More on Dean v. Ickes
I contacted Matt Stoller after he indicated in his MyDD post yesterday that this is a real political fight that he has known about for months, all off the record. I asked him is the fight between Ickes and Howard proper or Ickes as HRC's proxy and Howard? I also asked if there was anything else he could add about what was going on.
I received a brief reply from Matt: "It's hard to say. Lots of confusing eddies in this story. " Matt referred me to the Hotline entry I blogged about last night. Since I last read Marc Ambinder's post, it has been expanded.
This may just be a case of two lists being better than one:
It's a reality of Democratic politics that powerful groups exist outside the party structure and a legal reality that prohibits them from obtaining the latest DNC voter data. Completely apart from Howard Dean, a second global list is exactly what many in the party's alphanumeric penumbra (the 501(c)3s, the 501(c)4s, the 527s) crave.
That said, it's hard to see why attacking the DNC's list is necessary except to be able to raise money. The CEO of the Data Warhouse, Laura Quinn, presided over the DNC's voter file databases in '04. (Dems credit DNC chair Terry McAullife with spending to collect the data.) The DNC effort was not a stunning success. Dean inherited that file, and by many accounts, he has worked to improve it. It's discomforting to some DNCers that Quinn is being touted as the savior, when it was her file that the DNC is now forced to defend. (emphasis mine)
Ambinder wrote yesterday that Data Warehouse does need more money and is fishing aggressively. I noted yesterday that it was odd for Ickes to be working with Quinn, who worked on the original database that is now being maligned as ineffective. Nice to have that little reality checked by Hotline.
More:
Of course, it's ludicrous to blame one person for failing to properly target and persuade an electorate. (Imagine A Colbert Report Caption: "Except for John Kerry".) The RNC had two years and more money to refine their targeting procedures before the '04 election and a presidential candidate who helped them construct a persuasive argument about why folks just shouldn't trust the other guy with their security.
Democrats had a muddled primary and a candidate with a muddled message and only four months (and fewer dollars) to do what their opponents did. Quinn and DNC national field director Karen Hicks (who is also part of the Ickes effort) worked under severe time constraints, to say the least.
That last graf is an excellent case against a compressed primary season.
Consider the case of the National Committee for an Effective Congress. Run by guru Mark Gersh, it's been the to-go firm for Dems to figure out where and how to target voters. The DNC works with it. The DCCC works with it. So do unions and interest groups. And many congressional campaigns. The NCEC doesn't have a voter file. It shows groups how to create them. The NCEC is a resource for Dems. The Ickes project will be, if it succeeds, another resource.
NCEC is not some creation of the DLC. It was established in 1948 by Eleanor Roosevelt with some friends to "pool the resources of small contributors from across the country and spend those funds to help elect the most progressive candidates to the U.S. Senate and House." Gersh is considered a leading Democratic analyst and while he has written for the DLC's Blueprint Magazine, he doesn't seem to be a DLC creature.
Hotline's analysis also provides a boost for Howard's 50-state strategy:
It's also unfair to blame the DNC for the dilapidated condition of statewide voter files. Turnover in state parties is high. For journalists, try and remember the last time a state party press secretary lasted longer than two years. Voter file manipulators -- good ones -- are few and far between. The DNC is helping states hire the chosen data crunchers.
What worries some Dems is this: Republicans are much more centralized. The downside of creating shadow party groups is that eventually they step on each other -- see ACT and Kerry/DNC in Ohio 2004.
I think Howard comes out looking better in this analysis than in the ham-handed write up in yesterday's Washington Post. If I have time, I may fire off an LTE to the Washington Post about Edsall's story--although they don't seem to run LTEs that defend Howard. But the bottom line here is that it doesn't appear to be a power play by Hillary Clinton but a void that the DNC can't fill because of federal election laws.
Stay tuned.
I received a brief reply from Matt: "It's hard to say. Lots of confusing eddies in this story. " Matt referred me to the Hotline entry I blogged about last night. Since I last read Marc Ambinder's post, it has been expanded.
This may just be a case of two lists being better than one:
It's a reality of Democratic politics that powerful groups exist outside the party structure and a legal reality that prohibits them from obtaining the latest DNC voter data. Completely apart from Howard Dean, a second global list is exactly what many in the party's alphanumeric penumbra (the 501(c)3s, the 501(c)4s, the 527s) crave.
That said, it's hard to see why attacking the DNC's list is necessary except to be able to raise money. The CEO of the Data Warhouse, Laura Quinn, presided over the DNC's voter file databases in '04. (Dems credit DNC chair Terry McAullife with spending to collect the data.) The DNC effort was not a stunning success. Dean inherited that file, and by many accounts, he has worked to improve it. It's discomforting to some DNCers that Quinn is being touted as the savior, when it was her file that the DNC is now forced to defend. (emphasis mine)
Ambinder wrote yesterday that Data Warehouse does need more money and is fishing aggressively. I noted yesterday that it was odd for Ickes to be working with Quinn, who worked on the original database that is now being maligned as ineffective. Nice to have that little reality checked by Hotline.
More:
Of course, it's ludicrous to blame one person for failing to properly target and persuade an electorate. (Imagine A Colbert Report Caption: "Except for John Kerry".) The RNC had two years and more money to refine their targeting procedures before the '04 election and a presidential candidate who helped them construct a persuasive argument about why folks just shouldn't trust the other guy with their security.
Democrats had a muddled primary and a candidate with a muddled message and only four months (and fewer dollars) to do what their opponents did. Quinn and DNC national field director Karen Hicks (who is also part of the Ickes effort) worked under severe time constraints, to say the least.
That last graf is an excellent case against a compressed primary season.
Consider the case of the National Committee for an Effective Congress. Run by guru Mark Gersh, it's been the to-go firm for Dems to figure out where and how to target voters. The DNC works with it. The DCCC works with it. So do unions and interest groups. And many congressional campaigns. The NCEC doesn't have a voter file. It shows groups how to create them. The NCEC is a resource for Dems. The Ickes project will be, if it succeeds, another resource.
NCEC is not some creation of the DLC. It was established in 1948 by Eleanor Roosevelt with some friends to "pool the resources of small contributors from across the country and spend those funds to help elect the most progressive candidates to the U.S. Senate and House." Gersh is considered a leading Democratic analyst and while he has written for the DLC's Blueprint Magazine, he doesn't seem to be a DLC creature.
Hotline's analysis also provides a boost for Howard's 50-state strategy:
It's also unfair to blame the DNC for the dilapidated condition of statewide voter files. Turnover in state parties is high. For journalists, try and remember the last time a state party press secretary lasted longer than two years. Voter file manipulators -- good ones -- are few and far between. The DNC is helping states hire the chosen data crunchers.
What worries some Dems is this: Republicans are much more centralized. The downside of creating shadow party groups is that eventually they step on each other -- see ACT and Kerry/DNC in Ohio 2004.
I think Howard comes out looking better in this analysis than in the ham-handed write up in yesterday's Washington Post. If I have time, I may fire off an LTE to the Washington Post about Edsall's story--although they don't seem to run LTEs that defend Howard. But the bottom line here is that it doesn't appear to be a power play by Hillary Clinton but a void that the DNC can't fill because of federal election laws.
Stay tuned.
posted by Corinne at
8:20 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks very much.
It is confusing about why there needs to be another list but here is what seems to be happening:
1. Ickes needs about $11.5 million to get Data Warehouse off the ground and he's already raised $7 million. It's to his advantage to create a crisis so he can raise the remaining funds.
2. Laura Quinn, the CEO of Data Warehouse, spearheaded the voter database when she was at the DNC--the same database that was deemed to be unuseful due to technical problems. So the WaPo story takes Howard to task for something he didn't create and is trying to fix.
3. According to Hotline, there are legal reasons why groups outside the DNC structure cannot use the DNC voter list and this is Ickes' target audience. If done well, the Data Warehouse could function in a complementary way to the DNC database. But this being politics, it may not happen that way.
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Corinne, at 12:35 PM
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