| It's been a rough weekend at DFL headquarters.
Late last week an email was sent to their media distribution list containing (mistakenly) a link to a profanity-filled, stupid little YouTube video instead of the politically charged material they meant to send.
Later in the weekend, a message arrived in the party's Central Committee's inboxes indicating that Communications Director Eric Fought is leaving his position.
And those things aren't the end of the grumbling coming from activists around the state. Money being spent in questionable ways, bullying from above, no real comms strategy -- it's just bad.
Lucky for us most voters don't pay attention to internal party politics come November.
The email/YouTube/swearing Grandma thing...yes, it was a mistake. But it was a really bush-league mistake, and DFL Executive Director Andy O'Leary's reaction -- to blame a third-party research firm -- didn't help. If anything, it made it worse. The buck has to stop somewhere, and passing it off to someone else just doesn't fly when you're supposed to be executively directing.
And Fought's departure is another piece in a slow downward spiral for the party's comms shop. Fought is a good guy, but the lack of continuity in the position -- from David Ruth a few years ago, to Jess McIntosh, to Kelly Schwinghammer, then John Stiles and now Fought -- these are names that not everyone knows but still have a big influence over the party's communications success. Its messaging. Its oppo research. Its media strategy.
It's safe to say that the party doesn't have any of those things right now. And they can't be farmed out if the party's leadership expects success going forward.
Adding to these troubles is a HUGE gubernatorial field and several competitive congressional campaigns which are snapping up all the quality staff from Aitkin to Zumbrota. There simply aren't going to be a lot of good choices to succeed Fought and provide some continuity and immediate results in that position.
Bottom line: the value of the DFL's endorsement has dropped precipitously. My opinion of the statewide endorsement has definitely evolved over time -- and my apologies are due to those who criticized my past position on the matter. From where I'm sitting now, it looks like the endorsement will once again be a split between activists thinking about the best candidates to win statewide races and another group who, whether they realize it or not, are looking to have their egos stroked by candidates and campaign staff. The result will be an endorsement of someone who sounds great, does all the "right" things, promises to abide, and then gets squashed flat in the primary by candidates who reach beyond the endorsement early and start campaigning for actual votes.
Could the endorsement matter more than it will in 2010? Sure. We could go to a system like the one in Connecticut, in which the endorsement can be distributed to multiple candidates if they hit a certain threshold of delegate support (in their case, it's 15%). This is the system that allowed Ned Lamont to start building support in his quixotic quest to defeat pseudo-Democrat Joe Lieberman in 2006, and it worked -- Lamont got about 30% of delegates to the state convention, used that as a springboard, and whacked Lieberman in the primary. Under this system, I could see four or five of our candidates getting a "plurality endorsement" for Governor, and that would be a pretty decent field for the primary.
It would also force the money-flush candidates to compete instead of completely ignoring the delegate base, and would give the state party something useful to do instead of writing a puny check, handing over their voter file, and sending out a sample ballot two weeks before the primary.
It's probably an irrelevant idea for 2010. But if we ever want to escape the cycle of self-immolation that's going on right now, it might be worth considering in the future. |
