Camp Wellstone is one of the best at campaign training for pro-democracy Americans -- a.k.a., "Democrats." CW helped out Al Franken.
CW has twenty full-time employees and budget of roughly $1,000,000 a year.
Add up the left-center campaign support operations, you've got maybe $20-million. Ads go separate.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
On the other side, there's Corporate Politics, Inc. The old Cap Hill nickname: the Powell System.
The Powell System tops $500-corporatist-million a year.
RNC coordinates these operations along with the conservative Think Tanks. They have active research operations and multimedia libraries. They support the GOP's media teams. The real assassins are their candidate development teams.
RNC candidates get thousands of man-years of high-quality support. Pro-democracy candidates have to hire independent Media Consultants at $5,000 - $10,000 a day.
Compare/contrast below. Also, the example of Natalie White, a pharma sales rep and Million Dollar Baby, is mined for Natalie's Memes and to illustrate the parma-sales-to-GOP technology transfer.
BTW: Diary recommends a strategy for DNC. Specific improvements to assure a pharma-like thoroughness and resource integration. MBTF:::
Candidates are going to need the skills of the top pharma sales reps -- people like Natalie White -- to win their campaigns.
This is no joke. If Democrats are going to win the races where they expect to win, acquiring these skills is important.
HERE is Camp Wellstone
This diary considers what is essential. We'll then compare/contrast what DNC and Camp Wellstone can do vs. what the Powell System has constructed over the most of four decades.
You will see that Massachusetts was won by a team effort. A team of professionals. Also, that Scott Brown adopted campaign themes that match in detail to what I call Natalie's Memes -- tight, brilliant ideas that turned Survivor on its head and then the Massachusetts Senatorial campaign.
PICK THE CANDIDATES
Let's consider candidate selection and training.
First, the future of the Republican Party for candidate selection is not Sarah Palin. The rank outsider with truthiness problems is not going to make it. For Senate and House races, there will be no such disasters... at least none receiving RNC support. The archetype is Natalie White, the very well trained pharma sales rep and now Sole Survivor who won Survivor Samoa.
The pharmas are not copying the GOP; the GOP is copying the pharmas.
Natalie White combines intelligence, ambition, but especially a combination of strategic discipline and message. Thing is, her sales training from the pharma focused specifically on communication skills and psychological awareness.
Natalie's message for "Survivor" was simple. She was deserving of the money. This was her factual weakness, so she turned it around and made it her strength. She cast her final-three opponents as aloof and unconnected and even dishonest and personally undeserving:
This young woman is an example of what the pharmas send in to doctors' offices. They play in one of the country's highest-stakes poker games.
She and her "Survivor" message are the archetype for what the Republicans are throwing at upstart pro-democracy rebels.
"I won fair and square. People will always underestimate me, which is fine. That worked out to my benefit in this game."
-- Throw in a pick-up truck, swap gender, and you've got Scott Brown. More on Scott down below. Yeah... a crop of the centerfold.
Simple fact, not missed by the GOP: every Federal election has a sole survivor. Every election is winner take all... a replay of the Survivor paradigm. The Scott Brown campaign had the same core design elements as Natalie's campaign at Survivor -- even word-for-word replay of Natalie's Memes.
Natalie White was hired through a competitive process to be a pharma sales rep. Many apply, few are chosen. She beat out many dozens of other applicants. Once she got hired, the training investment gave her specific information related to body language and verbal clues, timing and framing techniques for speech, work on professional use of English, regional and professional preferences, and how to connect with people in all circumstances. She turned into a first-rate pro.
A hired gun.
A pistol.
WHAT HAPPENED
Natalie White was so astonishingly effective that she turned around the fundamental pattern that we've seen over the years with Survivor. The top "players" and manipulators have been the winners more than not -- broken by a few cycles where one alpha-male has won the eliminations or a huge blunder produced a turnaround.
Natalie played for sympathy -- saying that she had quit her job to play the game -- and undermining her two main rivals. This "talking point" of opponent aloofness/failure_to_connect got her the $1,000,000. That despite that she did nothing whatsoever to win, apart from following a stronger player and continuing to breathe. Her critical "talking points," Natalie's Memes, were slipped in toward the end, wonderfully timed for a decision -- producing a 7-2-0 victory.
Scott Brown hadn't done a thing during his years in the Mass legislature. A pretty poster boy. A nothing.
So he had to adopt a campaign strategy that came from the same place as Natalie's Memes. Scott is like Republicans everywhere -- they haven't done a thing for America in years, so all they can do is throw out Natalie's Memes and attack the Democrats. Don't underestimate it -- Natalie White should have taught everyone this lesson.
Democrats, generally ???
As soon as Howard Dean walked out the door his "50 State Strategy" went whoof. There is nothing permanent. DNC starts from a blank page every few years. They wouldn't know the Powell Memo if it bit them. (And of course it does.)
Meanwhile, the GOP has built a formidable and permanent strategic engine. This was the engine that pulled the GOP back from the grave after the Watergate scandal. Over the decades the engine has gotten better and better. Investing billions of dollars over the decades tends to do that.
THE POWELL SYSTEM
The money, here, is simply staggering. It seems to me -- a "gut" call, not anything scientific -- that this continuing Flood of conservative money is driven by individual insecurities and the common prejudices of the non-intellectual elements of American society.
The traditional left-center view of these conservatives -- particularly coming from preppies and Ivy Leaguers and Kossacks and -- is that they are know-nothings and Deniers and even hate-driven racists. Indeed, this imagery is correct. They are.
The broad unquestioning enthusiasm for Sarah Palin and this willingness of very rich Righties to give huge sums, many hundreds of millions of dollars to the various Rightie causes are fruits from the same tree.
The Money.
A dozen conservative foundations spread around more than $100-million a year. Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Altogether the foundations and private sources top $300-million a year. Corporations add another $200-million.
These are nonprofits. It is perfectly legal.
When the many thousands of Think Tank and issues group employees work on campaigns or do candidate development assignments, its just time off don'tcha know.
The Big Think Tanks.
Heritage Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, George Mason University (the Mercatus Center), the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Hillsdale College, Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, Judicial Watch, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The lists get to hundreds of operations, each drawing in more than a million dollars a year.
HOW THE SYSTEM GOT STARTED
I knew Paul Weyrich back in the day. He had founded Heritage in 1973, along with Ed Feulner and a pile of Joe Coors money. During the 1980s he and Ed were just as pissed as we were at irrational Federal projects -- and then the bizarre deficit spending that G.H.W. Bush ran up for no apparent reason.
Paul was able to get the Coors money because Lewis Powell -- in 1972 a judge, then elevated to SCOTUS by President Nixon as an Associate Justice -- had written up a strongly worded call for Republicans to circle the wagons and finance what we now call Think Tanks. Here is the text of The Powell Memorandum.
Powell also developed an interesting and very strong vein of paranoia, relating the upheavals of the 1960s and the tail of the Vietnam protests in the early 1970s to all-out revolutionary assault on the American Free Enterprise system. This pitch worked to beat the band. You don't have to more than a 5% rewrite to see it cast as the prime domation collector, today.
During the 1980s, Heritage grew to a staff of over a hundred. Their people connected to every reporter at every major news outlet in the country. Paul focused to domestic issues. He hated busing. He hated abortion. He had a picture of an in vitro fetus in his office. It was a Black kid.
Frankly, what the Democrats need, now, is their own Paul Weyrich. And they need to read the Powell Memorandum, because that is still what is killing them.
By the 1990's, Paul's guys worked on what became Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. A lot if it was fully bipartisan.
Tell me that a lot of DKOS wouldn't vote for the most of this ???
- Require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
- Select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
- Cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
- Limit the terms of all committee chairs;
- Ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
- Require committee meetings to be open to the public;
- Require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
- Guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.
And there were another ten items, a conservative hodgepodge of legislative initiatives, a few of which got done.:
- THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A $500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty...
- THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command...
- THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit...
- THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut...
The "Zero Base-Line Budgeting" was in there. It is pretty much the same idea, in practice, as Pay-As-You-Go. There was no wiggle for "Black" private armies or a Congress with no labor rules. Newt Gingrich wasn't a bad guy for getting this proposed. He was able to implement about 1/3 of it.
One other interesting step, the Heritage crew made their publications and transcripts free. And then the D.C.-based research shop discovered the D.C. motorcycle delivery services -- perfect for getting the right position paper to the right deadline-driven reporter.
The Powell System had developed over 20 years to become a competent, well-entrenched, connected presence in Washington. Brookings was still selling their papers and using snail-mail. Matters have gotten worse rather than better in the 16 years since then.
FROM REFORM TO CORPORATIST FASCISM
The Contract with America was about the end of simple good works. The Far Right and the militarists had decided to take a confident, largely Christian, at heart isolationist country and use it to make an empire. Big Oil knew what it wanted, Wall Street had its agenda, and the "McAllenization" of medical care was also on the horizon -- set to more than double the cost of health care.
The Powell System resources were already, in 1994, going where the big corporatist contributors told told them to go. Democrats carried too much baggage to oppose their efforts to polarize the country. White suburbanites and rural Scotch-Irish, particularly, were moved by the millions into the G.O.P.
Busing school children to strange schools to force integration had killed Liberalism -- the dumbest idea politically of the Twentieth Century. Worse than Prohibition. That gave us the Reagan presidency and then G.H.W. Bush. With the centerist Liberals bashed flat, the G.O.P. Base got dragged over to Lee Atwater's Angry White Males.
From there you got everything from Phil Graham destroying the Depression Era protections of the banking system, to the calls out of Hoover Institute for "another Pearl Harbor," to the bait-and-switch plan for invading Iraq, to setting up the MediCare/Medicade payables system to facilitate fraud, to the very engine for military takeover that is Blackwater/Wi.
MANAGING
The key to understanding the Democrats is that the DNC has always played with a weak hand. There is nothing in there that is permanent. There is no top level management. No quality control. No enduring strategy. And left-center foundation money is not focused to achieve political results.
For example, Brookings was and is big. But DNC has minimal influence over them. Nothing. The money that comes in to Brookings is focused to the issues of the left-center philanthropic foundations -- never to a broader political strategy.
Never coordinated to such as Dean's "50 State Strategy."
No one at DNC or at any DNC-connected operation had researched what to do in Massachusetts after Teddy Kennedy.
The goal should be that the left-center shops should be integrated with the Democratic Party campaigns -- but it only happens in sporadic ways.
DNC retains a tiny research operation related to Howard Dean's "50 State Strategy." I do mean tiny. DNC has a half-dozen people to cover the entire country. There is nothing permanent or high-quality about what happens -- as you could see from the Coakley disaster where she got literally nothing in the way of support from DNC.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
The Powell System research operation got built in force out of Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition and their outreach program. He canvassed every single Fundie church in the country -- from the megachurches to store fronts in Black Detroit. His people talked to 25,000,000 church people face-to-face. Pushed shared ideas, took names. Built a precinct-level database of the entire country.
The labor unions had detailed databases for their members and families. Big city political machines had their people organized. but before Reed, nobody realized that you could do the same XXXXXXX thing for the whole XXXXXXX country. Two amazing things deserve to be noted: first, that Reed shared his database freely with other Powell System operations.
Second, Reed is the one and only Born Again Christian that I know of, who freely admitted that his life-changing Come To Jesus moment occurred while he was in a bar, drinking, more than half-lit, arguably drunk on his ass. Gotta love a guy for that. Reed is also a genius -- yes, a genius -- at organization on a shoestring and at personnel development.
Ralph Reed's sorriest little preacher/volunteer_leader with a 100-member No Denomination storefront is likely to have a good understanding of turning out his voters. This preacher/volunteer_leader is surely a more valuable resource than, say, Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, advertised as Hillary Clinton's "strategic genius."
The little preacher/volunteer_leader is the product of a decades old system that was developed with strong quality control at every step. The likes of Mark Penn are elevated to advisory prominence among the Democrats on simple, personal impulse buying -- then by Hillary Clinton -- where there is no quality control whatsoever.
The Powell System almost always turns out its base votes.
CAMP WELLSTONE
Camp Wellstone shows pretty much what you can do to support campaigns -- despite that there is no strategic management at the top level, no extended system of support resources. Will Rodgers got it right: "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
Here is an example of the Wellstone agenda for candidate training:
Track 3 - Being a Candidate: How to Run & Win the Progressive Way
-- Creating an Effective Message
-- Politics of Conviction - How to Lead as a Candidate
-- Campaign Plan & Budget
-- Running for Office, A First-Time Candidate's Perspective
-- Building, Maintaining and Growing Your Base
-- Grassroots Fundraising - The Candidate's Role
-- Earned Media
-- Paid Media and Direct Mail
-- Canvassing
-- Targeting
Simulation Exercises
-- The Stump Speech
-- Crisis Simulation
-- Door Knocking
-- Fundraising
Then, for everyone from Al Franken running for Senate down to a mayoral candidate, there is one contact point:
If you have questions, or still are unsure about which track in which you'd like to participate, please contact Jen Haut (at email and phone)
This Camp Wellstone is the best resource the Democrats have.
The Powell System, in contrast, has detailed tactical and research operations in place directed at every Congressional District and municipality in the country. Not one operation. Operations. There are several overlapping operations in place, going on year after year after year, to support Republican candidates.
Look at the Wellstone bullet points. Good stuff.
But they have 20 people. They cannot do detailed, tailored courses -- they have to do generic product development. They certainly have no way to carry out in-depth, localized tactical research to incorporate such as media design.
They cannot do what was done for Scott Brown. They also have nothing in place to fight back against Natalie's Memes.
-- Republicans haven't done a single thing good or useful in more than a decade.
-- So its the Democrats who are aloof, out of contact, dishonest, deceitful, and undeserving of your votes.
The Powell System has 5,000 people working, just at the Think Tanks. Double that for the issues houses and the regionals, another 10,000 bodies around the country. Then between the conservative Foundations and the conservative shops inside universities and participation of corporate marketing shops, you've got another 5,000 on call. That gets to 20,000 people -- which I think is light as a guesstimate.
If you include the religious groups as Fellow Travelers, the number has to be 50,000.
These resources are coordinated. The difference is permanent strategic organization.
CONQUERING AND BLUNDERING IN MASSACHUSETTS
There is no sharper example for the impact of Powell System strategic management than the recent senatorial campaign in Massachusetts. Two factors predominated:
- Candidate recruitment -- including training, development, marketability testing, and the practical factors that get lumped together under "work ethic."
- Campaign design -- the Powell System shops had been a years long research effort goijng, aimed to win the first post-Teddy Kennedy Senate race. This effort turned up chunks of campaign gold -- the JFK tax cut clip weighing in to jump start Brown's race.
"Populist Anger" -- a brilliant, brilliant marketing discovery. A single meme that expands on defeating Coakley. The original form was "Conservative Populism" -- which is not half bad either. The version we saw at Survivor had Natalie smile sweetly and encourage other players to recount their problems with Russell Hantz and the other alpha-male rivals.
Anger can be managed.
"He Is Out Of Touch" -- the carry-over to attack Obama. Borrowed without attribution from every Maureen Dowd XXXX-spew since 2007. The Natalie White distillation went to issues of communication and the boundary issues with her other players. (I'm not good enough to understand what she was doing. She's the genius at it.)
I should probably check something out. Make sure that Natalie didn't get another $1,000,000 for recasting her Survivor memes to give Scott Brown his victory. Listen to the stump speech from Scott Brown... same difference.
Those specific phrases are now being replayed as the core MSM memes for what happened. Repeated over and over and over. For the old hand, here, I am amused at the extent to which these theme echo Newt Gingrich and his then-accurate portrayal of Congressional corruption in 1994.
Here's the GOP recruitment operation's product. Tell me this is not a knock-off of pharma sales force recruiting... a knock-off of Natalie the Magnificent:
Cosmopolitan picked a winner in 1982. HERE for their web page.
Yes, you can get clothes on him. And here is one immediate spread-out of the Brown campaign:
Republicans across the country are rooting for his team. They want to know the strategies his team adopted to trounce the Democrat from its bastion. For decades the seat was a sure win for the Democrats. That is why the Republicans praised Brown for the historic win.
A Hawaii congressional candidate has already expressed his desire. "Scott Brown has certainly put a lot of wind in the sails of my campaign," said Charles Djou of Hawaii.
Guarantee you, "Populist Anger" at the undeserving Democrats is going to get localized flavorings and then big appearances from Maine to Hawaii.
A STRATEGY FOR DNC AND SOMETHING OF TACTICS
The simple plan for DNC starts with reading the Powell Memorandum.
Take the document seriously. Don't whine about details. Screw the PC XXXX. Recognize that the Powell System -- by whatever name -- is what kills your candidates in election after election after election.
Top level strategy matters.
DNC needs to apply the Powell System's management principals to coordinate/organize the efforts of left-center foundations, left-center Think Tanks, left-center development resources such as Camp Wellstone, the big unions, and any and all sensible allies. Where practice among the Republicans has shown better methods, adapt to what is proven to work.
The Clintons, for example, get off on the phrase "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy."
Nice try. But that is paranoia speaking. It is not an analysis. Not any thinking at all that goes to historical roots, management methodologies, or to the facts of how the Powell System operates.
VRWC memes are essentially uncomprehending.
Superficial.
DNC -- at least it seems to me -- will be better off if they can adopt two strategic goals as the foundations for work over the next two or three election cycles:
Begin to develop a long-term response to the Powell System:
- Adopt the Howard Dean "50 State Strategy" as the permanent and central organizing principle for all political efforts involving the Democratic Party.
Recognize the resource disparity that exists between the Powell System organizations and all of the left and center organizations:
- Adopt a defensive tactical posture aimed at fighting off what I label as Natalie's Memes. The posture will need to be defensive in nature to win in 2010, because the Powell System outmans the Democrats by about 20:1.
The GOP hasn't done a XXXX thing for the country. But they hopped right on it in Massachusetts and applied brilliant campaign themes -- reworkings, even word for word, of the tactical constructs that Natalie White used to win Survivor.
"What rises must converge" sounds pretty.
What wins... really does converge.
Defending against the Natalie Memes ??? Hard problem. Look at the White House today... Republican copies of Natalie's tactical ideas have Obama cast up on the PR rocks.
The Republicans have earned nothing, done nothing. Yet they borrow from Natalie White and paste these memes all over the Democrats.
Politics is about winning. Lewis Powell understood that. So did Paul Weyrich. No one on the Democratic side has had the systemic impact that we saw on the GOP side from Lewis and Weyrich. They brought permanent changes to American politics.
Democrats want more than fleeting victories ??? The DNC needs management, quality control, and the same skills in their favored candidates that you see with the pharma sales reps.
The Coakley loss was the worst for systemic incompetence.
Any suggestions ?