Excellent Bill Bradly op-ed calling for Dem Party chg - A Party Inverted

[papau]

A Party Inverted
By BILL BRADLEY

IVE months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

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. <snip>


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30bradley.html

[AllyCat]

1. Excellent points

For those who get asked for a password, etc., use www.bugmenot.com or you can use forclark as the userid and wesclark as the password as we set up a group "logon" for this some time ago.

[Pirate Smile]

2. Very good and very important to read. Nominated!

"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."

[catzies]

3. Well done! Lots of good points to digest. Nominated!

I printed it, read it, highlighted it for future reference,
then copied and distributed it.

I was for Senator Bradley during the 2004 primary season, and was going to be a delegate for him.

I'd like to see Senator Bradley speak publicly more often! We need his voice!

[Pirate Smile]

4. We need him to help build the structure we lack which he

points out in the article.

[RedEarth]

5. Couldn't agree more......great article........

[longdriver]

6. Need better local activism in midwest and south

that's the bottom line

[Pirate Smile]

7. kick

[welshTerrier2]

8. the voice of the base

most Democrats have not read the Party's platform ... they have no idea what it says and they have no idea whatsoever how the document gets written ... Party insiders tell me that if I won't to have input to the platform i have to get elected to x and then to y and then i attend blah blah blah ... what's this got to do with giving registered Democrats a voice in building the direction of the Party ...

the more we push people away, the fewer people there will be ...

this is NOT a political spectrum issue; it's all about democracy ... we have got to start making the Democratic Party more democratic ...

electing Dean as Chair sent a hopeful signal ... but it is not yet clear exactly how reforms, if any, will be implemented ... Dean is new in his role but time's a-wasting ... involving the "grassroots" does not mean giving the grassroots a more important role to play during the next campaign ... it means giving the grassroots a voice ... getting a ton of work and a pile of money from "the grassroots" has not been a problem ... but without real reform, not only may the alienation many perceive deepen, but the Party will also fail to attract non-voters ...

it is time to call for a new American democracy ... it is time to call for restoring our democracy back to the ideals on which it was founded ... and it is time to start this process within the institutions of the Democratic Party itself ...

kudos to Bill Bradley ... his insights are dead on the money ...

[Lexingtonian]

9. half true

The Republican scheme works exactly because its essential ideas and voters don't actually change. That's also a recipe for obsolescence after a certain number of cycles of the same.

Democrats have faced a far trickier problem because the ground shifts, at least a great deal more, for them every election since LBJ's. Consequently, every cycle Democrats have lost voters and aged politicians off their conservative end and gained others in their then-center or on their liberal end.

Bradley is right that the lack of structure is a problem. That it's also an unavoidable consequence of a Party incrementally shifting away from its static Cold War moderacy into becoming the party of culturally Modern Americans, and thus Democrats have to evolve a different scheme from Republicans, kind of eludes him.

[BrklynLiberal]

10. Excellent oped. Here is a link to a speech by Larry Kramer given at

Cooper Union right after the "Selection", in which he also refers to the Powell "Manifesto", and gives even more details.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond lawyer who called himself a centrist, was secretly commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Congress to write a confidential plan on how to take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system. Not democracy. Free enterprise. Barry Goldwater had lost, Nixon was about to implode, Vietnam had sucked the nation’s soul dry, the cabal saw their world unraveling. They saw the women’s movement, black civil rights. student war protests, the cold war. They saw the world as they knew it coming to an end. (We are not the first to feel our world crumbling and becoming powerless.)

This is what Lewis Powell wrote:
“Survival lies in organization, in careful long range planning, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available through joint effort and in the political power available only through united action.”

This was the birth of what is now called the vast right wing conspiracy. It is known as the Powell Manifesto. You can google Lewis Powell (not the one who helped to assassinate Lincoln) and read it in its entirety.

Under the supervision of some of the richest families in America, that plan has been followed faithfully since 1971 and it has resulted in these past years of horror and the reelection of George Bush. Nine families and their foundations, all under the insistent goading of Joseph Coors, have financed much of this. The Bradley Foundation. The Smith Richardson Foundation. Four Scaife Family Foundations, The John M. Olin Foundation. The Castle Rock (or Coors) Foundation. Three Koch Family Foundations. The Earhart Foundation. The JM Foundation. The McKenna Foundation. From 1985 to 2001 alone they contributed $650 million to this conservative message campaign. They have helped to launch and gain financing for networks of newspapers and magazines. They have seen to it that hundreds of the most powerful think tanks have appeared, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise, Cato, Manhattan, Hudson Institutes, and many more. There are now in place an ever growing number of well-funded student organizations at many colleges. There are legal advocacy foundations, such as the Center For Individual Rights and Judicial Watch. There are Leadership Institutes and Action Institutes and Institutes on Religion and Public Policy and Religion and Democracy. There is a heavily visible media participation: Fox Television and Pat Robertson and Oliver North and Radio America and the Washington Times and Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, to name but a very few, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

For the preparation of this manifesto, Lewis Powell was rewarded by Richard Nixon with a seat on the Supreme Court, where among other things he voted against gays in Bowers v. Hardwick, and against Black people in Bakke v. University of California.

It is vital for us to realize that this plan was written in 1971. The people it was written for did not go off then to a disco, or to the Pines or into therapy, or into drugs. They took this plan and they have executed it religiously every day and night for the next thirty-five years initially with some 400 million dollars and always from then until now with unending hours of backbreaking, grinding, unglamorous work, of civic engagements county by county across the entire expanse of America. They took the richest and most liberal nation in the history of civilization and turned it hard right into a classist, racist, homophobic imperial army of pirates. 30% of America now self-identify as conservative or extremely conservative. When Lewis Powell wrote his Manifesto that figure was less than 10%.

And on the morning of November 3d we wrung our hands and wondered why.

http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2004/11/larry_kramer_sp.html

[RaleighNCDUer]

12. Now that is scary. Starts me thinking about storming the Bastille

and torching the manor house.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Larkspur]

13. The Cato Institute supports privatization of Social Security and they are

the "brains" behind Bush's scheme. Cato is not liberal or progressive. They are at best Rockefeller Republicans and Libertarians.

[RaleighNCDUer]

14. Just because Cato likes to amuse itself by saying they are liberal,

that doesn't make it so.

Cato would never support a national health care system.

Cato is anxious to do away with Social Security.

Cato wants to do away with all those pesky little regulations that hurt a business's bottom line while protecting the environment and the workers.

They are a faith-based organization, only their faith is in Adam Smith's magical hand solving all problems through unfettered capitalism. Like most social-Darwinist libertarians, they don't seem to have any concept of the value of a safety net.

We might be able to cherry-pick a few of their ideas, but they are no allies to Democrats or to American citizens in general. They are emblematic of the capitalist/corporatist coup that seized control of the Republican party and, by extension, the country.

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bleedingheart]

17. yeah....Enron's need less regulation....

what a joke....

[dcfirefighter]

21. My opinion only....

The Democratic Party is and should be the party of the people. The things the DP want are the things people want. It just seems to me that the DP doesn't understand how the economy works. It is possible to align the 'greed' of many to benefit the many rather than the few. The Democratic party needs to be the party of small business, competition, upstarts, change, and benefits for all. The DP needs to learn to speak the language of guys who work hard for their money, people who risk their livelihoods to make a business work. The DP wants to 'give' a lot of people a lot of things, but has no way to pay for it without taking it from someone else. And, right or wrong, many people view themselves as a lot wealthier than they are; these people think that the DP is coming after THEM.

At the turn of the last century there was a populist movement that believed in lowering taxes on workers and business, crushing monopolies, fostering competition, and promoting free trade. His name was Henry George: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

As I see it the Democratic Party can choose from several themes:
Left Authoritarian: Socialism to Communism, neither of which will get elected for the next 80 years.
Right Authoritarian: The Republicans have got this covered.
Right Libertarian: This is the Cato Institute, and while they don't like the current brand of Republicanism, they sure aren't voting Dem.
Centrist: This is the worst choice, it's the party of 'no'. No ideas, resist change, middle of the road worst of both worlds. This is where we are now, and this is why we don't get elected. Republican Lite is in this zone.
Left Libertarian: this is the party of Jefferson. This is the party of freedom, but unlike Cato, this party doesn't trade Big Government for Big Corporate. This is the spirit that led in '76 and again, in France in 1789. This is 'do as you want, don't hurt others'. This is the innovation of Silicon Valley. This is alternative fuels. This is change, this is evolution as a society.

[cprise]

27. The Culture of 'No'

No connection to the rest of the world, no possibility you will look outside your border for examples, no competition for capitalism.

America's political culture is self-referential and inbred, and that has led to the parties merging into a single corporate interest group.

The Jeffersonian example you give is not enough for a post-industrial society. That is a narrative that supports the idea of freedom that abandons social responsibility. OK if you have a huge frontier ahead of you. Other major left parties either embody a balance between liberty and social responsibility, or they are socialists who have formed a coalition with liberals.

France got "liberty, equality, brotherhood" from its revolution. We got something much less concise and missing the brotherhood part. Liberalism will never successfully work again on its own as a political philosophy.

[blondeatlast]

31. Assume that we HAVEN'T?!

You know about assumptions, of course.

[blondeatlast]

32. Do me a favor, okay?

Google the "triangle shirtwaist factory fire" and get back to me, then we'll talk.

[Mondon]

26. They are libertarian

They hate economic regulation. They are anti-New Deal, anti-Great Society, anti-safety net. Good on individual rights and foreign affairs, way out of step with Dems on economic issues.

[blondeatlast]

30. Proud cogs in the RW Noise Machine? No thanks.

Not as heinous as Heritage, but hardly progressive.

What are they doing about corporate socialism?

[go west young man]

15. Bradley forgets to ask....

was the election rigged? We do need to revamp the Democratic party with real fighters like Boxer,Conyers, and Byrd but the election was stolen so it amazes me that the media takes this kind of article and gives it a mandate. Just as they do the religious values B.S.

[RickWn]

18. Bring back the Golden Fleece Awards

Bradley's comments are right on the mark. His inverted pyramid analogy is true as dart in a bulls-eye. Do any of you youngsters remember back when the Democrat party had a base supported by the likes of Sen. William Proxmire (D. Wisc.)?

Every year he would gather the SCLM around at a press conference and point out the damndest pork in the latest federal budget. He would award his Golden Fleeces to the most egregious of congressional waste of tax payer's money. How about that? A Dem who was fighting for lower taxes if only the government didn't waste so much money!

What happened to that annual enlightenment... oh, I know, the Repubs turned it around and pointed out it was a Dem controlled congress responsible. Well, the Repubs have been in control for over 10 years now. Where is our new spokesperson? Senator Byrd remembers, but, God bless him, it's all he can do now-a-days to just stand there behind the podium. Surely, we have a more vigorous advocate to carry on the torch?

So, the Repubs have the Rockefellers, Scaifes and Mellons funding all these conservative institutions. No surprise, I guess. You know what's the surprise? Gates and Buffet, the two wealthiest Americans are Democrats. Why is that?

You know who is the wealthiest member of Congress? Yup, you guessed it... it's Nancy Pelosi, damn, another Democrat.

Check out Hollywood... filled with wealthy, famous folks. All, scum of the earth if the Repubs are to be believed. Why? Well, because they're mostly Democrats.

I ask, why are all these wealthy, famous people Democrats? Doesn't it make sense that they should be Republicans? After all, they have the most to tax (i.e. the most to lose) and they are all capitalists to the extreme.

But each of them chooses to adhere to the principles of a political party that Republicans would have you believe will lead to the total collapse of a carefully structured, Founding Father endowed democracy.

Why is it that a young couple having worked their way up from almost Depression-era circumstances, having actually the God-given grace and good fortune to be the President and First Lady did make as their first goal to change American health care from a "pay or die" system to a "paid and live" system. Why were they, and to this day, still viliffied for their compassion, their concern for the common American?

Only thing I can figure is that they were Democrats. How is it that truly compassionate Democrats, and fiscally responsible ones to boot, are not recognized as the true compassionate conservatives?

There is no such thing as a compassionate, conservative Republican. Their every action is rooted in selfishness and greed. Time we took back the mantle and redefined the frame.

[Stevepol]

19. Try putting another top on it and see what happens.

With the voting machines counting the vote in secret without even a breath of a chance of ever being checked or audited even if exit polls show the machines have probably been mis-programmed, hacked, patched or otherwise twisted to achieve the desired result, what hope is there of ever changing the one on top?

[bigwillq]

20. Read it and thought it was great!

:bounce:

[divineorder]

22. Where was Bradley?

If he really believed all this a while back, why did it take Dean to start reviving the grass-roots of the party? If Bradley had started his own organization based on these principles, it could have been on its fourth year of working, actually helping local Dems win. We would have been further along on the process.

And what is he doing now? Is he going to actually help develop those grass-roots or is it all talk?

[FogerRox]

23. Bill proly wont get the support of any of the NJ County chairs

SO why he would want to run is well--he must be nuts.
In 2000 Bill burned a lot bridges and pissed a lot of people off.
In the Primaries he made lot of mistakes. Plus hes done and washed up.

I plan on getting a job in the NJ gov race. '05

And then the 5thCD Anne Wolfe in '06

I thought about bill bradley for like 12 seconds.
My Resume is going to Corzine.

[GOPBasher]

24. These are excellent points. I agree with him.

I think we really need to copy what the Right has done the past forty years.

[UT troll]

25. Protests vs. Think Tanks

I still wonder why we hold protests. The money spent, either by the protestors to get there or donated for the protestors, and time wasted should be used the way the republicans do. Why do we still have protests?! Every protest just garners an overwhelming yawm from the public. We should be funding institutes and think tanks.

[PATRICK]

29. When size does and doesn't matter

You are right about just doing protests when the gamed media field does not allow any electronic national effect to naturally grow. One forgets why traditional things no longer seem to work when there is a break in the information pipeline to John Q. Public.

The same mistake could be made with matching think tanks which do need to be created. The system of getting information out etc. is still a broken pipeline no matter what and where we put things in that the other side can flood with more acceptable crap.

It is a question of coordinating the entire picture again. Too many simple things are plugged in as if they presume it matters. As if they are independent of the political overall system. Pieces, ideas, personalities, tactics cannot be worked on in isolation even though ALL are necessary and valuable and even though many can never be matched by the minority Coup and its tiny Cultic Coalition of the unthinking.

A truth tank is needed to debunk the sloppy propaganda and false research and fake credentials of the conservative corporate think tanks because they have been allowed to get away with the worst lying and blatant propaganda. Matching them as if it is an honest debate is subtly self-defeating especially with the suppression of truth in the national forum pipeline.

IF you have mammoth popular groundswell and demonstrations, or protests, you combine that with a massive dissemination assault as the
Democrats with unpracticed wisdom helped the GOP conduct in the Ukraine. Then too the actual votes and the polls are subjected to the same deception where simply pouring in more will not be allowed to work. Simply getting the leadership's collective mind and will around that is worth more than a thousand counter-tanks.

[flaminbats]

28. a flawed but fascinating analysis..

Bradley wrote about a stable pyramid, one in which "all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine."

But why replace the top if it sat on a stable pyramid? Bradley also wrote of the second level, funded by the base of the pyramid, pushing ideas to the third and fourth levels. But can the top of this pyramid only be supported by language used on the political and media levels? This means actions of the media and President are controlled only by polling and voters..but voters' ideas and perceptions are essentially controlled by a few conservative research centers and big donors. :eyes:

The Republican party is no more a pyramid than was the New Deal coalition, every political base has divisions..and identifying those fault lines in the majority party is essential to forming a new coalition.