I Hate to Say I Told You So....Actually I don't hate to say that at all, especially when my predicted outcome is good. Last night, commenting on how close Paul Hackett came to winning the special election, I noted that it might be the worst thing that ever happened to the Democrats.
Well, it looks like I was right. Check out
this post (some profanity) over at Swing State Project, the liberal blog that really flogged the left wing for donations to Paul Hackett's campaign:
Spot on. I never thought I'd say this, but I agree 100% with The New Republic on this one. Because the spirit of the Dean campaign is not alive and well in the DCCC. Last year the DCCC did the Ohio second congressional district their way, the Democratic nominee had $16,000 for the entire race, so the incumbent was able to spend all year traveling the country and raising money for embattled Republicans. This year, we did OH-02 the Howard Dean 50 State Strategy way of fighting in every precinct, in every district, in every state -- every single day. It forced a lot of Republican money from Washington to be wasted and we did 40 percentage points better.
Democrats need to stop judging success on Election Day. We need to start evaluating ourselves every day. Did we win today? Thats what needs to be asked in every race, every day. If we can make this simple mindset change, we'll win more races in the long run and stop compromising.
Yesterday, DCCC Chair Rahm Emanuel said:
Every Republican in Congress should consider himself put on notice."
That is total bullsh*t and the vast majority of Republicans in Congress know that the DCCC is going to give them the same treatment in 2006 that they gave OH-02 in 2004.Translation: The left wing bloggers are not going to target their support for candidates based on electability. This seems to be a theme of Howard Dean's that I have commented on in the past. Resources (both money and labor) are limited during a general election, so it is the responsibility of the party chairman to allocate those resources to elections where the party stands a chance. It would have made zero sense, for example, for the Republicans to run ads for President Bush in Massachusetts last year. They could not have won that state no matter how much time and money they spent there.
Swing State apparently thinks that if the national party had poured more resources into Ohio's second district in 2004, they could have prevented the incumbent Republican (Bob Portman) from going around the country raising money for other Republicans. That's silly for two reasons:
1. He won by over 40 percentage points.
2. Just how much money can Bob Portman raise around the country for other candidates?
Remember the
Dean Dozen? Howard Dean designated 14 candidates (three were running as a ticket) as the Dean Dozen and urged his supporters to send them money. Care to guess how many of them won? Three, one of which was running unopposed, and another (Barack Obama) of which might as well have been unopposed. So in essence he picked 12 candidates and ONE of them won. That's a pretty lousy percentage, and in large part it reflects the poor choices Dean made. He chose whom to support on the basis of ideology and not on the basis of electability.
