Direction For The Democrats, part 2
Senator Ted Kennedy presents A Democratic Blueprint for America's Future.
A good first step would be to stop hiring campaign advisors who lose races.
A good first step would be to stop hiring campaign advisors who lose races.
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A Democratic Blueprint for America's Future
by US Senator Ted Kennedy
An Address by Senator Edward M. Kennedy at the National Press Club
January 12, 2005
Thank you, Sheila Cherry, for that gracious introduction. And thank you to the Press Club for inviting me here today.
I'm honored to be joined on the dais by two outstanding young persons who represent a new generation of leadership for the Democratic Party and our country.
Grant Woodard is a junior at Grinnell College in Iowa and President of College Democrats of America. He brilliantly organized "Students for John Kerry" in the Iowa Caucuses a year ago, and last fall he led a national effort to mobilize student voters.
Andrew Gillum is the youngest person ever elected to the City Commission in Tallahassee. He was elected while still a student at Florida A&M, and now, two years later, the Commission has chosen him as Mayor Pro-Tem of the city. Andrew served last fall as Florida director of the get-out-the-vote-campaign of People for the American Way.
These two young leaders have a passion for public service and a talent for inspiring others. After spending a few minutes with them, you'll be reassured that the nation's future is in good hands.
Ten years ago, almost to the day, I stood at this podium after another election in which Democrats lost ground - far too much ground - an unwelcome redistribution of power, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century.
2004 was nothing like that. It was more a replay of 2000. This time, a switch of less than 60,000 votes in Ohio would have brought victory. Unlike 2000, it would have been a victory against an incumbent President, and in a time of war.
Small swings in other states could also have given Democrats control of the Senate or the House, or even both. Obviously, it hurts to come so close in all three battles, and then fail by so little. We did many things right, but that is no cause for complacency.
I categorically reject the deceptive and dangerous claim that the outcome last November was somehow a sweeping, or a modest, or even a miniature mandate for reactionary measures like privatizing Social Security, redistributing the tax burden in the wrong direction, or packing the federal courts with reactionary judges. Those proposals were barely mentioned - or voted on - in an election dominated by memories of 9/11, fear of terrorism, the quagmire in Iraq, and relentlessly negative attacks on our Presidential candidate.
In an election so close, defeat has a thousand causes - and it is too easy to blame it on particular issues or tactics, or on the larger debate about values. In truth, we do not shrink from that debate.
There's no doubt we must do a better job of looking within ourselves and speaking out for the principles we believe in, and for the values that are the foundation of our actions. Americans need to hear more, not less, about those values. We were remiss in not talking more directly about them - about the fundamental ideals that guide our progressive policies. In the words of Martin Luther King, "we must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope."
Unlike the Republican Party, we believe our values unite us as Americans, instead of dividing us. If the White House's idea of bipartisanship is that we have to buy whatever partisan ideas they send us, we're not interested.
In fact, our values are still our greatest strength. Despite resistance, setbacks, and periods of backlash over the years, our values have moved us closer to the ideal with which America began - that all people are created equal. And when Democrats say "all," we mean "all."
We have an Administration that falsely hypes almost every issue as a crisis. They did it on Iraq, and they are doing it now on Social Security. They exploit the politics of fear and division, while ours is a politics of hope and unity.
In the face of their tactics, we cannot move our party or our nation forward under pale colors and timid voices. We cannot become Republican clones. If we do, we will lose again, and deserve to lose. As I have said on other occasions, the last thing this country needs is two Republican parties.
Today, I propose a progressive vision for America, a vision that Democrats must fight for in the months and years ahead - a vision rooted in our basic values of opportunity, fairness, tolerance, and respect for each other.
These founding beliefs are still the essence of the American dream today.
That dream is the North Star of the Democratic Party - the compass that guides our policies and sets our course to freedom and opportunity, to fairness and justice - not just for the few, not just for some, but for all.
At our best, in all the great causes for which our party has stood, we have kept that dream alive for all Americans, even and especially in difficult times, and we will not fail to do so now.
Today, as we know too well, that dream is again in peril. The hopes of average Americans have faltered, as global forces cause the economy to shift against them. The challenge has been needlessly compounded, because Republican Congresses and Administrations have consciously chosen negative policies that diminish the American dream.
We cannot reclaim it by tinkering at the margins. No nation is guaranteed a position of lasting prosperity and security. We have to work for it. We have to fight for it. We have to sacrifice for it.
We have a choice. We can continue to be buffeted by the harsh winds of a shrinking world. Or we can think anew, and guide the currents of globalization with a new progressive vision that strengthens America and equips our citizens to move confidently to the future.
Our progressive vision is not just for Democrats or Republicans, for red states or blue states. It's a way forward for the nation as a whole - to a new prosperity and greater opportunity for all - a vision not just of the country we can become, but of the country we must become - an America that embraces the values and aspirations of our people now, and for coming generations.
A newly revitalized American dream will, of course, be expressed in policies and programs. But it is more than that. It is a challenge to Americans to look beyond the next horizon, remove false limits on our vision and needless barriers to our imagination, and open the way for true innovation and progress.
It is a commitment to true opportunity for all - not as an abstract concept, but as a practical necessity. To find our way to the future, we need the skills, the insight, and the productivity of every American, in a nation where each of us shares responsibility for the future, and where the blessings of progress are shared fairly by all our citizens in return.
Obviously, we must deal with Iraq and the clear and present danger of terrorism. I intend to address that issue in greater detail after the elections there. But I do not retreat from the view that Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam. At the critical moment in the war on terrorism, the Administration turned away from pursuing Osama bin Laden, and made the catastrophic choice instead that has bogged down America in an endless quagmire in Iraq.
Our misguided resort to war has created more - and much more intense - anti-American feeling than Osama bin Laden ever dreamed of. And the sooner we reverse that distressing trend, the better.
I'm convinced John Kerry could have worked with the international community to end that war and bring our troops home with honor. Our challenge now is to convince George Bush that there is a better way ahead in Iraq, instead of continuing to sink deeper into the quagmire.
Here at home, but also for the sake of our future in this rapidly globalizing world, I strongly believe that our highest priority must be a world class education for every American. As Democrats, we seek a future where America competes with others, not by lowering people's pay and outsourcing their jobs, but by raising their skills.
We must open new doors and new avenues for all Americans to make the most of their God-given talents and rekindle the fires of innovation in our society. By doing so, we can turn this era of globalization into a new era of opportunity for America. Universities and school boards cannot master the challenge alone.
We need a national education strategy to assure that America can advance, not retreat, in the global economy in the years ahead.
I welcome President Bush's remarks today on improving our high schools. But, it's clear that unless we fund the reforms under the No Child Left Behind Act for earlier grades and younger children, what we do in high schools will matter far less. We are past the point where we can afford only to talk the talk, without walking the walk.
It's time for the White House to realize that America cannot expand opportunity and embrace the future on a tin cup education budget.
The No Child Left Behind Act was a start, but only a start. We need to do more - much more - to see that students are ready for college, can afford college, and can graduate from college.
I propose that every child in America, upon reaching eighth grade, be offered a contract. Let students sign it, along with their parents and Uncle Sam. The contract will state that if you work hard, if you finish high school and are admitted to college, we will guarantee you the cost of earning a degree. Surely, we have reached a stage in America where we can say it and mean it - cost must never again be a bar to college education.
We must also inspire a renaissance in the study of math and science, because America today is losing out in these essential disciplines. Two major studies last month ranked American students 29th in math among the 40 leading industrial nations. Over the last 30 years, we have fallen from 3rd to 15th in producing scientists and engineers. Incredibly, more than half of all graduate students in science and engineering in American colleges today are foreign students.
National standards in math and science have existed for more than a decade. We need to raise those standards to be competitive again with international norms, and work with every school to apply them in every classroom.
We should encourage many more students to pursue advanced degrees in math and science. We should make tuition in graduate school free for needy students in those disciplines. And we should make undergraduate tuition free for any young person willing to serve as a math or science teacher in a public school for at least four years.
We can make these investments in our nation's future without adding a single penny to the deficit, if we empower colleges to negotiate better agreements with student loan providers. Billions of education dollars needlessly line the pockets of the Sallie Maes of the world. The Bush Administration irresponsibly defends this mis-allocation. Democrats must fight to end it. If Republicans truly care about values, they will join us in throwing the money-changers out of the temple of college education.
Another basic truth is obvious here. How young Americans fare in their school and college years is determined in large part by how well they do in their earliest years.
We must invest much more in early education and healthy development for the youngest children, so that entering school ready to learn is no longer just a hollow mantra but a genuine reality.
For children at home, we must give parents the information needed for their child's well-rounded development. For those in child care, pre-school, or Head Start, we must see that teachers and caregivers have the skill and training to provide the best possible start in life.
A new national commitment to early childhood education must become a top priority. If we fail to meet a child's development needs starting at birth, we fail not only the child, but our country and our future as well. Acting in time in the early years will also achieve immense savings in later costs for remedial education. Prevention works in health care, and it can work in education, too. Our goal should be an America whose commitment to early childhood education is as strong as its commitment to elementary and secondary education and to college education.
As we prepare our children for the new economy, we must make sure the economy lets them fulfill their American dream. The reality today is that the free market is not truly free. Not all Americans can fully share in its prosperity. We need an economy that values work fairly, that puts the needs of families ahead of excessive profits - an economy whose goal is growth with full employment and good jobs with good benefits for all.
To create good jobs for both today's and tomorrow's economy, the private and public sectors must work together toward specific goals.
We should reduce our dependence on foreign oil - not by drilling in the priceless Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, but by investing in clean energy.
We should invest in new schools and modernize old ones, to make schools the pride of their communities again.
We should invest in research and development, to pave the way for innovation and growth.
We should invest in broadband technology, so that every home, school, and business in America has easy and comprehensive access to the internet.
We should invest in mass transit, to reduce the pollution in our air and the congestion on our roads.
We should stop the non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, and anti-scientific nonsense emanating from the right-wing, and start demanding immediate action to reduce global warming, and prevent the catastrophic climate change that may be on our horizon now.
We must not let the Administration distort science and rewrite and manipulate scientific reports in other areas. We must not let it turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Pollution Agency.
A progressive economy also recognizes that Americans don't just want more. They want more of what matters in life, which is the true American dream.
They want greater flexibility on the job, with more time for their families, more time for their children's schools, more time to volunteer in their communities and churches and synagogues and mosques. They want jobs that pay fairly and don't force them to work excessive hours without extra pay. They want safe workplaces and the right to join with fellow employees to bargain for a fair workplace. They want companies to stop marketing cigarettes and unhealthy foods to young Americans. They want workplaces free from all forms of bigotry and discrimination, including discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans.
One step we can and should take immediately to help families cope with the relentless and growing pressures of everyday life is to require all employers to give employees at least seven days of paid sick leave a year.
That's not asking too much of corporations. For too many Americans, an illness means a cruel choice between losing their job, or neglecting their sick child or sick spouse at home. I intend to introduce legislation early in the new Congress to end that cruelty, and I urge the Republican leadership to bring it to a vote.
I also propose that companies which create good jobs with good benefits should receive new tax advantages, because their mission is so important to our cause. But companies that choose not to do so, that ship jobs overseas, should be denied those new incentives. In addition, we must act at long last to raise the federal minimum wage. Overwhelming numbers of citizens in Nevada and Florida showed the way last November, by voting for a higher minimum wage in their states. It's time for the Republican Party to stop obstructing action by Congress and raise the minimum wage for all employees across the nation.
We must do more to reduce poverty. It is shameful that in America today, the richest and most powerful nation on earth, nearly a fifth of all children go to bed hungry at night because their parents are working full time and still can't make ends meet.
For the millions who can't find work and the millions more unable to work at all, we need a strong safety net.
Social Security is fundamental to the integrity of that safety net. Never before - until now - has any President, Republican or Democrat, attacked the basic guarantee of Social Security. Never before - until now - has any President, Republican or Democrat, proposed a cut in Social Security benefits. Yet President Bush is talking not just about a cut, but an incredible 33 percent cut. We must oppose it - and we will defeat it.
We will not let any President turn the American dream into a nightmare for senior citizens and a bonanza for Wall Street.
The biggest threat to Social Security today is not the retirement of the baby boomers. It's George Bush and the Republican Party.
To revitalize the American dream, we also need to renew the battle to make health care affordable and available to all our people. In this new century of the life sciences, breakthrough treatments and miracle cures are steadily revolutionizing the practice of medicine and the quality of life. The mapping of the human genome enables us to understand far more about the molecular basis of disease, and to plan far-reaching cures that were inconceivable only a few years ago.
Sadly, in America today, the miracles of modern medicine are too often the province only of the wealthy. We need a new guarantee for the years ahead that the cost of these life-saving treatments and cures will not be beyond the reach of the vast majority of the American people.
An essential part of our progressive vision is an America where no citizen of any age fears the cost of health care, and no employer refuses to create new jobs or cuts back on current jobs because of the high cost of providing health insurance.
The answer is Medicare, whose 40th birthday we will celebrate in July. I propose that as a 40th birthday gift to the American people, we expand Medicare over the next decade to cover every citizen - from birth to the end of life.
It's no secret that America is still dearly in love with Medicare. Administrative costs are low. Patients' satisfaction is high. Unlike with many private insurers, they can still choose their doctor and their hospital.
For those who prefer private insurance, we will offer comparable coverage under the same range of private insurance plans already available to Congress. I can think of nothing more cynical or hypocritical than a Member of Congress who gives a speech denouncing health care for all, then goes to his doctor for a visit paid for by the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan.
I call this approach Medicare for All, because it will free all Americans from the fear of crippling medical expenses and enable them to seek the best possible care when illness strikes.
The battle to achieve Medicare for All will not be easy. Powerful interests will strongly oppose it, because they profit immensely from the status quo. Right wing forces will unleash false attack ads ranting against socialized medicine and government-run health care.
But those attacks are a generation out of date - retreads of the failed campaign that delayed Medicare in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, we are immunized against such attacks by the obvious success of Medicare. It is long past time to extend that success to all.
The Democratic Party's proudest moments and greatest victories have always come when we stand up against powerful interests and fight for the common good - and this coming battle can be another of our finest achievements.
To make the transition from the current splintered system, I propose to phase in Medicare for All, age group by age group, starting with those closest to retirement, between 55 and 65. Aside from senior citizens themselves, they have the greatest health needs and the highest health costs, and need our help the most.
The first stage of the phase-in should also guarantee good health care to every young child. We made a start with the Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997. It does a major part of the job, and it's time to complete the job now.
As we implement this reform, financing must be a shared responsibility. All will benefit, and all should contribute. Payroll taxes should be part of the financing, but so should general revenues, to make the financing as progressive as possible.
We can offset a large part of the expense by a single giant step - bringing health care into the modern age of information technology.
By moving to electronic medical records for all Americans when they go to the hospital or their doctor, we can save hundreds of billions of dollars a year in administrative costs while improving the quality of care.
Equally important, we should pay for health care based on value and results, not just the number of procedures performed or days in a hospital bed. We must also expand our investments in medical research, so that we can realize even more of its extraordinary promise. We must confront and defeat the misguided ideology that - in the name of life - denies life-saving cures by blocking stem cell research.
Above all, as we face the forces of globalization, we must inspire a stronger sense of national purpose among our citizens in a wide variety of areas that serve the public interest. We must affirm anew what it means to be an American.
Citizenship is far more than just voting every two years or four years. The strength and genius of our democracy depends on the caring and involvement of our people, and we cannot truly secure our freedom without appealing to the character of our citizens.
If we fail, we open the way for abuses of power in the hands of the few, for neglect of poverty and bigotry, and for arrogant foreign policies that shatter our alliances and make enemies of our friends.
Our founders made the values of justice, equality, and civic responsibility the cornerstones of America's strength and its future. Teaching these fundamentals should be the mission of every school. It's not enough to deliver the knowledge and skills needed to compete in a global economy. Equally important are the values that create an informed and engaged society.
Every young person should learn the skills to participate in our democracy through knowledge of government and opportunities to be involved in service in their own communities.
Good citizenship begins at home, with the values that parents teach children. Parenting is a challenge in any era, but never more so than today. Parents know that every hour spent working overtime is an hour away from their children. If they can't attend a PTA meeting or a school play or a sports contest, they lose an opportunity to learn more about their child at school. They know instinctively that the quality of their skill as parents affects the learning of their children, their sense of the future, and their contributions to their communities in their own day and generation.
Aid to schools should include more funds for outreach, so that parents know more about schools, and schools know more about parents. The outreach should also include employers, so that they too can see the importance of flexible hours for employees to attend school functions and meet other family needs.
Our new progressive vision must also speak more directly to the issues of deep conscience in the policy positions we take. We must do a better job of explaining these positions in terms of our shared goals and values.
I'm concerned particularly with the contentious and difficult issue of abortion. My deep and heartfelt desire is for families to grow and prosper and continue to bring new life into the world. Our progressive vision and the policies that flow from it are aimed at helping all families thrive in this land of opportunity.
But in this land that cherishes individual rights and liberties, a woman has the constitutional right to make her own reproductive decisions, and I support that right wholeheartedly. As the Supreme Court has recognized, reproductive decisions are among the most personal and private decisions a woman ever makes, and neither Congress nor the White House should be making those reproductive decisions for her.
But there is a way America can find common ground on this issue. Surely, we can all agree that abortion should be rare, and that we should do all we can to help women avoid the need to face that decision.
If we are serious about reducing the number of abortions, we must be serious about reducing unwanted pregnancy. We must adopt policies with a proven track record of reducing abortion. History teaches that abortions do not stop because they are made illegal. Indeed, half of all abortions in the world are performed in places where abortions are illegal. We do know, however, that the number of abortions is reduced when women and parents have education and economic opportunity.
Our progressive vision is of an America where parents have the opportunity and the resources - including good prenatal care - to bring healthy children into the world.
We want every child to be welcomed into a loving home, and to be part of the American Dream. This fundamental vision is at the heart of who we are as Democrats, and we must do everything in our power to make it a reality.
On the issue of gay rights, I continue to strongly support civil marriage. We cannot - and should not - require any religion or any church to accept gay marriage. But it is wrong for our civil laws to deny any American the basic right to be part of a family, to have loved ones with whom to build a future and share life's joys and tears, and to be free from the stain of bigotry and discrimination.
Finally, and by no means least, our actions in the wider world must reflect our values at home as well. The true American spirit and the basic generosity of the American people were never more in evidence than in the spontaneous outpouring of support by millions of our fellow citizens for the victims of the deadly tsunami that caused such tragedy and devastation across South Asia. We are a compassionate and caring people, and in times like this, we are never separated by borders or oceans or politics or faith. The people of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and other suffering nations are our brothers and sisters.
Sustained action by America and other nations will be essential in the ongoing mission of reconstruction and rehabilitation. The people of South Asia need our help now and they need our long term support - and so do other peoples struggling desperately to deal with overwhelming poverty and disease.
Their nations can be our friends - or be the breeding ground of our enemies. As President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."
America is strongest in the world when we use our superpower status to join with other nations to achieve great goals, instead of bullying them to salute us. More than ever, our strength today depends on pursuing our purposes in cooperation with others, not in ways that anger them, or ignore them, or condescend to them.
As Franklin Roosevelt said of America in 1945, "We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of nations far away. . . . We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community."
If only President Bush would heed those words. Our fragile planet is not a Republican or Democratic or American community. It is a world community, and we forget that truth at our very, very great peril.
So I look forward to this year and the years ahead with full awareness of the great challenges facing our country, but with full confidence as well in our ability to renew our Democratic Party to successfully meet them, and persuade America that we are right. I welcome the opportunity and the obligation to debate our values and our vision.
A new American majority is ready to respond to our call for a revitalized American dream - grounded firmly in our Constitution and in the endless adventure of lifting this nation to ever new heights of discovery, prosperity, progress, and service to all our people and to all humanity.
We as Democrats may be in the minority in Congress, but we speak for the majority of Americans. If we summon the courage and determination to take our stand and state it clearly, I'm convinced the battles that lie ahead will yield our greatest victories.
Fire the Consultants
Why do Democrats promote campaign advisors who lose races?
By Amy Sullivan
If you were a Democrat running as a first-time candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002, Joe Hansen was most likely a familiar part of your life. As the field director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), Hansen was responsible for recruiting promising candidates, and then for getting the nascent campaigns off to a running start. In the first overwhelming days of your campaign, Joe was a lifeline. He took you out to dinner for pep talks, broke down the fundraising process into something almost manageable, walked you through the selection of campaign staff and consultants, and promised that—if you proved you were a serious candidate by putting together the right team—the DSCC would happily write the checks that might make the difference when things really heated up in the fall. And when it came to choosing just the right firm to design and produce the fliers, postcards, and door hangers that would blanket your state in the closing weeks of the campaign, Joe recommended the very best consultant he knew: Joe Hansen.
In addition to his job at the DSCC, Hansen was also a partner in the direct mail firm of Ambrosino, Muir & Hansen. His sales pitch must have been effective—Democrats in nine of the closest Senate contests in 2002 signed up with Hansen, including Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Max Cleland in Georgia, and Alex Sanders in South Carolina. The day after the election, only two (Tim Johnson in South Dakota and Mark Pryor in Arkansas) were still standing.
Despite widespread grumbling about his aggressive sales tactics, Hansen is still part of the DSCC (he stepped down as field director midway through 2002 as criticism mounted; officially, he is now a “consultant” for the committee). What's most surprising, though, is that Democratic candidates continue to hire him despite his lousy record. After losing seven of nine close races in 2002, Hansen was again a man in demand during the last election cycle. His firm handled five of the most competitive Senate races in 2004, including the two—Tony Knowles in Alaska and Erskine Bowles in North Carolina—that prognosticators thought were most winnable. Only one of Hansen's candidates, Ken Salazar in Colorado, pulled out a victory.
Hansen is part of a clique of Washington consultants who, through their insider ties, continue to get rewarded with business even after losing continually. Pollster Mark Mellman is popular among Democrats because he tells them what they so desperately want to hear: Their policies are sound, Americans really agree with them more than with Republicans, and if they just repeat their mantras loud enough, voters will eventually embrace the party. As Noam Scheiber pointed out in a New Republic article following the great Democratic debacle of '02, Mellman was, perhaps more than anyone else, the architect of that defeat. As the DSCC's recommended pollster, he advised congressional Democrats to ignore national security and Iraq in favor of an endless campaign about prescription drugs and education. After the party got its clock cleaned based on his advice, Mellman should have been exiled but was instead...promoted. He became the lead pollster for John Kerry's presidential campaign, where he proffered eerily similar advice—stress domestic policy, stay away from attacking Bush—to much the same effect.
Hansen and Mellman are joined by the poster boy of Democratic social promotion, Bob Shrum. Over his 30-year career, Shrum has worked on the campaigns of seven losing presidential candidates—from George McGovern to Bob Kerrey—capping his record with a leading role in the disaster that was the Gore campaign. Yet, instead of abiding by the “seven strikes and you're out” rule, Democrats have continued to pay top dollar for his services (sums that are supplemented by the percentage Shrum's firm, Shrum, Devine & Donilon, gets for purchasing air time for commercials). Although Shrum has never put anyone in the White House, in the bizarro world of Democratic politics, he's seen as a kingmaker—merely hiring the media strategist gives a candidate such instant credibility with big-ticket liberal funders that John Kerry and John Edwards fought a fierce battle heading into the 2004 primaries to lure Shrum to their camps. Ultimately, Shrum chose Kerry, and on Nov. 3, he extended his perfect losing record.
Since their devastating loss last fall, Democrats have cast about for reasons why their party has come up short three election cycles in a row and have debated what to do. Should they lure better candidates? Talk more about morality? Adopt a harder line on national security? But one of the most obvious and least discussed reasons Democrats continue to lose is their consultants. Every sports fan knows that if a team boasts a losing record several seasons in a row, the coach has to be replaced with someone who can win. Yet when it comes to political consultants, Democrats seem incapable of taking this basic managerial step.
A major reason for that reluctance is that Democrats simply won't talk openly about the problem. Shrum did eventually take some heat publicly during the 2004 campaign when the contrast between his losing record and his high position in the troubled Kerry campaign became too stark to ignore. But in general, a Mafia-like code of omerta operates. Few insiders dare complain about the hammerlock loser consultants have on the process—certainly neither the professional campaign operatives whom the consultants hire nor the journalists to whom the consultants feed juicy inside-the-room detail. “Everybody in town talks [privately] about Hansen and how he's held candidates hostage through the DSCC,” says Chuck Todd, editor of National Journal's Political Hotline. Todd, however, is one of the few brave insiders. I interviewed two dozen Democratic Party leaders, operatives, and others for this story. Virtually no one had a good thing to say about Hansen or the rest of the oligarchy. Yet few would talk on the record. The exceptions were those who have gotten out of the business of working for political candidates such as Dan Gerstein, a former advisor to Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). “If a company like General Motors had the same image problem that the Democratic Party does, they would fire the guys responsible,” Gerstein told me. But not Democrats. “We don't just hire those guys,” Gerstein said, “we give them bonuses.”
A number of paychecks
Joe Hansen's national career began like that of most other big-name consultants—with a breakthrough success. The slightly chubby, sandy-haired operative had been involved with political races for a number of years by the time he managed Tim Johnson's upset of incumbent senator Larry Pressler in South Dakota in 1996. The race made his reputation as a premier field organizer and attracted the attention of Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle, who hired Hansen to run his own reelection campaign two years later. Daschle was never in danger of losing (he eventually won by 26 percentage points), so Hansen had time to step in as campaign doctor for other races, saving the seats of both Sen. Patty Murray in Washington and Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada. With a gruff, take-no-guff manner—even those who consider him a friend say he can be explosive and overbearing—Hansen can whip a campaign into shape with his instinctive knack for field operations, and talent for moving around money, material, and manpower.
It's a skill that is sorely needed at the party campaign committees, where Democrats consistently grapple with the considerable spending advantage their Republican counterparts enjoy. After the 1998 cycle, Hansen assumed the role of DSCC executive director, a position he held for all of five months before clashes with the equally aggressive committee chair Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) led him to step down and become DSCC field director instead. In truth, the apparent demotion was a good move for Hansen, who is at his best in the field, not managing staff in a Washington suite.
And all might have been well if Hansen hadn't answered the siren call of the consulting world. It's not hard to understand why many political operatives become consultants—when you work for a campaign, you do a lot of work for one candidate and draw one salary; when you work as a consultant, you do similar work for several different candidates and collect several different paychecks. But you also dilute your focus and divide your loyalties. Moreover, individuals who excel in a specialized area like polling or fieldwork typically try to migrate to higher-paying, higher-prestige work as strategists and message maestros. Shrum is, by all accounts, an excellent wordsmith, but he has no genius for strategy and very little feel for what makes Middle America tick—he is, after all, best known for writing a concession speech for Ted Kennedy's failed presidential bid in 1980. Similarly, Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani are two of the most effective opposition researchers and spinmeisters in the business. But they were out of their depth when they took charge of retired Gen. Wesley Clark's run for the presidency as his lead consultants.
Hansen is no exception—he is brilliant at executing campaign tactics in the field but as a consultant he is not playing to those strengths. Candidates who used Hansen as their direct mail consultant in 2002 found that he was less than adept at turning his field magic into effective campaign products. “He didn't do a heck of a lot of work,” said a senior staffer from one losing campaign who described rewriting most of the direct mail products that Hansen submitted. “We did the creative, and he collected the cash.” Staffers from several other campaigns that had worked with Hansen expressed the same frustration.
How does Hansen defend his performance and the seeming conflict between his roles as DSCC representative and private consultant? Not very aggressively. After I made numerous attempts over two weeks to get an interview with Hansen, he replied with a one-paragraph email, in which he listed the three victorious senatorial and three winning gubernatorial races that his company had worked on this fall, and concluded, redundantly, “Our firm has an unmatched record of success that no other firm can match.” The email came from Hansen's DSCC account.
His consultant's hat
It's important to understand that even for experienced politicians—mayors, governors, representatives—a Senate run can be an intimidating challenge. It involves courting an entirely new world of donors by proving to Washington fundraisers and party leaders that you are a serious contender. Jeremy Wright, who served as the political director for Oregon Senate candidate Bill Bradbury's race in the spring and early summer of 2002, says that candidates are almost required to run two parallel campaigns, “one to get voters to vote for you and the other to get D.C. money by putting together the right consultants to show you're for real.” For Democratic candidates in the few targeted races every cycle that are actually competitive, winning without the financial support of the DSCC (or its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) is nearly impossible. While the candidates are grateful for the infusion of cash in the form of committee-sponsored polling, fliers, and commercials, the money comes with strings.
Officially, no favoritism exists. “We don't push one consultant over another,” a DSCC spokeswoman told me. “It's more of an informational thing, telling candidates about good people who do a lot of Senate races.” But Democrats who have worked on targeted races describe a reality in which they are strongly encouraged—often with the reminder that precious funds hang in the balance—to select recommended consultants. “The campaign was pretty paranoid about making sure the DSCC was backing us,” explains one veteran of an unsuccessful 2002 Senate race. “We needed the cash. So of course, we were going to go with the consultants they recommended.”
No one was in a better position to take advantage of this power relationship than Hansen. As the first man-on-the-ground, his contact with budding campaigns was early and often. “That person has a very large advantage in being able to shape the team,” one of Hansen's consulting competitors told me. “You bond with the candidate from the get-go at a pretty stressful time when they're deciding whether to run and how to do it.” Another Democrat who has worked with Hansen complains, “Joe is a pretty egregious example of a guy who is sent out as the official representative to help candidates plot their campaign plan, and then when he gets to direct mail, says, 'Oh, by the way, let me switch hats for a second—I happen to do direct mail.'”
The situation puts candidates—who are loath to alienate the campaign committee whose financial assistance they desperately need—in a tricky spot. Even when working with experienced consultants, candidates need to retain some ability to disagree with a proposed idea or strategy. That's hard enough when the consultant is recommended by the party committee. But when the consultant actually is the party committee, the candidate's discretion stays sealed in a tight box. “It was an interesting dynamic, I'll say that,” Wright says. “When Joe signed us up, he was on staff for the DSCC. We'd work on DS[CC] stuff during the day, and then he'd take us out to dinner and put on his consultant hat.”
The level of their incompetence
This Peters Principle effect of Democratic operatives rising—or muscling their way—up to the level of their incompetence, happens for a simple reason: The consultants are filling a vacuum. After all, someone has to formulate the message that a candidate can use to win the voters' support. Conservatives have spent 30 years and billions of dollars on think tanks and other organizations to develop a set of interlinked policies and language that individual Republican candidates and campaigns can adopt in plug-and-play fashion. Liberals are far behind in this message development game. Indeed, most Democratic elected officials have been running recently on warmed-up leftovers from the Clinton brain trust, ideas which were once innovative but are now far from fresh. With little else to go on, consultants—many of whom came to prominence during the Clinton years—have clung to old ideas and strategies like security blankets. “Democratic consultants are being asked to fill a role they're not suited to,” says Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, “to come up with ideas and electoral strategy in addition to media strategy.”
Rosenberg hints at a second Democratic deficit: The party has no truly brilliant strategists in positions of power. Such talent is always rare in both parties and tends to come out of the political hinterlands, often as part of a winning presidential campaign team. Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign was waged by a crew of Georgia political operatives with the help of unconventional pollster Pat Caddell. Four years later, Reagan defeated Carter by relying on a California-based gang of professionals. James Carville and Paul Begala were largely unknown before they took Bill Clinton to the White House. And outside the South, the team of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Mark McKinnon weren't much less obscure when they put together the strategy for George W. Bush's winning 2000 campaign.
Republicans have proven much more adept than Democrats at giving their best talent a national stage. While Democrats have permitted a Washington consultancy class to become comfortably entrenched, Republicans have effectively begun to pension off their own establishment. “The D.C. consultants for the GOP have their list of clients, but they're definitely on the outside looking in,” Chuck Todd told me. “The Bush people have been very careful to give them work…but they're not in the inner circle.” In 2004, seasoned Washington media strategist Alex Castellanos paid the bills with a handful of safe congressional races and a few unsuccessful primary challengers. Meanwhile, nearly every tight Senate race (North Carolina, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Florida) was handled by a Tampa-based firm, The Victory Group.
Republicans, of course, don't have any natural monopoly on strategic talent—they just give their best young strategists chances to run the biggest national races. In all likelihood, there is another Karl Rove or James Carville out in the Democratic hinterlands, who ought to be playing essential roles in the most important races. It might be David Axelrod in Chicago, who developed the media strategy for the then-unknown Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) primary campaign; West Coast strategists Paul Goodwin and Amy Simon, who helped Democrats regain the legislature in Washington state; or even unconventional D.C.-based consultants like Anna Bennett, the pollster who engineered Melissa Bean's upset of veteran Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.) in November. But any new talent will likely remain on the national margins—running races for Congress and judgeships—until someone breaks up the consultant oligarchy.
The electoral system takes care of dead weight when it comes to politicians. The proof is in the political wreckage evident after yet another year of Democratic defeats at the polls. Dick Gephardt—after 10 years at the helm of the Democratic minority in the House—has decided to go back home to Missouri. John Kerry is returning to the Senate instead of stretching out his legs in the Oval Office. The consultants, however, live on. After pocketing a $5-million paycheck following the election, Shrum is back from a vacation in Tuscany and now advising Sen. Jon Corzine's (D-N.J.) gubernatorial race. Mellman, whose advice helped sink Democrats for two consecutive campaign cycles, continues to line up clients. As for Hansen, his connection to Daschle may not help him now that the South Dakotan has vacated the Democratic leader's office. But don't cry for Joe Hansen—he's the consultant for incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
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