GregsOpinion.com

I swear, I was all set and prepared to make some keen observation on Ed Kilgore's latest post about Messages vs Messengers, but damned if Mark Schmitt didn't beat me to it. So I'll just piggyback on his take. Lesson learned ... strike while the iron is hot!

Now, Ed takes precisely the view that one might take if they worked for a think tank. Fully invested in the world of ideas, you'd expect "the message" to be a pretty big item for such folks. And that's not an entirely wrong idea, either. But as Mark alludes to, I think there's a coexistence between message and messenger that usually makes each ingredient more than the sum of its parts.

Schmitt puts it as succinctly as I think can possibly be done:

Much as The Prince was written for Lorenzo II De Medici, many of these ideas were contrived with an audience of one in mind. Clinton would "get it," they knew. And of course, the fact that he "got it" was exactly what led to the frustration that so many of the idea-advocates had with him. He loved the ideas, he made them feel brilliant and relevant, and then he took their ideas and stirred them deep into the soup.

Now, my version didn't have a comparison to classic works of literature. Hell, I'd be lucky if I could work in an Andy Kaufman movie reference. But one point worth launching off on from Mark's take is that the synergy wasn't entirely as tight as he suggests, at least in the case of the DLC's history. Remember, the DLC had a fairly well defined segment within the Democratic Party official ranks for much of their early history. The audience wasn't so much one person as it was one type of person. Bill Clinton was certainly among that type, but so was Al Gore, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, and Dave McCurdy. Each of those either did run for the White House or contemplated it, or had Al From ask them flat out to run. When 1992 came around, it was clearly Clinton's turn at bat, but in 1988, it was Al Gore's. And in 2004, the DLC had a toe in so many camps that it was ludicrous to think of simply one DLC candidate even though one of the candidates was the longest-serving President in DLC history.

Now, that point right there, I think confirms as much of what I believe Mark wanted to make ... that although there is an understandable importance to place on message itself, it cannot be cleanly separated from the messenger itself. Simple marketing at work here, actually. I mean, I can come up with the best philosophical framework for a candidate to run on as a pro-free-trade, pro-life, pro-school choice Democrat, but the list of people to run as such is down to myself and maybe a handful of others with even less name ID. So is it wise of me to invest in that process of idea-building? Probably not, at least not beyond what I do to ground myself on the ideas I care about personally.

Now, all that said, there is certainly a time and place for emphasizing the search for message versus the search for messenger. The hunt for a DNC chair is something of a proxy for that quest for a messenger, but it's far more minor than even my postings on the subject might indicate. 2005 and 2006 is not the time, in my view, to get too worked up on Presidential candidates. With that in mind, although there's a ready list of people I'm inclined to like for the 2008 nomination, I think its overkill at this point. Yet, with apologies to KY Dem and others ... someone has to do it. I can't sit here and claim that if Lieberman wanted to take another ill-fated swing at the crown, I wouldn't have revived TexansforJoe.com for just such a purpose.

Instead, this part of the process ought to be more about hashing out the ideas that the party ought to run with in the short-term future. In fact, the need is even more critical for reasons that Mark touches on ... many of the ideas promoted by Democrats are leftovers from the Clinton era. One of the disappointments of the Kerry campaign (there are, regrettably, too many) is that in the most meaningful campaign of our lifetimes, there was an inexcusable dearth of ideas presented by Kerry's campaign ... although, similar to Kilgore, I believe Kerry's health care plan will be a staple of Dem campaigns for the next few years. If it isn't, it should be. But "quality health care" isn't enough and Mark's point that campaigns are as much about indicating what type of President one will be during unforeseen instances is far more important than having the right position on the issues that come up in polling.

That final point is one that I think, unfortunately, defines where the two parties are right now. Democrats have most of the issues on their side, but there is more needed to get over the electoral hump ... putting it into a narrative that explains how the various policies advocated fit into an understandable and identifiable framework ... and sending the right message about what type of elected official one will be based on the issues and narrative offered.

Clinton put his issues into the narrative that he was a "New Democrat." It wasn't just an empty catchphrase. It meant breaking the stereotype of what being a Democrat had become on the national level (and more gradually, at the local level). It meant showing the goods on a variety of issues that proved that point. It meant consistency across the board in advocating his third way. And Clinton did all of that magnificently (although I quarrel incessantly with the concept of 'triangulation'). Clinton indicated he would govern as a New Democrat and with some key exceptions that drove those of us who were New Dems before it was cool, he did just that.

The broader lesson here is something that ought not be new to any PoliSci nut. It's taught in Sam Popkins' classic tome: The Reasoning Voter. Voters sift through the cacaphony of information provided with far more nuance and insight than they are often credited for. As such, when I first read the book during the 1992 campaign (required in Dr. Murray's "Presidential Campaigns" class at UH), I regularly caught a few mocking taunts from Republican friends who took it to be a liberal rationale for why anyone could see fit to elect Clinton. Yet the book's lessons still stand at this time where liberals mockingly taunt those who voted for Bush. There's a surprisingly consistent rationalization that voters make and the cues picked up on are very similar to what Schmitt suggests when he suggests "we elect a president not just because of his position on issues we know about, but to make choices that we cannot foresee." This past campaign didn't merely vindicate Schmitt's view on this matter ... it vindicated Sam Popkin as well. Unfortunately, every election in modern history has pretty much vindicated Sam Popkin, yet the lessons continually get forgotten from time to time.