Reply #94: Bottom line is, the guy didn't know what the hell he needed to be doing,

[deckerd]

And at the time, neither did William Pitt, Billy Bunter, and various other "insiders" (up to and including Mary Beth Cahill and other "experts" who were embarrassingly chastised by their boss, who says he wanted to come out against the Swift Vets from the get-go.)

The reason Dem Strategist raised such hostility was (a) his strategy of getting people to repeat talking points generated by himself was lame and reminds me of countless marketing-speak "experts" I have to deal with in the world of community development; I am not in the least surprised if this is the order of the day in "expert" Democratic circles;

and (b) he was angering everybody on DU because of the timing of it all. Kerry was going down in flames over the Swift Vet publicity, losing ALL of a convention bounce and continued sinking throughout September until outside events and a good debate performance saved him.

Mr. Pitt et al. can claim that this was all part of the grand strategy they devised for "use" of DU but the bottom line is D_S was fiddling while Rome burns and that's enough to piss off anybody and everybody with half a brain, up to and including Carville and Kerry himself, who have both come out and said that the strategy of rising above the Swift Vet ads and trying to get your "message through the media" is asinine.

Why do I suspect that Dem_Strategist is none other than Howard Dean's old (non) buddy/webmaster? He fits the profile to a T. "The media is the enemy" and all that nonsense.

Might as well say ignorant American voters are the enemy. The media is and always has been a capitalistic enterprise. It is designed to move product. If you don't want to compete with the product they were offering (Swift Vets), trying to roll out an unrelated product like the economy in the same field (the media) while your core business (national security) is going down the tubes is stupid.

I have nothing but respect for what that guy did for Dean, but he failed to take it to the next level, he failed to distinguish between what could be done at the grassroots level and what compromises in strategy needed to be made to engage the RW media. There was a good article in US News on it -- in depth, most of it about the Dean campaign and obviously researched with the expectation Dean would win the primaries. Alot of Dems seem to thrive in the sort of hothouse milieu created by meetups and blogs and insular protest groups.