Here’s a great takedown of that pariah thankfully no longer running the the DNC. I’m told this is the “polite” version; I’m sure if I were to research Terry in-depth I’d have some strong stuff to say. There is much to explain what the problem is in party in this piece, here’s a quote I liked particularly:

By his own account, his friends are always selfless, whether it’s Dick Gephardt driving four hours to pick out just the right puppy for the McAuliffe kids or a strip-mall builder doing a financial favor for the Democrats (“Terry, we’ve got to do this for the sake of the party”). By his own account, too, McAuliffe is always a hero: he saves the Democratic Party (several times); he even saves a small, struggling independent bank (it’s a wonderful life). But in real life there’s always a cost, and the political effects of McAuliffe’s rehabilitation of the Democrats among the wealthy may be nugatory.  Read more 

Part the First. Xan notes:

Hamilton and Baker are backed by a 40-person media team operating out of a public relations firm and a hot-selling paperback edition of their report.

Their dawn-to-dark parade of interviews, in which they always appear as a pair to underscore their bipartisanship, will culminate with a run of the Sunday morning talk shows.

“We’ve been spinning like a top,” Baker said Thursday, ushered into a paneled conference room with 14 news reporters at Edelman, a Chicago-based public relations firm that has detailed 40 members of its 200-person Washington office to manage the media blitz.

Question: How’s that working out, media team? Can you make people not see the egg on your face, as Bush essentially has told you and every one of your members in the chatter rooms, “I don’t give a shit?”  Read more 

It’s all about the Rolodexes.

With our famously free press, it really is that simple. All the capital the Beltway 500 has is in their Rolodexes: those relationships. And since the names in those Rolodexes are all either Republicans, Republican enablers, or DINOs, it’s only natural that the 500 would continue to book them, quote them, and teabag them. It’s kinda like refusing to sell your house when the housing market’s collapsing.

And it’s the same deal with the (loser) Beltway Dem consultants. They have an interest in keeping Democratic numbers as close as possible to Republican numbers, because they try make their money at the margins, by taking big bucks for eking out small victories. Their capital is in their Rolodexes too, except instead of “sources,” they have pollsters, media buyers, bad media producers, etc. And they’ve got the classic unethical consultant’s gig: Sucking dollars out of a client by treating symptoms, but never causes. (Because if they ever solved the problem, the money flow would stop. Right?)

Both these happy, comfortable denizens of the Beltway cesspool (Carville, Hillary; Wittman, Lieberman) are under threat from two fronts: the netroots, and the 50 state strategy. Remember, a functional Democratic party apparatus at the state level, driven by citizen involvement, means the Beltway consultants are fucked; there’s no money for consultants in a system that works. It also means the press is fucked, because they might actually have to interview people who don’t serve them free food.

And the code word for keeping the the Democratic loser consultants and the Republican enabling press in business and at the cocktail weinie table is:

Centrism.

And “centrism” is also code for denying the Democrats their natural governing majority; a majority which would turn the value of their Rolodexes to zero. Or possibly less than zero. Since being associated with the Clusterfuck that is the criminal Bush regime, let alone enabling or supporting it, really should be a negative. A big fat negative.

Wait a minute. What was that I just wrote?  Read more