Reply #58: If I may speak to my friend wyldwolf's points

[NoPasaran]

Most sources give Emanuel the lion's share of credit for 2006 wins. Not everyone worships at the alter of Howard Dean.

As the saying goes, success has a thousand fathers. I think that the extent of our victories in 2006 was big enough that paternity could be shared among many people. I have no doubt that Rahm Emanuel, as head of the DCCC, should get a lot of the credit for taking back the House. But we also won in many other races, many of which didn't get much national attention. For example, Democrats took over the county government in Hays County, Texas, a rural county that is becoming suburban. In Dallas County, every single Republican judge on the ballot was swept out of office. And while victories like these may not have the immediate impact on the nation that national races have, they do affect peoples' everyday lives as well as building the farm team from which our future national politicians will arise. And I'm going to insist that this is the level where Dean's "run everywhere" strategy has its impact.

To be sure, there were disagreements over allocation of resources in 2006. I view this like a military battle. Every commander on the field sees the piece of ground he's fighting over as the most important sector, the most deserving of support and reinforcement. The general commanding has to make some tough decisions about when and where to commit his reserves. If the decisions he makes are by and large good ones, the army as a whole wins. If he makes poor choices, he may "win" the sector that he reinforces while losing the overall battle because of some catastrophe elsewhere on the field.

Afterwords you can continue to argue over what might have happened if X had been done instead of Y, but I think it's hard to argue with winning the overall battle.

Dean activists are far wealthier, better educated, more secular and much less ethnically diverse than other Democrats. A disproportionate number of Dean activists are white, well-educated Baby Boomers ­ fully a third are college graduates between the ages of 45 and 64, compared with just 9% of Democrats in the general public.

I hope you're not going to hold our relative wealth, education, or whiteness against us. We are a big tent party, after all.

Throughout the whole Dean "movement," non-Dean Democrats were always amazed at how Dean supporters believed canvassing was a new thing. That sentiment isn't surprising coming from folks who were, for the most part, new to politics.

Speaking as one of those Dean supporters, canvassing WAS a new thing for a lot of us because we came from places where canvassing just wasn't being done. We had to learn to knock on doors because there had just never been Democratic machine foot soldiers to show us how it was done.

From my own experience, I bought a house in Southwestern Austin in 1996. The first time I ever saw any political flyers of any description in my neighborhood was in 2004 when I walked the precinct by myself during early voting (although back in 2000 I do recall the republican precinct chair knocking on my door and offering me some pictures of aborted fetuses). In 2004 the incumbent GOP state representative and county commissioner both were re-elected without opposition. However, the influx of new door-knockers and voter registrars and phone bankers did allow us to defeat one republican incumbent state rep, come within a few hundred votes of beating another, as well as winning every countywide race we contested. Since then, the one remaining republican judge flipped parties and we've elected a solidly Democratic legislative delegation, including winning the seat we didn't even contest in 2004. And my Republican county commissioner knows he's got a target on his back for 2008.

True, back in 2004 we were idealistic and naive. But since then those of us who have remained active have gone through several elections. We're not as new and inexperienced as we were back then. Some have gone from knocking on doors for the first time in 2004 to running campaigns in 2005 to running winning campaigns in 2006. And may I say, hurray for us! Any party that doesn't get an infusion of new, enthusiastic activists from time to time is doomed to extinction. And naturally there will be conflicts between the new people and the old. I myself am looking forward to some young know-it-alls to pry the party out of our tired, arthritic hands some ten or twenty years from now.