There are plenty of other political lessons we learned in 2004, but I think I’ll conclude with what we learned about our dear ol’ fightin’ donkey, the Democratic Party.
On the plus side, we learned we could get through a tough general election battle, after a fractious nominating process, with extraordinary unity. It wasn’t always easy, but we made it look that way.
We learned it was possible to use technology to create a whole new, decentralized, small-dollar donor base, reducing an advantage the GOP has had in small-dollar funding for a generation, and enormously increasing the overall amount of money available to our candidates. The diversification of the party’s financial base also reduced our dependence on big-money sources ranging from corporations to trial lawyers to unions, without significantly diminishing these sources.
We learned Democrats could at least begin to compete in the “new media” sources of political commentary and advocacy previously dominated by conservatives, ranging from radio to cable TV to the Internet and its boisterous spawn, the blogosphere.
And we learned that Democrats could win younger voters. Although there were not enough of them to make a big difference this year, Democratic strength in the younger cohorts of Americans is a good and important sign for the future.
On the minus side, we learned that self-identified Democrats no longer outnumber Republicans for the first time since the New Deal.
We learned that a lot of the negative perceptions of the Democratic Party that we thought had gone away during the Clinton administration were simply dormant.
We learned that all the excitement, enthusiasm, and money generated by the Dean/MoveOn/Blog phenomena of 2003 are not necessarily transferable into votes.
We learned that we could use a new generation of pollsters and campaign consultants.
And we learned that Republicans have now gained a geographical advantage in the country that undoubtedly gives them an edge in control of state governments, of the U.S. Senate, and (indirectly, through redistricting) of the U.S. House, and a strategic advantage in presidential campaigns as well.
The post-election analysis among Democrats has been relatively free of recriminations (though the brewing campaign for the DNC chairmanship threatens to change that happy situation), with the main divide separating those who think the party needs to significantly change to become competitive in broader parts of the country, and those who think we just need to raise more money, excite more activists, and attract more Hispanic voters, and things will be just fine.
While most Democrats agree that we should now become (in Washington, at least) a loud-and-proud opposition party, there is less consensus about the positive message Democrats should stand for. And some of us, especially at the DLC, are worried about (a) the tiny investment we are making as a party on new policy ideas–we’re basically all living off the policy thinking of the Clinton administration; and (b) the relative lack of interest in the current intra-party debate about Democratic state and local elected officials, who deserve at least as much attention as grass-roots activists and Washington consultants in plotting the course forward.
It’s been a painful but instructive year for this Donkey, and for all of us. And may we toast the New Year with a prayer for unity, imagination and courage.

When you’re down south, you can’t twirl the radio dial without running across sports talk, so I’ve been listening to endless discussions of the Big Brawl in Detroit last Friday night. Some gabbers think Ron Artest got a raw deal, losing roughly a million dollars per punch for his foray into the stands after those beer-and-popcorn hurling Pistons fans. Others think he should be strung up by sundown.
I couldn’t help but think about extending the civility rules from basketball to politics. What if Tom DeLay was subject to a suspension-without-pay for his next ethics violation? I know House Members don’t get paid as well as NBA stars, but maybe DeLay could pony up some cash from one of his political action committees when he goes into the stands back home in Texas and roughs up some innocent Democrat, eh?
Some kinds of poor political sportsmanship, however, deserve a penalty that goes beyond the deepest wallet. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to toss a beer right now at the Honorable James Sensennbrenner of Wisconsin, or the Honorable Duncan Hunter of California, the two solons who are risking all our lives by gumming up bipartisan intelligence reform legislation in Congress over a stupid turf fight with the Senate and the White House. (A note to any zealous law enforcement agents who may be reading: this is a fantasy, not a terroristic threat).
Right now the only person in a position to punish these guys for their bad behavior is the President of the United States, who in a statement from Chile, allowed as how he’d like to get things worked out when he gets home (assuming he doesn’t have one of those Crawford vacations previously scheduled). This is one time I truly wish Bush was the swaggering cowboy his publicists claim he is, and that he’d hogtie these boys and drag them to the House floor to do their jobs for the American people.

Josh Marshall among others has taken special note of the unusually abrasive comments made during and after the election by James Dobson, patriarch of the huge, Colorado-based Focus on the Family radio ministry. There is unmistakably a totalitarian tone to Dobson’s lurid arguments that gay people not only threaten the institution of marriage, but the survival of Planet Earth, along with his description of Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) as a “God’s people hater.”
This is nothing new for Dobson. I wrote a piece six years ago for The New Democrat magazine (the predecessor to the DLC’s Blueprint) noting that Dobson represented a new and dangerous strain of the Christian Right, based on the frequent parallels he drew between (Clintonian) America and Nazi Germany, and his corresponding claims that Christian conservatives were, like the Confessing Church of Nazi Germany, a rare beacon of conscience in a satanic society that was determined to wipe them out. I know that for many secular or Catholic or Jewish or “mainstream” protestant people all the Christian Right leaders pretty much sound alike, but Dobson is different: in the kulturkampf, he’s the apostle of Total War.
Dobson first came to my attention in 1996, for his part in a famous public controversy launched by Richard John Neuhaus’ First Things magazine, entitled “The End of Democracy?” Neuhaus posed the question whether legalized abortion and gay rights and other affronts to traditional culture justified civil disobedience and other extra-legal forms of resistance. In a subsequent issue of First Things, Dobson was by far the most emphatic in rejecting the “legitimacy” of “the current regime,” and of constitutional democracy as well, so long as the courts continued to defy “divine law.”
One of the enduring ironies of this controversy was that it created a serious split between hard-line Christian conservatives and the largely-Jewish neoconservatives who expressed horror at the theocratic views of Neuhaus, Dobson, and their allies. Yet little more than seven years later, Dobson and at least the most prominent neocons are yoked together to the political fortunes of George W. Bush’s Republican Party.
It’s a truism–and like all truisms, partially true–that the GOP is an ideological party, while Democrats represent a coalition party. But underneath the surface of Republican harmony, there are serious differences that cannot be perpetually suppressed. I will defer to my colleague The Moose in analyzing the fault lines of contemporary conservatism. But I can’t help but wonder what doubts privately afflict Bush’s neocons. They have succeeded in convincing the president to rhetorically embrace their vision of America as a militant advocate of secular democracy and liberty in the Islamic world. But when they look down the party line, they cannot help but see their ally James Dobson, who so fervently believes that democracy and liberty are mere disposable tactics for the imposition of “divine law.”

There were not one, but two, major newspaper takes on political blogs yesterday. One graced the cover of The New York Times magazine. The other was on the op-ed pages of the LA Times. The first was by a journalist who suspects many bloggers would like to graduate to more traditional outlets for political commentary. The second was by a former blogger who fears the same thing.
Both pieces take very seriously the belief of many bloggers that they represent something truly revolutionary in political discourse, and even in politics itself. And both pieces suggest that celebrity, commercial success, and mainstream respectablility may be producing a Thermidor in that revolution wherein its leaders are being coopted by the hated establishment.
The Times’ Matthew Klam focuses on three bloggers who have already crossed the line into celebrity: TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall, Wonkette‘s Anna Marie Cox, and DailyKos‘ Markos (Kos) Molitsas, and suggests all three are at a crossroads where they must choose between street cred and fame and fortune. But I think he confuses his story by conflating two very different rationales for political blogs. Some bloggers want to do political journalism. Some view their role as movement-building and agitprop.
While Marshall is quite partisan (who isn’t this year?), he’s still basically a journalist. And his segment of the blogosphere was made possible by the conjunction of a market failure in traditional political journalism with the emergence of a new technology that provided a way around that market failure.
It’s no secret that political print journalism has been a steadily declining segment of a steadily declining industry for decades now. Radically reduced readership; competition from electronic media; ownership conglomeration; cost-driven downsizing; the collapse of commercially viable niche markets; rampant editorial cronyism: all these factors have dried up opportunities for would-be political journalists, while ossifying the profession into a self-referential universe of carreerist status and specialization, much like academia.
Josh Marshall had the choice of spending two decades struggling through old-boy networks and ownership crises to land an insecure perch in a paper or magazine, or taking advantage of a new technology to practice political journalism right now. And that’s what he does: chasing down stories, digging beneath the surface, sticking to them when other reporters lose interest. He may feel that he’s contributing to a political movement, but he’s still a journalist, and there’s nothing dishonorable about that. The fact that he’s figured out a way to support himself without sucking up to editors or attending Washington cocktail parties is an example of successful entrepreneurship, not betrayal of some blogospheric ethic.
Ms. Cox is another example of journalistic enterprise, but of a very different sort. Unlike print poltitical journalism, electronic political commentary has been expanding in recent years, but only by embracing the entertainment paradigm of television and radio media generally. Like thousands of other, less successful, bloggers, Wonkette probably watched 1,000 hours of scandal-dishers and partisan “pundits” trading insults, and thought, Hell, I can do that. Klam’s discovery that she’s now ready to graduate to television or even movies is hardly shocking. Like Marshall, she’s already doing political journalism–but it’s a kind of journalism that commands little respect and adds even less to the common weal. To put it another way, Marshall’s type of journalism carries a moral hazard of celebrity; Wonkette’s is basically about celebrity.
Kos, of course, is a blogger who’s more into movement-building and agitprop than journalism. His temptation is not to go onto the masthead of The Nation; it’s to gain real influence over real-life political institutions. Klam’s most interesting Kos anecdote involves a near-physical altercation between the fiery blogger and the executive director of the DCCC, involving the latter’s allocation of campaign dollars in House elections. If Kos were inclined to think this way, he might say his and similar blogs address a market failure in the political world itself, where the inbred clan of Democratic fundraisers and political consultants are more concerned with protecting their turf than winning elections.
To sum it all up, Josh Marshall and Kos are blogging with a purpose, and thus their efforts can and will be judged in terms of their success in meeting their purposes. And that seems to be the main complaint of retiring blogger Billman in the LA Times. For him, blogging is essentially about itself: a revolutionary culture of dissent, of “speaking truth to power,” that “made blogging such a potent alternative to the corporate-owned media.” By this measurement, actually gaining influence and power is ipso facto a betrayal of the blogosphere.
I guess you know where I come down on this. Blogging is a means, not an end. It’s open to everybody, whether or not you pass the test of subversiveness some would impose. Nobody’s forced to read anybody’s blog, and it’s not like there are limited options. And if bloggers put their work to good purpose, then good for them.

Before undertaking the herculean effort of watching and then analyzing the Republican National Convention, I can’t resist the opportunity to flog one of my favorite political books, about a Convention held at the original Madison Square Garden 80 years ago.
Robert K. Murray’s 1976 book, The 103d Ballot, focused on the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York, which took, yes, 103 ballots to nominate a doomed ticket of John W. Davis for president and Charles Bryan (younger brother of The Commoner) for vice-president. The book has been out of print for decades, but is probably available at any decent university or big-city library. Here’s a link to a big PDF file that includes a longer take on the book and the ’24 Convention, under the title of “Unhappy Warriors.”
Today’s conventions are tightly controlled, relentlessly timed affairs aimed at conveying partisan messages through the ever-narrowing lens of network television coverage. 80 years ago, the new medium of radio offered gavel-to-gavel coverage of conventions, while most newspapers devoted massive coverage to all the speechifying. And as Murray amply demonstrated, the uncontrolled nature of the 1924 Convention, and the disastrous impressions it created, began the long, slow, uneven trend towards submerging party differences during the Big Show of party conventions.
At The Garden in 1924, Democrats were deadlocked between the rural, prohibitionist, anti-Wall Street forces that united behind William Gibbs McAdoo, and the urban, wet forces symbolized by New York’s favorite son, Al Smith. There was a frenetic and toxic platform fight on the floor about whether or not to specifically condemn the Ku Klux Klan, considered a “progressive” organization by the populists of that time. It was William Jennings Bryan’s last convention, and it helped make Franklin D. Roosevelt (already the vice-presidential candidate in 1920) a national political figure after his “Happy Warrior” speech nominating Smith.
If nothing else, Murray’s book amply shows that cultural issues did not somehow emerge in 2000 as a source of partisan identification against a “normal” background of class-based divisions. The real aberration in American political history occurred in and after 1932, when the emergency of the Great Depression enabled FDR to create the first grand coalition of low-to-middle income voters since Andrew Jackson.
Check out Murray’s book if you can, and then stock up on the caffeine to watch the latest Garden Party, if you must.