Begala...Dean has hired bunches of people to pick their noses...

The Cook Report - This Time, Dean's Right
Charlie Cook

No one would mistake me for the president of the Howard Dean fan club. I can't even count the number of times that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee has said things that I considered a bit over the top and that I thought contributed to the caricature that the Democratic Party has become in the minds of many Americans. In his most recent dustup, though, Dean is absolutely right.

Last Sunday, Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post reported that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada met with their party chairman and "complained about Dean's priorities -- funding organizers for state parties in strongly Republican states, such as Mississippi, rather than targeting states with crucial races this fall."

While Pelosi and Reid are right that control of the Senate will be decided by races in just eight or nine states and that, likewise, a small fraction of House districts will truly be in play, they ignored one set of facts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee exists solely to win House races. On the Senate side, there's the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. For the party's governors, there is the Democratic Governors' Association. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee was created to boost candidates for state legislatures. And the GOP, of course, has comparable committees for all of its candidates.

The primary responsibility of the DNC is not to win House, Senate, gubernatorial, or state legislative races, but to build and sustain a national party and to oversee the presidential conventions and nomination process. The same is true of the Republican National Committee. No other entities within the two major parties are charged with those missions.

In January, while giving a speech at Mississippi State University, I happened to meet a DNC staffer, a former executive director of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, who was assigned full-time to party-building in Mississippi. In the 33 years that I have been involved in politics, I have never heard of the national Democratic Party assigning a full-time staff member to organizational efforts in Mississippi.

Although organizing in Mississippi might not seem important to Pelosi and Reid -- after all, the state won't have competitive House or Senate races this year -- at some point, conservative Democratic Rep. Gene Taylor will retire, and then the House Democratic leadership may see the wisdom of their party already having a presence in southern Mississippi. When Republican Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott retire, the Senate Democratic leadership just might have a similar revelation. Keep in mind that if Lott had opted to retire at the end of this year, as many had expected, Democrats would have had a pretty fair shot at winning that seat by running former state Attorney General Mike Moore.

The Democratic congressional leaders' shortsighted, penny-wise/pound-foolish complaints show why their party has become bicoastal. Congressional Democrats have trouble winning in many interior states, in part because leaders like Reid and Pelosi have failed to appreciate the importance of maintaining a strong national party apparatus. The Democrats' inability to consistently win elections in places where gun shops outnumber Starbucks is a big reason the party controls neither the House nor the Senate.

Right now, one of the biggest obstacles to Democrats' taking the House back is their failure to recruit strong candidates in many Republican-held districts that ought to be in play. Party building means lining up a solid team -- organizing and winning lower-level offices that give the party a talented bench from which to draw for higher contests.

Dean's view -- that Pelosi, Reid, and their party committees have their jobs and he has his -- is the one that he ought to stick to. He should also resist pressure from interest groups, such as the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members raise very little money for the DCCC even though a Democratic takeover of the House would elevate many black lawmakers to chairmanships.

Howard, stick to your guns.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/10/15241/7822

"As far as the Voter File, I can tell you that Hillary Clinton has nothing to
do with any of this, and that was just speculation, which was unfounded.
What Harold wants to do, I think, is build a big proprietary Voter File.
There’s some legal problems having us use the voter file because of
McCain-Feingold. And there are some problems because one of the things he
wants to do, which I think is a good thing, is to incorporate lists from,
you know, sympathetic organizations -- environment, women’s rights, so
forth. That’s a very difficult issue for us. The bottom line is the DNC
needs to have a Voter File. And we need to have a Voter File that’s
available, and we have a relationship with the states, of using the states
as substrata for building a Voter File that nobody else has. So we’ve got to
do this, it’s got to be owned by the party so it’s available to candidates
without fear or favor of whomever may be running the proprietary Voter File.

..."but we’ve got to have our own Voter
File and we’ve got to be able to use it for candidates, and we’ve got to be
able to have the candidates build it and we’ve got to be able to share it
with all candidates. I’d like to make it free. We will make it free -- we’re
raising the money to pay for it so that we can make it available to
candidates from all over the country. Harold, you know, is not going to be
running this Voter File forever. And a proprietary Voter File that we have
to depend on is not the right way for the DNC to go. That doesn’t mean he
shouldn’t do it. I’m sure this Voter File will be very useful in other
capacities -- for example, if there’s a sequel to ACT or something like
that. But we have to have a Voter File that we build that works, and it has
to work the way I described it, which is, as you use it, it gets built
immediately. Because we’ve got to end this 30-year process of the day after
the presidential election the DNC goes into hibernation -- unless we win --
and then we emerge three and a half years later. That is not a successful
strategy.

Look, my basic job here is to establish a long-term plan for the Democratic
Party. Chuck and Rahm need to focus on the ’06 races and we’re going to be
as helpful as we possibly can there, but I’m focusing not just on ’06 but ’08
and ’12 and so forth and so on. There needs to be a permanent, ongoing,
well-run campaign organization that’s always campaigning. They have it on
the other side of the aisle; we need to build it and that’s what we’re
doing.

Thomas Edsall: Will your data file be as sophisticated as the Republicans
claim theirs is, with all these consumer lists and being able to develop
targeting by all kinds of identities and views and religion and so forth?

Dean: We already have that data. Terry got that data in before. It’s all
commercially acquirable, and we did all that. The problem was the platform
was too small and the folks at the state level weren’t trained to use it.
And there were some kinks, there was actually too much data. There were
about 900 data points per voter, so it became essentially unusable. So we
don’t have to reacquire the data, we do have to update it. All we have to do
is build a different kind of platform so we can make it work, and then we
have to train the heck out of people at the state level. Now we have a great
relationship with the state parties for the first time in about 30 years and
we’re going to be able to do that."