From Daily Kos and Open Left....RIP 50 State Strategy.

[madfloridian]

Heading back to more of the swing state strategy, which we used to call the 18 state strategy. Also bringing to an end the decentralization which our outgoing chairman felt would make the party more open to all.

From Open Left:

DNC Strategy Update

1. Increasing Centralization: The shift in resources away from paid media and toward on the ground organizers will continue. However, these resources will be more directly controlled by the DNC itself, rather than by state parties. In other words, the SPP program where the DNC pays for organizers chosen by the state parties themselves is, as previously reported, done. Instead, the DNC will likely hire and assign organizers themselves. State party grants will also likely be transformed into more centrally directed expenditures by the DNC.

2. More swing state, less fifty-state: Many, if not most, states will have more resources spent on them during the next four years than during the previous four years. In addition to increasingly centralized control over how these resources are spent, there will also be a return to a swing-state focus for 2012. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Obama campaign's version of a swing state strategy was broader than either the Gore or Kerry incarnations.

In short, the DNC will be moving away from the long-term, decentralized, fifty-state strategy of Howard Dean's tenure, and toward serving as a short-term, centralized re-election effort for President Obama in 2012. It will continue the move away from paid media ushered in by Howard Dean, maintain or increase the amount of resource expenditures in most states, and the number of states it targets will be a broader effort than the narrow focus we saw in 2001-2004 (but more narrow than 2005-2008). However, it will return to the traditional role of the DNC as a supplement for the sitting President's re-election campaign, rather than as the long-term, localized institution building operation that is was from 2005-2008.

The fifty-state strategy of 2005-2008 is going to be replaced with the "re-elect President Obama" strategy of 2009-2012.

That's fine with me now. We are moving on from being so involved.

Markos adds to Open Left's post and is pretty outspoken.

RIP 50-state strategy

...the DC Democratic establishment will like this. They hated losing control of that cash and letting the states decide for themselves how to best spend it. This is a return to how the party has traditionally operated. Idaho, which implausibly elected a member to the House in an R+18.9 district -- the most Republican district held by a Democrat today and the 14th most Republican district in the entire country -- would likely get passed over using a more traditional resource allocation model.

..."Howard Dean was a rare political creature -- a person who embraced decentralization. The new crew in power is far more conventional, resorting to an old-school centralized power structure. Democrats have the White House, and perhaps it's understandable that they want to take a proven model (the Obama campaign) and begin building what will eventually morph into Obama's reelection campaign. But given the size of Obama's list and his fundraising prowess, it shouldn't have to be an either-or proposition.

Update: I wrote this as a comment in the threads, but it's a succinct summary of this post, so I'll paraphrase it here:

The reason that there's an inherent conflict with turning the DNC into Obama's 2012 reelection effort is that there's no reason for the Obama operation to have staffers in Utah. But there's a reason for the Democratic Party to have staffers in Utah -- helping Democrats get elected to important local- and state-level offices and building a bench for federal offices.

If Obama's DNC wants to staff up in battleground states, then great. But the rest of the states shouldn't be discarded. We've been down that road before, and it wasn't pretty.

The power is back where it was.

Now the purse strings are firmly back in DC.