- Orginally Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 by the New York Times [more] and [more]
by Bill Bradley
Five months after the presidential election Democrats are still
pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why
Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues
or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the
conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the
candidate flawed?
Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to
see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the
Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become
Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more
appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis
Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the
United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the
United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping,
coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on
college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.
To further the party's ideological and political goals,
Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure
based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.
You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through
it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife
family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the
pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage
Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.
The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the
third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists
like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and,
through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic
attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest
electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on
Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy
position. The development process can take years. And then there's the
fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative
commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.
At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because
the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it
and it works fine.
It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton
described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously,
carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists
don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for
anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid
well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots
of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes
toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.
To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid.
Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the
presidential candidate.
Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids
all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can
rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a
campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too.
Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how
well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea
people.
There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic
policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time
for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell
old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand
until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the
daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message.
The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.
Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still
hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who
can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The
trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around
several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then
exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what
Democrats believe.
In such a system tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk
talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently
tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and
express few deep convictions. In the worst case, they embrace
"Republican lite" platforms - never realizing that in doing so they're
allowing the Republicans to define the terms of the debate.
A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our
last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight
years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin
Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what
happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the
world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic
senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national
party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not.
Charisma didn't translate into structure.
If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or
the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to
resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead
make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will
take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there
really is no other choice.
- Bill Bradley, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey, is a managing director of Allen & Company.