Wordcruncher

Messaging Discipline

Following up on the tease in my last post regarding how the steps we need to take to tilt the playing field in our favor are more inherently difficult for Democrats that Republicans:

We face the challenge Will Rogers explained: “I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” (Thanks, Bob.)

It’s more difficult for Democrats because we as a party lack the message cohesiveness and discipline the Republicans deploy so well. I am hoping a new DNC chair will help with this; if not, they’ll be of limited use. For what good will organization and fundraising be if we can’t win the national debate?

Perhaps basing their model on Moses descending from the mountain, Republicans craft their message on high rapidly, arm their troops with it, then deploy troops for combat on blogs, talk radio, Op-Ed pages, the House and Senate floors, etc.

It’s an admirable and formidable operation. Their message discipline gives the press corps nothing else to talk about. Indeed, Republican talking points become seared into the brains of a lazy press corps that can’t – or won’t – deconstruct the message.

There really isn’t a true grass roots Republican organization. It’s more accurately described as a top-down structure resembling the military or corporate-style governance. To us, they appear as automatons, unable to think for themselves and capable only of parroting the party line.

I think this helped the Bush campaign in one significant and overlooked way: It creates the illusion of Mr. Bush as a leader. After all, the troops were always in line and never strayed off the reservation. If they did, they’d be publicly reprimanded. Hell, even John McCain looked like a follower. It made a profound statement that he fell in line behind Mr. Bush. And they knew it.

Democrats are exactly the opposite. Our party leadership excelled at raising money, but had little or nothing to do with message dissemination or discipline. And let’s face it: Democrats can’t discipline Democrats. Presidents Clinton and Carter consistently expended political capital fighting against their own party. For Carter, it was his downfall – he couldn’t fight the labor-led Democratic machine. That and the hostage crisis destroyed any public semblance of leadership he may have had.

This election cycle saw the birth of a new dynamic for Democrats: blogs. Howard Dean was the first to recognize the power blogs could have as a grassroots movement. Institutionalized Democrats (as well as the media and even Republicans) were clearly caught off guard by the anger of rank-and-file Democratic voters during the primary season. Governor Dean, however, tapped into this zeitgeist from the blogs; he then distilled it into his campaign (yes, he still lost, but for other reasons).

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the absence of a top-down messaging discipline created in its stead one from the ground up. It still is. If one were to consistently monitor the blogs I have blogrolled on the right side of my page, one would quickly realize some thematic unity on a consistent basis.

I am, while admittedly naïve, excited about the prospect of Governor Dean as DNC chair. His candidacy demonstrated the possibility of a Democratic messaging structure that befits our party. Rather than dictating the message from top-down, the message could flow two ways – from bottom to top in its rawest form and then from top to bottom as polished and refined talking points.

We’ll never have the advantage of a CEO-style, crack-the-whip discipline. But what we can do is create a frame into which our candidate can step for the ’08 campaign. Perhaps more significantly, we can create a frame for every Democrat, at all levels, to use.