OK, I’m missing something here.<\/p>\n
My party, the Democrats, just lost three statehouses in the last 60 days, and are on track to possibly lose another in a bit over a week.<\/p>\n
The smart Democratic blogs … Kevin Drum<\/a>, Matthew Yglesias<\/a>, Daily KOS<\/a> … not a peep about this or what, if anything it means.<\/p>\n My reaction is twofold:<\/p>\n First, I think that the Democrats may have suddenly taken a page from hapless L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who has believed for years that if he can only buy one great player, he can have a contending team. For the Democrats (who admittedly won some statehouses last time around, while losing the Senate and House), I wonder if it’s entirely too concentrated at the top.<\/p>\n Second, I’m inclined to ask “What has to happen, exactly, in order for us to panic?<\/i>” In the polls, each of the plausible Democratic candidates is running behind<\/b> the numbers of plain old “don’t like Bush”. We lost the Senate and House. We lost California, because the party wouldn’t stand up to a corrupt and barely competent incumbent and challenge him, either in the election or in the recall. A strong Democrat – a Feinstein, Panetta, or even an Angiledes – would be Governor now. We lost Kentucky and Mississippi, and the Republicans in Louisiana have to be smelling blood this morning. <\/p>\n And no one on the left is willing to sit down and go “Huh. Wonder what we’re doing wrong.”<\/p>\n Can I make some suggestions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OK, I’m missing something here. My party, the Democrats, just lost three statehouses in the last 60 days, and are on track to possibly lose another in a bit over a week. The smart Democratic blogs … Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, Daily KOS … not a peep about this or what, if anything it means. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMaybe it is<\/b> all about “Beat Bush.” The problem is that you get there by growing and winnowing candidates at the lower levels<\/b>…mayors, Congressmembers, Senators, Governors – and my sense is that the national Party isn’t doing a good job there. Look one level down from the current crop of Democratic contenders – ignoring how strong or weak you may believe them to be – and where are the contenders for the next cycle? I’m not an expert, but I don’t see a lot of interestng candidates until I get down to the mayoral level, and that’s bad. Politics is a team sport, and you have to play more than one position.<\/p>\n