The Bannock Street Project? That was going to save the Democrats? Like the Republicans were going to get fooled two elections in a row? Like they weren't going to get their best and brightest out to hammer the early vote and search the bushes for new voters? Like we had some sort of super secret "sneak" attack? What crack cathedral was the national leadership living in? Without a moral imperative and a clearly (and loudly) defined vision for that moral imperative, (and one that resonates with the voters, not just makes intellectual sense), we were never going to fire up the young voters and women and Latinos to repeat 2012. We never gave them a reason to believe, and so the necessary Democratic voters never had a good reason to follow their heart and go vote.
Here's the deal: In 2002 a small group of us from Chicago presented an idea to the DNC to rebrand the Democratic Party as the party that helps workers and helps keep the economy strong. With Jan Schakowsky's introduction, we pitched the rebranding idea to the Communications Director of the DNC. We pulled out images prepared by a former Leo Burnett exec and showed him how we could start to help the Democratic image with the voters and start to beat up the Republicans' brand. His first question, swear to God, was, "What's a brand?"
After our hearts started again, we said, "Well, it's like 'Can You Hear Me Now?' or 'Where's the Beef?'" He said, "Oh, yeah, I like those." And then we never heard from him or the DNC again...and the Democrats lost the 2002 midterms when late breaking voters decided that Republicans and George Bush were going to be better for the economy.
Well, the National Democrats now know what a brand is, but they still don't care and they still don't put any money into either branding the Democratic Party with its positives, or into assuring that there is some level of Democratic brand coherence in the messaging of all their candidates or into blasting the Republican Party for its abominable lack of effectiveness.
It's not that Democrats have never branded successfully, we've just never done it continuously. We've had people who understood what branding is and worked hard to get the message out. Bill Clinton, after the crushing defeat in 1994, had the DNC spend a bunch of money in 1998 on the message and the brand--(about 15% of their total budget) -- and had a remarkably good election night. Clinton also said in Davos in 2011 that 2010 should have been a 30-seat loss, but that the lack of putting money into clear messaging and positive branding by the Democratic Party turned it into the 63 seat debacle that it ended up being--as well as into the gerrymandering nightmare that happened when the lack of a national Democratic message failed to neutralize the incredibly powerful and coherent Republican message that turned a bunch of state legislatures way red.
Howard Dean, (does anyone in national office remember the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party?), did an incredible job for two election cycles as head of the DNC in 2006 and 2008, by implementing a 50-state strategy and getting the ground game and intellectual game in place so Democrats could achieve two consecutive and country-changing victories. Of course, his reward for doing so was to have James Carville try and destroy him after the 2006 victory and Rahm (I'm going to go hide in Chicago before the 2010 midterm because my strategy is obviously failing so badly) Emanuel completely ignored Dean and excluded Dean from the Obama White House, and then reversed most of Dean's successful programs before the 2010 mid-terms.
In 2012 Jim Messina and the Democratic whiz-kid programmers in Chicago pulled off an incredible technology coup and got huge turnout and helped Obama win a second term, but everyone obviously failed to understand that, while a Presidential candidate can brand a presidential election by his continual media coverage and speech making, mid-term elections have to be messaged the hard way -- with a consistent message across campaigns and 24/7 advertising, internet, mobile, print and talk to every segment of society, and especially to the rural areas where the 80/20 Republican victories continue to overcome our urban advantage--and that takes money, it takes time and it needs to start the day after a presidential election...or a mid-term defeat.
So here's the question to the DKos community: What's our message? What's the best way to get it out to the public and when are we going to start the experimentation necessary to figure out how to get it infused into the hearts and minds of the 2016 electorate?
Remember that the Republicans, Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers are already working on 2016--and they have several tens of thousands of people who will continue to work on it full time from now until the first Tuesday in November in 2016. Fox News will continue to hammer the message home every day and every evening. Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and the American Enterprise Institute and Americans for Prosperity will continue to message every single week and put op-ed pieces in your newspaper and use Regal Cinemas and all the bulk mail outfits and all the business polling firms to figure out just how to refine their message so it stops all frontal lobe activity and puts their supporters, (and anyone on the fence), into deep survival mode so they can't hear and won't listen to all the logical arguments the Democrats put forward. (F*ck logical arguments by the way. Arguments can and should be logical, but if they don't hit the stomach and the amygdala and the old brain, then we are not competing on the level we must to achieve success.) Being able to say after an election that you had better arguments, but the idiot voters voted for the other guy is the worst form of self deception: It says, at best, that you didn't have the right arguments and, at worst, that you were too intellectually arrogant to realize what kind of communication was going to actually engage and enroll the voters in the moral and emotional superiority of your cause. The meaning of the message is the message received and the action it evokes in response...so the meaning of our lack of message was: "Go vote for Republicans, they may be crazy, but at least they stand for something."
Here's a particular example: Claiming you know that ebola's not going to over-run the US and that anyone who thinks so is an idiot, when everyone's terrified, is self-aggrandizing lunacy. If, instead of treating everyone who was scared like silly children, Obama had asked Congress to come back in session so they could pass an emergency $20 billion program to fully fund the CDC and finally get Obama a Surgeon General to work with, he would have thrown the Republicans on the defensive and made himslef seem statesmanlike and concerned--and it would have put the blame for our lack of preparedness back on the Republican Congress, which had been more than happy to sacrifice our national security from infection on the altar of neo-conservative cost-cutting.
So that's it, we don't just need to get back to work, we need to start to figure out what the hell the work is that we need to do, and we then we need to fire up Howard Dean and Bill Clinton and anyone else who truly wants to message that Democrats are better and the results they produce for the country are better: Equally importantly, we need to blow up the Republican brand, by getting people to recognize that the Republicans are running a shell game and that the only Republican pea they are going to discover is the yellow stuff trickling down on their head from the Kochs and the Walkers and the Scalias and the Romneys.