Pyramids

Bill Bradley's op-ed today is so spot-on it brought a tear to my eye. For awhile now, I've been incoherently expressing the difference between Republican and Democratic presidential candidates by saying that the former are defined by their party while the latter are forced to define their party. But Bradley hit the target much more accurately:

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.
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To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.
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A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

Absolutely correct in every way.

Update: Kevin's got some further thoughts, mainly, that the remarkable success conservatives have had has come from exploiting levers of power no one had really thought of before (though he forgets what may be the most important two -- direct mail and churches). Regarding Bradley's op-ed, I'd argue that conservative innovation hasn't been the result of dedicated and original thinkers looking for new opportunities but the simple dividends of paying attention to structural strength. None of the paths they formed were particularly novel, at least not once they started forging them. But Democrats never really tried to counter the conservative radio presence (at least not until Air America), never tried to figure out our own framing, never attempted to pack the courts (not since FDR, anyway) -- but none of this stuff was exclusive to the other side, it was more our lack of interest that gave offered them such massive returns. If Bradley's ethos was adopted, Democrats would be on the lookout for ways to challenge current forms of conservative advantage and create some of their own. Evidence is they're trying, at least to a degree. Online fundraising is really owned by liberals, with DailyKos, MoveOn.org, and the Dean campaign all firmly settled on the left so that, at least, is positive.

What always surprises me is that there is a natural place to make great gains that Democrats completely ignore. While both parties battle over Hispanics and Catholics, Republicans begin vying for Blacks, and Democrats start Godding up their language, nobody pays any attention to the young. As a group, we naturally tilt towards the left, but Democrats show little-to-no interest in codifying that advantage. You don't see them working to support mobilization on college campuses, you don't see them deploying speakers and politicians to schools, you don't see them working to align themselves with the young on issues they care about, you don't see them trying to do, well, anything. And yet, here you've got a constituency that tilts left, that Republicans don't care about, and that will be voting for a long time to come. It's really a very stupid oversight.