Why Doesn't the Democratic Party Have a Farm Team?
You know what a farm team is--every major sports league trains and develops its players by bringing them up through minor leagues. Okay, the NFL and the NBA use collegiate sports, but the baseball system is built on A, AA, and AAA leagues through which players rise and sometimes fall before their shot at the big games.
Increasingly, the Right has farm teams of its own, sometimes beginning as far down as local school boards, and bringing candidates up through state legislatures, the US Congress, and above all, governors' mansions. But the Democrats? The closest thing they have to a farm team is the US Senate. Almost every Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime has been a member. A few have been recently resigned ex-members, but mostly they've been sitting senators. And the last time a sitting senator was elected president was before most of today's electorate was born (1960 to be exact.) What we need is what God's Own Party has in abundance--governors. Preferably Southern governors. The only Democratic presidents since 1968 were both Southern governors (Carter and Clinton.)
I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with senators. In fact, most of the Democratic senators who have run for President in the last 45 years have been pretty high-quality candidates--smart, articulate, hard-working, and taking positions that (even if I didn't always agree with them) were well-argued and supported by good use of evidence. But the American people don't really like senators. Or respect them. I mean, what do senators do? Talk. Argue. Compromise (showing they're fundamentally wimpy) or refuse to compromise (showing they put their own political advancement ahead of the common good.) They don't really accomplish anything.
Governors, on the other hand, can easily claim to resemble that most respectable of American icons, the CEO. They run a big business. They administer a big budget. They tell people what to do--and it gets done. It's great job training for the biggest executive job of all.
Which is why, I suspect, the right-wing media elite worked so hard to get rid of Howard Dean last time around--unlike all the other possibles of that year, he was a governor. Not, admittedly, a Southern governor, but still somebody who had done a pretty good job of meeting a payroll. So when he came out with his wild barbaric yawp after the Iowa caucuses, the conservative pundits took it and ran, knowing it was probably the last shot they would get at a man who had come up with the first successful innovation in political fund-raising since Richard Viguerie's direct mail brainstorm in the 1970s.
Well, enough of the post mortem. The point is, this year we're really short on Democratic governors. There's Tony Richardson in New Mexico (a sort of Southern state, I guess, and in spite of his Anglo last name, a Hispanic) and Rod Blagoyevich in our own state. Illinois governors, though, are a chancy commodity. Three of them have actually done prison time for official jiggery-pokery; one is currently under indictment, and two others that I know of have left office just ahead of the sheriff. (I think this means that if Barak Obama, our current junior senator, is to get the proper seasoning for a presidential run, he should probably move to another state and run for governor there first. These days, most people don't object to carpetbagging--if it's good enough for Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, why not Barak Obama? Maybe he should move back to Hawaii?) Offhand, I don't know of any others. Even Massachusetts now has a Republican governor, for pete's sake.
So the Democratic Party needs to evolve a long-range strategy (like the one the GOP famously formulated after Goldwater bombed in 1964), and that strategy needs to feature, above all, the cultivation of Democratic governors, especially in the South and West. It would be nice if some of them were women, or Hispanic, or African-American, too. It would be okay for them to spend some time in the Senate, but that should under no circumstances be their last stop before a presidential campaign. The long-standing habit of governors (of both parties) filling unexpected senatorial vacancies by resigning and having their successors appoint them to the senate, has got to stop. Ex-governors are better than no governors at all, but not much.
Yes, I know that when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to formulate a long-range strategy to drain the swamp. But the sooner we start, the sooner it will pay off.
Increasingly, the Right has farm teams of its own, sometimes beginning as far down as local school boards, and bringing candidates up through state legislatures, the US Congress, and above all, governors' mansions. But the Democrats? The closest thing they have to a farm team is the US Senate. Almost every Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime has been a member. A few have been recently resigned ex-members, but mostly they've been sitting senators. And the last time a sitting senator was elected president was before most of today's electorate was born (1960 to be exact.) What we need is what God's Own Party has in abundance--governors. Preferably Southern governors. The only Democratic presidents since 1968 were both Southern governors (Carter and Clinton.)
I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with senators. In fact, most of the Democratic senators who have run for President in the last 45 years have been pretty high-quality candidates--smart, articulate, hard-working, and taking positions that (even if I didn't always agree with them) were well-argued and supported by good use of evidence. But the American people don't really like senators. Or respect them. I mean, what do senators do? Talk. Argue. Compromise (showing they're fundamentally wimpy) or refuse to compromise (showing they put their own political advancement ahead of the common good.) They don't really accomplish anything.
Governors, on the other hand, can easily claim to resemble that most respectable of American icons, the CEO. They run a big business. They administer a big budget. They tell people what to do--and it gets done. It's great job training for the biggest executive job of all.
Which is why, I suspect, the right-wing media elite worked so hard to get rid of Howard Dean last time around--unlike all the other possibles of that year, he was a governor. Not, admittedly, a Southern governor, but still somebody who had done a pretty good job of meeting a payroll. So when he came out with his wild barbaric yawp after the Iowa caucuses, the conservative pundits took it and ran, knowing it was probably the last shot they would get at a man who had come up with the first successful innovation in political fund-raising since Richard Viguerie's direct mail brainstorm in the 1970s.
Well, enough of the post mortem. The point is, this year we're really short on Democratic governors. There's Tony Richardson in New Mexico (a sort of Southern state, I guess, and in spite of his Anglo last name, a Hispanic) and Rod Blagoyevich in our own state. Illinois governors, though, are a chancy commodity. Three of them have actually done prison time for official jiggery-pokery; one is currently under indictment, and two others that I know of have left office just ahead of the sheriff. (I think this means that if Barak Obama, our current junior senator, is to get the proper seasoning for a presidential run, he should probably move to another state and run for governor there first. These days, most people don't object to carpetbagging--if it's good enough for Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, why not Barak Obama? Maybe he should move back to Hawaii?) Offhand, I don't know of any others. Even Massachusetts now has a Republican governor, for pete's sake.
So the Democratic Party needs to evolve a long-range strategy (like the one the GOP famously formulated after Goldwater bombed in 1964), and that strategy needs to feature, above all, the cultivation of Democratic governors, especially in the South and West. It would be nice if some of them were women, or Hispanic, or African-American, too. It would be okay for them to spend some time in the Senate, but that should under no circumstances be their last stop before a presidential campaign. The long-standing habit of governors (of both parties) filling unexpected senatorial vacancies by resigning and having their successors appoint them to the senate, has got to stop. Ex-governors are better than no governors at all, but not much.
Yes, I know that when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to formulate a long-range strategy to drain the swamp. But the sooner we start, the sooner it will pay off.
posted by WiredSisters at 8:31 AM
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