer you five pieces of advice:

1.) Don’t get cocky

The Republicans made a habit of jumping the shark time after time, but the party movement as a whole did so around the time they proclaimed their “permanent majority.”  It was a ludicrous thing for Republicans to say, even when their power looked strong.  Any student of history will tell you that nothing is permanent – especially political majorities in a democratic government.

Your majority is a gift from the American people to be used for doing our will.  Don’t think for a second that it’s permanent, and never forget that we can and will remove your privileges if we think you no longer represent our interests.  If you want our votes in 2010 and 2012, you’ll have to earn them.

2.) The Republicans aren’t a regional party

There’s this belief going around (see various posts on DailyKos) that the Republican party is now a regional party.  They’re not.  While Republicans won strongly in the South while losing most of the rest of the country, the votes were still very close in the Southwest and Mountain West.  Much of the new Democratic strength is fairly soft right now, and it remains to be seen if these new Democratic voters represent the future of the Democratic or Republican parties.

Also, never forget that the Democratic party was once declared a regional party of the coasts just a few years ago.  Middle America would never go for such “left wing” values, and so on.  Right now, Middle America appears to go for a whole lot of things when it suits them.

3.) “Change” was a brand, now it must be policy

Take it from a guy with an MBA: Americans make a ton of decisions based on brand.  But take this from a guy with an MBA: if the brand fails to meet expectations, Americans will drop the product like a hot potato.  Coke created a flop with New Coke.  Democrats: don’t make a flop out of Change.

Americans expect a number of things from this product of Change: more transparency, less corruption, a more intelligent level of dialog, and less single mindedness.  These are easy things to promise, and I actually think that Obama wants this kind of government.  What I’m not convinced is that the rest of the Democratic party wants this kind of government.

So Democrats be on notice: your party leader has created a very powerful brand with high expectations.  Your new ascendency to power has been built on those expectations.  Live up to them, or you will end up like New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, and the Ford Edsel.

4.) Yesterday’s movement is today’s establishment

Over the past eight years, one of the most interesting things to watch has been the downfall of Bill O’Reilly.  Remember him?  I’m not talking about the blowhard commentator who sits on Fox News and spits out right-wing press doctrine.  I’m talking about the guy who led Fox News to incredible highs in the 2000 election by making the populist case against Bill Clinton and the Democrats.

O’Reilly has always been a jerk – just find the old video on YouTube of his meltdown on Inside Edition in the 90s.  It’s just that eight years ago, O’Reilly was able to tap into a willing public consciousness looking for a new future.  He spoke of the ills of eight years of Clinton rule, ranted against the perceived failures of Clinton policy, and made the frequent case for a new Bush based future.

Today, the role of O’Reilly has been replaced with the likes of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Markos ‘Kos’ Moulitsas.  They are the voices of the underdog movement, but as of Tuesday, their roles have now completely changed.  Their movement is now more powerful than ever, and they are certainly no longer the underdogs.

As leaders of the underdog movement, they are now faced with a choice.  They can become pundits, like O’Reilly, and try to support their new found power by promoting themselves and their party, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of failure.  Or they can wait until the time is right, jettison many of their previous followers, and rebuild a new movement around tomorrow’s problems.  The second choice is obviously harder, requires more work, has less payoff, and creates many new enemies.

Kos, Olbermann, Maddow, and others be warned: you are now establishment pundits until proven otherwise.

5.) Your party is a fractured coalition

The Republican party must now rebuild out of a mess of competing interests, and it’s a wonder that these people were ever able to form a party in the first place.  Religious evangelicals, corporate executives, and libertarians have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  All of this mess has to be put back together, and getting any kind of consensus will be nearly impossible.

But wait, before you Democrats find too much schadenfreude in all of this, remember that you too are a party of competing interests.  You have a mess of high-tech nerds, union laborers, greens, “new” corporates, social liberals, and moderate conservatives.  It is absolutely inevitable that this new coalition will collide, and the first conflict to come will be the unions vs. everyone else.

A rebuilding Republican party will almost certainly come cherry picking whomever loses in this coming battle of self-interested supporters.  You can sometimes push off the conflict, but you can’t do that forever.  There’s really no way to stop the collapse of a coalition government, and that’s what keeps a real permanent majority from forming.  See #1.

Conclusions

Democrats, you are on notice.  Your clock is ticking, and we as Americans expect results.  All of us want a new direction, but the new directions we want are all completely different.  Figure it out, or we’ll find someone else to do it.

(Coming Soon: Advice for Republicans.)

© Stanton for Stanton Champion, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: democrats, elections, republicans

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Over on Twitter, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) asked people what kind of car each candidate would be.  You can follow the action by watching the #association tag on Summize.  I thought I would repost my answers here for everyone’s amusement:

• Obama = Mercedes. The car is amazing, but past experience says it will break down and end up costing you more later.
• McCain = Land Rover. Fun to drive, but guzzles gas. Due to bad planning, we end up getting sold to foreign nationals.
• Palin = Caparo T1. It looks great in the garage, but when you actually try to drive the car, it explodes.
• Biden = Honda Accord. It’s a solid reliable choice when you’re too afraid to pick anything more interesting.

All tongue in cheek, of course.  What are your answers?  If you’re on Twitter, also Tweet them with the #association tag to join the fun.

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Post tags: democrats, humor, republicans, twitter

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So the race is over and the result are in for the primary portion of the Democratic election here in Texas. Election leaders are still counting the votes from the caucuses, which could take a while given that the voting process was entirely on paper with hand-written candidate preferences. Still, we can we learn a lot from this process:

The Vote

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in Texas, but because of the way the state allocates its delegates she only picked up a net of four. That’s because Texas does not assign delegates by state-wide popular vote, but rather by state Senate district. Electoral-Vote has the breakdown, where it’s pretty easy to see the problem for both candidates: you can’t divide people into parts.

Take the Senate district from where I grew up: SD-1. Senator Clinton won by 17%, but there are an even number of delegates for that district (4 delegates). Because you can’t divide one of them into a fractional delegate, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama both received two delegates for their troubles. The situation happened in reverse in my current home district: SD-25. Senator Obama won by 9%, but the district’s six delegates were once again divided by two giving each candidate three delegates. In fact, the only places where either candidate picked up anything were where there were odd numbers of delegates or where one candidate truly defeated the other (ex: SD-20 and SD-23).

Barack Obama has performed much better in the caucuses, however the results from these are arriving slowly. Slate has a nice article explaining why the caucus results are taking so long to total, but the upshot is that Texas has a ridiculous snail-mail based system that takes forever for any kind of communication to get done. Slate compares Texas to Iowa where the results are known right away because Iowa is used to having important primaries where people actually care.

Still, early indications suggest that Senator Obama will likely pick up three to four delegates from the caucuses, possibly giving him a delegate advantage over Senator Clinton by the time the counting is finished. This will undoubtedly unhinge someone, although whether it will be the Clinton campaign, the Texas Democratic Party, or the American media, I’m not sure.

Oh yeah, and John McCain won the Republican primary or something. There was huge excitement here for that contest. Yeah.

The Campaign

Of course, the campaign in Texas was completely unusual compared to most elections. Candidates actually visited and campaigned, although no serious attention was paid to issues important to the state. Both of the Democratic candidates were circumspect about NAFTA while visiting Texas, but openly blasted it in Ohio. Why? Because NAFTA makes Texas a heck of a lot of money. We like it, thank you very much. Ohio can suck it.

Much was made of Obama’s ground organization, but the reality was curiously not what I expected. If the media was to be believed, I thought we would see armies of Obama supporters flooding across the state carrying his message of “Change” everywhere they went. However, no such mass ever materialized. Instead, I saw exactly the opposite: Hillary supporters out in droves with signs, buttons, and stickers everywhere they went.

Case in point, at my precinct’s polling place, there were several Hillary supporters out front who were well dressed, had nicely printed flyers, and carried large signs. On the other hand, there were only two Obama supporters, both of whom were more poorly dressed, and neither carried a large Obama sign. I had to see the stickers on their jackets to realize they weren’t actually part of the Hillary group.

Much has been said about Howards Dean’s 50 state strategy and how Obama has more deftly executed on it than Clinton, however Texas was almost the reverse. Take this graphic from the New York Times which shows where the Obamas and Clintons campaigned and opened offices. Both candidates paid attention to the major metropolitan areas, but only the Clintons branched out to other smaller cities. Meanwhile, both candidates had offices all over the state, but the Obama campaign chose to open multiple (redundant?) offices in the more major population centers while ignoring smaller rural cities, especially in West Texas. What baffles me is why there was not an Obama office in Lubbock, home of Texas Tech University and a source of much of the college student enthusiasm that has supported his campaign.

Many have wondered if the Clinton campaign did well in Texas because of Rush Limbaugh who told Republicans to vote for her to stretch out the Democratic campaign process. And it’s true, the most Republican districts favored Hillary Clinton. However, as I pointed out in my earlier post, many Republicans were voting against her as well, leading me to believe the Limbaugh effect probably didn’t materialize.

I actually believe that Obama lost the Texas vote because of sloppy campaigning. Hillary Clinton kicked his ass in the polls because she got her act together at the last minute, built a real ground organization, and at least conveyed the appearance of a successful campaign. Obama won the caucuses because of the raw enthusiasm he can create from thin air, but to continue his success against the Clinton campaign he needs to get his act together before the next primaries or else he’s a loser for the rest of the campaign.

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Post tags: democrats, elections, hillary, obama, politics, republicans, texas

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So rather than make this all political with my opinions and such, I thought I would just throw out some good links on the upcoming Democratic primaries in Texas. As big a state as this is, it tends to stay under the national radar when it’s not having its vast ranch lands cleared by a vacationing George Bush. Yet when something does happen, the inevitable deluge of articles begins trying to reason out just how this state manages to exist when everything is so…big.

New York Times

The New York Times is first up with its article titled Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle – an article that’s amusing enough simply for betraying Northerners’ utter confusion about the Lone Star State. The rest of the world seems to be coming to terms with what locals have known for quite some time: Texas is weird. Quote:

In a 1968 essay, Larry McMurtry wrote that Texas was divided but “not yet fragmented to a degree that would raise difficulties for the novelist.” Forty years later, you could sympathize with the writer, but you should feel really sorry for the presidential candidate, trying to make sense of a state as large as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina combined, and probably even more diverse.

Electoral-Vote.com

Next up is a great article from everyone’s favorite computer-scientist-turned-pundit election website, Electoral-Vote.com. In the news posting from today, Mr. Tanenbaum makes a few good points on the Texas primary system and how absolutely confusing it really is. He starts by writing that because of the way Texas divides its delegates for the voting portion of its election, it’s unlikely either candidate will pick up a substantial lead. He thinks we will see at most a 15 delegate spread.

Beyond his concerns about the delegate spread, he also thinks that very few people will actually attend the caucus portion of the election. I think his point about the caucuses is the most interesting, in large part because so few Texans understand their own primary system. This may have much to do with the fact that Texas has voted mostly Republican for so long that people have simply forgotten about how the Democratic primaries work. Most likely, however, only the die-hard voters will attend the caucuses on the evening of the 4th. For those who do attend, 90% of them will be attending for the first and almost certainly the last time for quite a few elections to come.

Houston Chronicle

Last up is an article from the Houston Chronicle titled In Democratic primary, expect a GOP turnout that confirms what a lot of people from around here already know but what for some reason seems to be a complete surprise to people elsewhere: Republicans really hate Hillary Clinton. What’s more, a good chunk of them may be voting for Obama in the Democratic primary simply because they absolutely don’t want Hillary to even possibly think about winning the election. How many Republicans? As many as 15 percent of them! That’s an awful lot of Republican voters, and a good chunk of them will vote for McCain in November.

© Stanton for Stanton Champion, 2008. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: democrats, elections, hillary, links, obama, politics, republicans, texas

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