“Democratic Victory Task Force”: Grifters Put the Bite on Eric Schmidt? [View all]
“Democratic Victory Task Force”: Grifters Put the Bite on Eric Schmidt?
Posted on February 23, 2015 by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
A kind reader sent me a PDF copy of the first deliverable of the Democratic Victory Task Force (DVTF), their preliminary findings. We’ve already looked at the big brainwave the DVTF had, the “National Narrative Project,” so today, I’m going to put on my yellow waders and trudge through the sludge, lookly more deeply into the report. I’ll look at the language of the report, the paradigm for the party that the report (still) supports, and finally the makeup of the committee, and what that might imply.
So, to language. Here’s a Wordle of the most words the DVTF uses most frequently (larger is more):
I’ve helpfully added yellow highlighting to a few of the smaller, less frequently used words; the algorithm fits them in between the most frequently used words, so some of them are vertical, and hard to find. These smaller words are, from left to right:
activists
voter
citizen
class
working
One might urge that a document designed to get people to vote for Democrats would give those voters themselves a little more prominence in its text; instead, institutional words dominate: “Democratic,” “Task Force,” “Democrats,” “Party.” To be fair, this is a preliminary deliverable, and perhaps that’s when the institutional should dominate. From page 5 of the preliminary findings:
In May of 2015 the Task Force – in partnership with the Democratic National Committee – will release a strategic plan to guide the Party’s efforts through the 2022 elections.
So we have many more reports to look forward to! Perhaps in future there will be more focus on voters — as opposed to “strategists” and donors and consultants and message crafters and pollsters and meeting facilitators and “grass roots organizers” and SEO weasels and Beltway site builders. And report writers.
Next, the DVTF’s paradigm for the party. From page 8:
In other words, the New Politics is still firmly in place, with tweaks. Michael Lind describes this paradigm as follows:
Today’s Democratic Party … took shape between 1968 and 1980. Although George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential race to Richard Nixon in a landslide, the McGovernites of the “New Politics” movement wrested control of the Democratic Party from the old state politicians and urban bosses of the Roosevelt-to-Johnson New Deal coalition. Robert Kennedy’s aide Fred Dutton, one of the architects of the disempowerment of the old New Deal elite, called for a new coalition of young people, college-educated suburbanites and minorities in his 1971 book “Changing Sources of Power: Politics in the 1970s.” Sound familiar? That’s because, nearly half a century later, the same groups are the core constituents of today’s Democrats.
Basically, then, the DVTF’s thinking is that they want to add another minority to their portfolio coalition: “Southern whites.” (And never mind why, after having been the focus of Democratic party attention from the dear dead days of McGovern, African-American women and Latinas aren’t already “excited”; could it be that the Democrats never actually deliver them concrete material benefits, as the old Roosevelt coalition did?)
THERE'S MUCH MORE with excerpts of the Dem Report (including those involved in writing it at:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/democratic-victory-task-force-grifters-put-the-bite-on-eric-schmidt.html
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