Random Thought For the Day ...

This keeps bugging me. Sorry while I beat this dead horse, but bear with me.

I'm told we lost Harris County because we just didn't get our people out to the polls. The fix for this is to just do a better job of getting those people to the polls. But we lost not just this time around. We lost most countywide spots in 2002, 2000, 1998, 1996, and 1994 too. Did we just lose those because we didn't get our people to the polls, too? Is there not an election where that excuse is the preferred answer by anyone serving as Party Chair? If so, I'd love to hear one.

More troubling ... if we truly lost it for that reason alone, and assuming we lost all of the others for the same reason, then that means we've known of this deficiency in our campaign strategy for a long time now and the blame for this rests even more squarely on the very person most likely to admit this version of events: the county party chair. Why did we not get our people to the polls in 2004 when we lost in 2002 for the same reason and knew what we had to fix? Who else is assigned blame for this failure?

So there's the irony as I see it. If I accept the answer that I'm given by a party chair for this loss, then I'd have to expect my next reaction would be to run that very person out of the county on the next bus.

Alas, as more and more details are empirically proven, we didn't lose this election for that reason. We got out people to the polls. But the other side just did the same thing ... and beat us at the game, in fact. Just like 2002, I might add. We got our people to the polls and still lost. What comes after that when trying to make heads or tails of the party's local direction? Yet all I'm offered is yet another excoriation that we really only lost it because our people just didn't get to the polls. Such intransigence and infallible belief in one's own belief sure seems like the very qualities of the problems we complained about in the White House this past election. Why should they be tolerable now?

The more I mull on the West U post, the more troubling things get and the more unsettled things get. Upon further reflection, I don't think the participants left that meeting with any great sense of resolution to what problems we felt plagued us as a party at the lower levels. The more I think about it, the more questions I realize went unanswered ... or even worse: answered very horribly.

The people at that meeting were there because they want to win elections. The best answer our own party chair could offer was to hop in the car and book it over to another part of town and try to get those voters to dominate the ones next door to us. I don't think that left anyone feeling really happy, energized, or engaged with their party.

We can do better ... we must.