"Herding Donkeys" has some real insight into the problems facing Democrats right now.

[madfloridian]

I had to read several of these paragraphs a few times to see if I agreed, and I mostly do agree.

In 2003 something happened to us politically, and it was not about left or right. It was really about honesty basically. We worked on the Dean campaign with local Democrats, Independents, Greens, and some Republicans.

There was one thing we had in common. We did not like the lies and propaganda surrounding the invasion of Iraq. Many of us were broken-hearted that our government would do such a thing, and we were even angrier that few Democrats were opposing it vocally.

So I think Ari Berman got a lot of it right in his new book "Herding Donkeys". It is not about left or right, it is about inside DC and outside DC, it is about right and wrong. But most of all it is about doing the correct thing even though it is not politically expedient. He just worded it differently than I did.

Herding Donkeys, an excerpt

Obama's movement did not begin on the steps of the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois; it began in the governor's mansion in sleepy Montpelier, Vermont. Howard Dean, the five-term governor of one of the country's tiniest states, entered the Democratic presidential primary in 2003 because he wanted to talk about a balanced budget and healthcare reform. But after he became the first major candidate to denounce the war in Iraq and aggressively challenge the Bush administration, his campaign, quickly and unexpectedly, became much bigger than that—an experiment with a new kind of politics aimed at revitalizing American democracy, reviving the Democratic Party and ending the Republican Party's electoral dominance.

Dean's run for the presidency embraced and amplified a few unique notions that profoundly altered modern American politics, namely, that committed volunteers are cheaper and more effective than the same old crew of professional campaign consultants; that small donations in large numbers can do more than large donations in small numbers; that the Internet and new social networking tools can level the playing field for seemingly quixotic candidacies and attract hordes of new people into politics for the first time; and that Democrats needed to compete everywhere (including in the hinterlands of long-forgotten red state America), stand up for some core principles and stick with them. The cause was as much about the means of doing politics as the ends. Dean and his followers fervently believed that the Democratic Party could still be fundamentally reformed, and they focused their activism toward that end. This spontaneous new insurgency—a response to the corporatization and triangulation of the Clinton era—wasn't about left versus right as much as outside versus in. The soul of the party and the future of politics were suddenly up for grabs. Dean certainly did not intend to become a catalyst for these changes, but that's where his campaign ended up.

I think the comparison between the two campaigns is apt up to a point. They both empowered people and made use of the grassroots. But things changed after the election.

Berman's description of how OFA has been handled shows that things changed when Democrats got their majority. Obama for America became Organizing for America. And it changed.

Despite locating OFA in the DNC, changing the Democratic Party didn't rank as Obama's foremost priority. He had more pressing problems on his plate—not least, digging the country out of its worst economic crisis in decades. In those critical days following the election, OFA opted largely to circumvent the party rather than enhance it. On November 5, 2008, the DNC's nearly 200 local organizers, the core of Dean's fifty-state strategy, awoke to the news that their contracts were expiring at the end of the month. The e-mail from headquarters called it a "bitter-sweet moment." When Obama's DNC reconstituted Dean's strategy a few months later, funding OFA staffers across the country took priority. Unlike the organizers hired under Dean, who worked to strengthen the party at the state and local level, the new Obama organizers were instructed to focus strictly on helping to pass the president's legislative agenda, forming a parallel structure to the existing party. "I'm not trying to build a bigger and better Democratic Party," says Colorado OFA director Gabe Lifton-Zoline.

With a Democrat as president, the DNC chairman exists to further that president's agenda.

And that is now what OFA does as well.

OFA operates under the assumption that the president's policy is always the best possible one. But what about when it isn't? What are Obama's supporters to do then? They are told to sell the policy, but they can't influence the shaping of the product. "There's a certain hubris among the people around Obama in the White House that they were above the fray and didn't have to pay attention to the base," says Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. "Certainly a president has to govern from the middle, but you've got to reassure your base that what they did and how hard they worked was worth something." Much of the tension can be traced back to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a consummate Beltway insider, who replaced David Plouffe, the Obama inner circle's past conduit to the grassroots, as the central figure in Obama's orbit.

Howard Dean said basically the same as Harkin, that you can't just use your base and then forget them.

There is a difference between being "post-partisan" and using common sense. When the party of no is obviously not going to give any support to Democrats, it is time to start appealing to those who are on your side. And it is time to give them the due respect.