When Democratic Chairman Howard Dean sent Idaho Democrats the money to double the size of the state party’s tiny staff, it seemed a vainglorious gesture.
Silly. Stupid, even. Few states are as Republican Red as Idaho.
Dean’s critics, and there are many here, call his “50-state strategy” to direct a chunk of the party’s treasury to states that don’t routinely elect Democrats a colossal waste of resources.
Rahm Emanuel, the debonair Chicagoan who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, threw a well-publicized tantrum over Dean’s insistence on nurturing Democratic grassroots in backwoods places like Idaho.
Emanuel’s buddy, Democratic consultant Paul Begala – who once knew a little something and cared a bit about folks who live outside the Washington Beltway – said contemptuously on CNN that Dean was wasting precious money “hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”
And then, strange things happened in Idaho.
A row of political dominos fell in the Democrats’ favor. Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned, and President Bush picked Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne to replace her. Republican U.S. Rep. Butch Otter announced he would run for governor, leaving a Republican congressional seat up for grabs. The GOP staged a crowded, nasty primary, in which an out-of-state, right-wing interest group – the Club for Growth – spent heavily to promote an idiosyncratic, ultra-conservative state representative, Bill Sali, who emerged the victor with 25 percent of the vote.
That is the same Sali of whom Idaho’s Republican state House speaker, Bruce Newcomb, told the press, “That idiot is just an absolute idiot. He doesn’t have one ounce of empathy in his whole fricking body. And you can put that in the paper.”
In part because Dean had the foresight to send a few bucks to Idaho, the state’s Democrats were better prepared to capitalize on the unexpected Republican misfortune. With two weeks to go, centrist Democrat Larry Grant – a onetime Denver lawyer whose experience as a former corporate counsel for the high-tech Micron Technology company fits well with the intermountain West’s slowly changing demographics – has a chance to steal the seat.
“I’m ecstatic,” said the Democrats’ long-suffering Idaho party chairman, former congressman Richard Stallings. The 50-state strategy “has made all the difference.
“I tell my staff they are turning the party and the future around. With their help and the Republican missteps, it has made all the difference in the world,” Stallings said.
At the other end of the Rocky Mountains, Arizona Democratic chairman David Waid is as rhapsodic. The Arizona party is in much stronger shape than Stallings’ hardy little band, but was able to augment its efforts by hiring additional organizers for Maricopa County, the state’s Latino community and its Indian reservations, and an aide to work with the Spanish-language press.
“Who knew how important it would be?” asked Waid. But, just as in Idaho, a series of Republican blunders and internal schisms gave Democrats unexpected opportunities. “Suddenly, it began to explode.”
In a fractious primary, the Republicans picked a hard-line anti-immigration candidate, Randy Graf, to succeed retiring Rep. Jim Kolbe. Waid’s new organizers in the Latino community were there to capitalize.
And when Rep. Rick Renzi started looking vulnerable in Arizona’s 1st District, which contains a big chunk of the Navajo Nation, “we had a field organizer there, who in fact is Navajo herself,” said Waid. Now the Democrats have a chance to pick up three seats in the state, he said, adding GOP Rep. J.D. Hayworth to the list.
“The 50-state strategy stems from Dean’s belief that Democrats do better when organized, and organized everywhere,” said Waid. “It is a vision that encompasses more than one cycle, and some people can’t look past one cycle.
“But you can’t focus all your resources on those places that you predict are going to be tight races. History shows predictions can be meaningless,” he said.
If the Democrats win one or more houses of Congress next month, Dean won’t get much credit. He’s no barn-burner as a fundraiser, and the first returns from the 50-state strategy will be properly eclipsed by the impact of the war in Iraq, Republican mistakes and scandals, and the relentless drive shown by Emanuel and his Senate counterpart, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York.
But unless the Democrats want to begin each election by writing off 20 growing states, 150 Electoral College votes and 40 U.S Senate seats, they have no alternative but to “invest in long-term infrastructure enhancement,” said North Carolina’s state chairman, Jerry Meek.
Dean is making smart, tough decisions “like a CEO, who must decide what portion of revenues to invest in research and development and what part you should pay out to the shareholders,” said Meek. For too long, “the DNC was just myopically thinking of the next election.”
South Carolina state chairman Joe Erwin said that his party won’t pull off any big surprises in his conservative state this year, but said Dean’s troops have put a new bounce in the step of Democrats there, and helped make a difference in several local races.
“You don’t turn the supertanker around overnight,” Erwin said of the party’s prospects in a region where, as in the West, demographic changes may one day erode the current Republican advantage. “But now we have folks that go around and tell every party organization, every club, ‘You matter. You can make a difference. Let’s compete everywhere.’
“It’s clearly a tone that is different than what it was before,” said Erwin. “Everybody gets it now.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday. Read and comment on his columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
