Begala III

I've been reading through some of the blogosphere response to Begala's latest and realized that I was being to kind to Begala in my first post on this topic.

First, Begala acknowledges that he "quiped" without first looking into the details and thus made a mistake when he insulted the "nose-picking" organizers in Utah and Mississippi. Second, Begala says that he looked further and found out that the state organizing campaign is not the source of the problem. Finally, he says that he doesn't know where the extra $45 million has gone.

Did Mr. Begala bother to call up Dean and ask him?. To quote Mr. Begala, "I have no idea". Begala gives no hint that he made any such attempt. He only references (but does not link to) a Washington Post report about increased spending on consultants.

I suppose I could call up Mr. Begala and ask him if he ever asked Dean, but I'm just a "desktop campaign manager-wannabee" so I'm not likely to get through. He, on the other hand, can probably get Dean to return his phone call in short order (that's one advantage of being an insider).

If Begala has concerns about where the money is going he should take it up with Dean. If he doesn't get a straight answer from Dean he should take it up with other insiders. If he still doesn't get anywhere with it, then and only then is it time to escalate this to a public issue.

Otherwise, Mr. Begala is engaging in is rumor-mongering and deserves to be criticized for it.

Addendum: There's some good discussion on this going on in this DailyKos diary.

Begala, Gerrymanding and The Wave

Stirling Newberry has an excellant (and long) analysis of the problem of Begala. I won't summarize it but I would like to hilight this one point:

The reality is that Begala's weapon is a pistol - he can shoot it at the map and put a hole in one congressional district. Maybe a full magazine will make it 10 districts, or 25. But that is it, it is a retail attempt to locate districts that swing the election. This is why there is such despair among consultants, as the price of barrages has gone up, and the country has gotten more geographically hardened politically, it gets harder and harder to swing an election. Just two months ago, most insider Begala types were saying that the Republicans would probably hold both houses of Congress.

What people don't realize is that this is normal for Congress. Look back over the 20th century, and you find that normally only a few seats change hands. The House itself doesn't change hands with a few seats - instead, it tips with large shifts. The DLC-DCCC-DSCC strategy of trying to incrementally win back the House a few seats a year may have looked like the "safe" play, but in fact, it was quite radical - it had never been done before.

I recently posted about how Gerrymandering has increased the partisanship in the House as the Representatives have come to be more closely identified with the Red/Blue populations in their districts. I received an interesting response to that post that pointed out an ironic fact: while redistricting makes districts "safer" in times of relative stability in political attitudes, it makes them more vulnerable to transition when political attitudes shift by any significant margin.

Let me quote the response since it explains it so well (it originally appeared on DailyKos here):

Gerrymandering does something else weird. It encourages status quo in status quo times, but when change is apparent, it actually amplifies it. That is to say, one way to gerrymander yourself into more districts is to make all of the districts weaker, and give some of your "extra" voters to a district that used to lean the other way, to swing it your way.

Let's imagine a state with three congressional districts. District #1 is 60% R and 40% D. So is district #2. District #3 is 55% D and 45% R. If you gerrymander the state to favor the Republicans, one way to do that would be to change both districts #1 and #2 to 55 R 45 D, and give the "extra" Republicans to district #3-which would make it 55 R 45 D too. This works great for them-they get an extra district.

Until there's an eight point shift towards the Democrats.

Suddenly, every district is now 53 D 47 R. Had they not gerrymandered the state, two of the districts would be 52 R 48 D, and they would have lost zero seats. But now they lose two (well, three, including the one they gained from the gerrymander).

Stirling's point that the Democrats attempt to regain the Congress by incremental wins being the radical approach is apt in light of this "weirdness".

Our country is poised for a monumental shift in political power, possibly rivaling 1994. But I fear we won't make it if the Democrats are dominated by this "take it easy" approach.

Begala

A few days back I took Paul Begala to task for his thoughtless insult of party organizers in the backwoods of Utah and Mississippi. I wasn't the only one. He became just another in the long line of Washington establishment insiders who have looked down their noses at those outside that establishment.

Well, Begala is big enough to admit that he blew it:

... I should never, ever have denigrated young men and women who are working in the political trenches in places like Mississippi and Utah.

I was being arrogant and flippant when I said they're just picking their noses. Mea culpa. You live by the smart-ass quip, you die by the smart-ass quip.

Begala goes on to say that his was a comment made out of frustration with (the perception) that the DNC, under Howard Dean, is bleeding money. The DNC has raised over $74 million under Dean, but currently has only $10 million cash-on-hand (compared to the RNC's $43 million). Begala is a long time campaigner who appreciates the importance of the last minute push, especially in close races. It is from that background that he assesses this disparity as a serious threat going into the Fall.

Unfortunately, instead of digging deeper into the numbers, Begala automatically assumed that the greatest reason for the expense was the DNC plan to put paid organizers on the ground in every state.

... It turns out I was wrong when I fingered the DNC's State Party subsidy program, wherein Washington pays for state party organizers, for this disparity. After a little checking, I've learned from reliable sources that the State Party program costs about $8 million. Not cheap, but not exactly the primary cause of a $64 million spending spree. I'm also told that the DNC spent about $11 million on the New Jersey and Virginia governors' races. Good. We won them both (although why we needed to subsidize the candidacy of multimillionaire John Corzine is beyond me.)

Thanks for the info Paul. I don't know why you didn't check into this earlier. Perhaps it was some underlying bias against Dean that made you automatically assume the worst. You have sneered at him repeatedly since 2003 when he first rose to national prominence. I couldn't say. But I'm willing to cut you some slack for the simple reason that we all make mistakes and you are at least willing to admit yours.

However...

You are one of our leading political strategists and it is a poor sign of our strategic skills when one of our leading political strategists makes a blunder like that. At the level you are at there is simply no room for mistakes.

Begala does bring up one disturbing question which I think needs to be investigated further and reported on by someone who doesn't have a history of anti-Dean bias:

Bear with me, I was a liberal arts major. But it seems that leaves $45 million in expenditures. Perhaps fundraising costs have gone through the roof. That would be especially tragic given that part of the appeal of the Dean for DNC Chair campaign was his potential to raise money cleanly and cheaply through this newfangled Interwebnet thing.

So, where's the money gone? I have no idea. I do know that the Washington Post reports that salaries and consultants (Gasp! The dreaded C-Word) have gone through the roof at the DNC. Consultants' costs alone have increased from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Could it be that the netroots' hero is actually bloating the DNC's Beltway bureaucracy?

Dean made his name by criticizing consultants and the consultant culture (among other things). So it would be shocking if, under his leadership, the DNC has become even more indebted to high priced consultants. I'd hate to see a repeat of the pattern we saw in his Presidential campaign where he allowed his advisors to run amuck and burn through over $40 million dollars in a matter of a few short months. That mistake could be excused by Dean's lack of experience at leading a national campaign and by the distractions of his rapid level to star status.

But making that mistake a second time would be an indicator of a deeper organizational deficiency on Dean's part.

I, like Begala, had assumed that the DNC's burnthrough rate was because of the outlays for the state organizational campaigns. Since I support that effort I was willing to cut Dean some slack on this matter. But if Begala's figures are right, that effort is actually costing a relatively modest sum of money. So where is the rest of the money going?

(Begala, unfortunately, still hasn't shed his inside-the-beltway arrogance. Even as he acknowledges his mistake in insulting the ground troops he still sneers at "desktop campaign manager wannabes". Paul, instead of insulting people who have energy to burn, why not find a way to use them?)

Hmmm....

Of, By and For The Press

The beltway Democrats problem in a nutshell:

“When you do oversight, ultimately, the press is the judge of your credibility,” one top Democratic committee staffer told me.

And here I thought it was The People who were supposed to be the ultimate judge of credibility.

Fallible Heroes

Howard Dean has said that he was uncomfortable with homosexuality when the civil unions issue came up while he was Governor of New Hampshire. He didn't want to talk about it and he certainly didn't seek to become a gay rights icon. But he decided that he couldn't in good conscience refuse to sign the legislation that made it legal.

He paid the price for that conscience. His next race for governor was marked by an extreme smear campaign that tried to portray him as an agent of the Homosexual Agenda. Yet, despite all that, he won re-election. I suspect a big part of his victory was his willingness to explain honestly his position on the issue and his thinking behind his actions. Even people who disagreed with him admired him for his forthrightness.

A hero is not simply someone who does something heroic. A hero is someone who overcomes weakness and adversity, both external and internal, to do the right thing. Some of the greatest heroes were people who lead otherwise unremarkable, if not questionable, lives (think Oskar Schindler). Yet when the time came for them to make The Big Decision they made it correctly.

Those are the people I admire. Those are the people I hold up as examples of good human beings.

Leave the "infallible hero" ideal to the right. Let them elevate a nothing like George W. Bush onto their pedestals. They are worshipping false idols.

I'll take fallible heroes everytime. They give me hope that I could someday be a fallible hero as well.

Gerrymandering causes gridlock

In the midst of this Washington Post report about the growing acrimony between Republicans I found this particular snippet interesting:

But recent redistricting has exacerbated those natural tensions, said a member of the House leadership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to not heighten the strain. House districts have grown increasingly partisan, more liberal in Democratic districts and more conservative in Republican districts. So when Senate Republicans tack to the center to placate their broader spectrum of voters, conservatives concentrated in Republican House districts are quick to anger.

Gerrymandering can lock partisans (both Democratic and Republican) into their House seats. But it can also increase the partisanship of the constituencies in those districts. Blue districts become bluer. Red districts become redder. This results in Representatives who are more extreme in their policy positions.

Senate seats can't be gerrymandered. Their constituencies are defined by state borders. Therefore, Senators (unless they come from truly partisan states), have to adopt a more moderate tone in order to win re-election.

The final result of gerrymandering is a growing divide between the more moderate and collegial Senate and the more partisan and bickering House. Gridlock rules the day and the people grow increasingly frustrated with a do-nothing Congress.

This will continue to be the case after the elections, especially if the House goes Dem but the Senate stays Republican. But it will also be the case even if the Democrats manage to take both houses because Senate Dems and House Dems have the same inherent conflict.