A Closer Look at Bill Bradley's Strategy

by Ryan Oddey
On Wednesday the New York Times ran a piece written by former Senator Bill Bradley that offered his suggestion on how the Democratic Party can return to power. Much of this suggestion involved taking some ideas that the Republicans had done right, in terms of political strategy and planning, and applying them to the Democratic principles. Whenever a well-known Democrat makes a suggestion that involves adopting anything from the GOP, even if it is just strategy, then it is bound to stir the pot. Since that article first ran, preeminent bloggers have been commenting on the suggestion, mostly criticizing Bradley for his idea. However, after reading Bradley‛s suggestion and the responses that came with it I think that some people may have missed the point. We do not need to copy the GOP in its entirety but it would be a mistake not to learn from some of the things they have done right.

Bradley writes:
"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."

Over at Tapped (link), Matthew Yglesias responded to this with some key points and he ends his response with a principle that I believe to be very true. Yglesias writes

"The past 30 years of right-wing infrastructure have served the financial interests of their financiers very, very, very well but they've achieved remarkably little in terms of advancing core ideological principles."

Yglesias is right, the GOP is a pawn of Big Business and the Religious Right because they are the financial base and the voting base of the Republican party and obviously each group falls into some sort of the Republican Pyramid. However, I believe Bradley was suggesting that we take the things that the GOP did right and make them our own. Democrats can do that, in a similar pyramid structure, without falling victim to being a pawn of the lower rungs of the pyramid.

Yglesias also writes:
"it's really not the case that the Goldwater Republicans "didn't try to become Democrats" after losing in 1964. Goldwater ran on a platform of eliminating Social Security, opposing the Civil Rights Act, opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and opposing a federal role in education finance. By the time Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to power in 1981 he had abandoned all of those planks and also had to accept the existence of the EPA and various other innovations of the 1970s. What he did once in power was basically scale back to some extent programs that didn't even exist when Goldwater ran."

All true, but that was in the early 1980's and it has been almost twenty years since Reagan was president. Now we have a President who is trying to eliminate Social Security, has taken stances against affirmative action, and is trying to slash funding for Medicare and Medicaid. It may not be the Goldwater platform, but it‛s a natural evolution of that agenda. Part of the reason for the agendas success, is that same pyramid structure that Bradley mentioned.

The Democrats need to be able to do the same thing in as much that we need core values that will continue to evolve over time while remaining true to our form and we need to be able to do this while building a strong "pyramid" with our own parts designed specifically to help spread the core principles of liberalism.

The key to making the pyramid work for the Democrats will be coming up with our own people and our own parts that fit perfectly and can advance the cause as a whole. Kevin Drum highlights this important fact over at Washington Monthly by writing:

"What conservatives really did was to exploit new levers of power in ways that no one had thought of before. Their answers turned out to be foundations, language, judges, talk radio, and lobbyists, but there's nothing sacred about those particular levers. So while creating our own foundations and talk shows is important, what's more important is that we should be constantly searching for new and underappreciated levers of power and figuring out creative ways to exploit them. Howard Dean's campaign did this in a minor way with its use of internet MeetUps, a new way of organizing grassroots support that took everyone by surprise."

Drum is exactly right, we must not copy the GOP structure in its entirety, but we must take what they have done right and improve upon it while simultaneously coming up with new ways to help the party. Air America Radio and Blogging are steps in the right direction but the party will thrive if we are able to come up with new ideas.
So what are these new ways? I think that no longer conceding the south to the Republicans is a strong move, as well as backing non-traditional Democratic candidates such as Bob Casey Jr in Pennsylvania and Tim Kaine in Virginia will help broaden the appeal of the party without completely abandoning the ideologies of the party.

The ideology of the party is what makes a pyramid scheme for the Democrats tricky to pull off. As Samuel Knight said "We need to think of a way to beat the machine without becoming the machine ourselves." I think we can do it, but its going to take a consistent and prolonged effort from the Democrats to make sure we become the party we know we can be.

Ryan Oddey
Ryan@TAFMess.com