The Role of the DNC Chair

by Simon Rosenberg
December 2005

A critical first step in deciding who we want as our next chair is to first figure out what the job is, and what it requires. An article in the December 16th Economist, excerpted below, does an excellent job at describing how the Republicans now view the job and why they have chosen a 38-year-old strategist as their next chair.

As NDN has been discussing for the past several years, the modern Republican political machine has redefined politics as we know it. Years of investing billions of dollars in their infrastructure have created a vast and complex web of multimillion dollar operations which include think tanks, for-profit media outlets like Fox News, traditional political advocacy groups and, in recent years, a very healthy and strategic set of national, state and local party organizations.

The Republicans understand the division of labor required to run such a political empire, and have a diversified set of leaders to build and manage their affairs - spokesmen like Bush, Colin Powell, Bill Frist, Rudy Giuliani, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; strategists like Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist; managers like Roger Ailes, Ed Gillespie and Ken Mehlman; intellectuals like those at Heritage, Cato and the dozens of other local and state think tanks; propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge; and investors like the Coors and Scaife families.

They run their politics like a business. They have strategic plans, targeted outcomes, measures to gauge progress and accountability. As Democrats, we must come to terms with what they have built and how they run their affairs, for today they have a much better system that yields much better results than ours.

Finding someone who can take on Bush on TV is not the biggest or most important part of the job of chairing the DNC. Terry McAulifffe has repeatedly said as much, and the Republicans have clearly recognized this in their recent choices for chair of the RNC. We already have dozens of national leaders well-equipped to take on the GOP each day. They are named Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Richardson, Gore, Dean, Reid, Pelosi, Obama, Hoyer, Bayh, Lieberman, Vilsack, Landrieu, Menendez, Graham, Salazar, Ford Jr., Nelson, Lincoln, Durbin, Stabenow, Granholm, Rendell, Warner, Biden, Holbrooke, Harman, Spitzer and Emanuel. We could all add more.

What we need at the head of the DNC is someone who can take on Rove, Reed, Norquist and Mehlman. Someone who understands how to defeat the modern Republican machine at its own high-level strategic game; someone who understands the demographic, attitudinal and socio-economic complexities of the coming America; someone who is deeply rooted in the emerging new media world of databases, digital media, satellite and cable television; someone who understands the internet and modern community-building techniques; someone who can speak for the mainstream of the party and connect with its increasingly youthful activist base; someone who has successfully raised money and worked in all regions of this diverse country; and someone who has a proven track record at running a business or political organization.

We cannot lose sight of the fact that the DNC has become a business that could raise as much as $1 billion in the next four years. The day-to-day job of DNC chair requires running the largest and most important political organization that Democrats have in a time when Republicans have vastly improved their political machine, and are using their party institutions in ways we must emulate in the years to come. First and foremost, this job is to be the head of an organization that is the primary vehicle for millions of partisan Democrats to organize and defeat Republicans each day.

Our greatest risk in the chair’s race is selecting someone who may do fine on TV but who cannot turn our $1 billion machine into something that takes on the modern Republican Party at its own game. Our greatest opportunity is getting a strong team in the DNC led by a new chair who can expand on McAuliffe's groundbreaking reforms, build a 21st century Party and start the Democrats back on the winning path again.

We face a simple choice in the race for chair: do we keep doing what we are doing and lose, or do we choose a new direction, a modern path, that can meet the challenges of the 21st century and defeat the new Republicans at their very own game? Friends, this is an extraordinarily important choice we face, and one could have dramatic consequences on our fate as a Party. I hope we will demonstrate courage and choose wisely, but first we must understand clearly what the choice actually is.

The Economist
December 16, 2004

"The organisation man"

The Republicans have already taken an important step towards keeping the White House in 2008

THIRTY years ago, political commentators from David Broder down were all busy writing their obituaries of America's political parties. Today the parties are arguably more important than they have been for a century. Partisanship is on the rise; ticket-splitting is on the decline; legislative compromise is a dying art. Politically active Americans are increasingly divided into two well-organised warring tribes, liberals and conservatives, who disagree about the most fundamental issues of life.

An age of political parties is also an age of party mechanics. Races are won not just by charismatic drivers, but by the toilers who spend their lives fine-tuning the political engines. The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which help to raise money, support candidates and co-ordinate campaigns, can make all the difference in contests that often depend on mobilising loyalists rather than persuading swing voters.

The Republicans clearly won the organisation war this November. The Democrats didn't do badly: John Kerry's popular vote was 12% more than Al Gore's. But the Republicans did better: George Bush's popular vote jumped by a fifth. In the past fortnight both Terry McAuliffe, the outgoing chairman of the DNC, and Howard Dean, the darling of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”, have gone out of their way to praise the Republicans. “We ran the best grass-roots campaign that I've seen in my lifetime,” said Mr Dean. “They ran a better one.”

The Republicans are now consolidating this organisational advantage. While the Democrats face a civil war over who should succeed Mr McAuliffe at the DNC, with eight candidates (including Mr Dean) sparring for the job, the Republicans have already settled on their man for the RNC.

A mere 38 years old, Ken Mehlman does not fit many stereotypes. He isn't a Washington veteran like the current chairman, Ed Gillespie (who retires in January to return to his lobbying firm). He isn't a “character” like the smooth-as-molasses Haley Barbour. He isn't a nationally known figure like George Bush senior. He comes across as a classic company man—the whippersnapper CEO of a data-management company in Plano, Texas, perhaps—rather than a back-slapping pol. But it is impossible to find anybody in political circles, Democratic as well as Republican, who doesn't think that he's the ideal man for the job.

Karl Rove may have been the architect of Mr Bush's victory—the man with the grand strategic visions and the sweeping sense of history. But Mr Mehlman was the mechanic who translated those strategic visions into reality. His main assets are an extraordinary command of detail (his colleagues dubbed him “Rain Man” because he can reel off election statistics much as Dustin Hoffman, in the film, could calculate at a glance the number of toothpicks spilt from a box) and the iron discipline necessary to keep Mr Bush's unruly army together.

In the last election, the Democrats seemed to take the more modern managerial approach: they contracted out much of the grunt work of politics to outside “527” organisations and made extensive use of paid canvassers to register and turn out voters. Trade unions paid 5,000 people to work full-time on the election, for example. By contrast, Mr Mehlman slowly built up a volunteer army of 1.4m loyal Republicans.

The volunteers made much better salespeople than the Democrats' paid hacks. (“Who do you find more believable?” asks Mr Mehlman. “A paid worker from outside or a friend and neighbour?”) They also operated under the political radar; the Democrats systematically underestimated the Republican effort. And they allowed Mr Bush's campaign dollars to stretch much further: in Ohio, the Bush-Cheney campaign had only a couple of hundred paid staff but 80,000 volunteers.

Yet this volunteer army also required an inordinate amount of management. Mr Mehlman dug up Republicans in the corners of America that campaign managers often overlooked—especially the new exurbs. He used all sorts of business metrics: marketing data to find potential supporters, performance measures to make sure they were doing their job and rewards to keep them motivated (successful volunteers were invited to Mr Bush's rallies, for example). He bristles at the idea that Democrats like Mr Dean won the internet wars. The Democrats used the internet primarily for fundraising, he says. The Republicans used it for organising, with 7.5m e-activists.

All revved up and somewhere to go

Mr Mehlman faces two obvious challenges. First, the Democrats are already learning from their opponents. Mr McAuliffe, for instance, waxes lyrical about the Republicans' use of targeted advertising. Second, it is notoriously hard to keep up the enthusiasm of volunteer armies: look at the way the Christian Coalition has faded to a shadow of its former self. Mr Mehlman argues that the best way to keep volunteers motivated is to keep delivering the legislative goods to Bush voters. But it is easy for a second-term president's legislative agenda to stall.

Even allowing for these problems, though, it is plain that Mr Mehlman's Ferrari is in far better nick than his opponents' Lada. The Democrats, after all, are still only talking about how to catch up, not actually doing so. And Mr Mehlman is already laying plans for the next round of elections.

Moreover, the political terrain still looks better for the Republicans. Mr McAuliffe's successor will have to concentrate on shoring up his party's defences: hanging on to core Democratic constituencies such as blacks and Latinos. The Republicans are flourishing in almost all the fastest-growing bits of the country. If the biggest challenge in American politics is reinventing parties for the age of the internet and the exurb, then the Republicans are streets ahead of the opposition.