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Showing posts from May, 2005

for a politics of coalition

One thing that gets me is how my political instincts just run counter to what most folks propose as the "magic bullet" for the Democratic Party. (In my view there isn't one.) As you may have guessed, politically, my instincts always come back to coalition building. This essay is an attempt to analyse why and where I differ with what I see as the prevailing ideas...and to indicate why I am interested in 'coalition building' as the Democratic Party's best bet for winning back a legislative majority. It seems like there are two broad schools of thought currently proposing a 'model' for moving forward, those based on message and those based on process. Let's take a look.... {click here for the full post with your comments.} {note: this essay was long enough that I "folded it"...your comments are still welcome, and you can add to the discussion by clicking at the bottom of the linked thread.)

a politics of coalition: sets

One of the things that has always frustrated me with Democratic politics is that we bang heads so much inside our coalition. I mean, it's almost like we don't get the meaning of the term "ally" or "coalition" in the first place. Now, there are reasons for this...deep reasons actually. And the simplest and most direct response to this state of affairs would be for all of us to take as a basic start point that we are a broad and diverse coalition, and not paper over that fact. What I'd like to do here, towards that end, is to propose what I hope is a fresh approach to looking at coalition building and political organizing: a politics of coalition. To do this, at first, I'd like to look at our coalition like a mathmatical set. (Ok, I know this kind of mechanistic thing is not to everyone's taste....if what follows isn't you, no worries...feel free to skip this stuff.) Let's say you could break, for simplicity's sake, all Democrats i

mike brown continued....

One has to wonder why there has been zero FEMA presence at the Superdome, the Convention Center and the city's hospitals. Would it have been too much to have communications people at those locations arrive by helicopter...if only to provide leadership and information? (If not distribute water and prioritize the needs of the victims needing help.) Mr. Brown characterized the levee break almost like it caught him and the government off guard. (which it, of course, did.) But as he talked about that break I got the distinct impression that the levee break was going to serve as a kind of excuse...that "everything would have been okay if only the levee hadn't broke." That doesn't cut it when your own agency had addressed that exact contingency, in my view. At any rate. Mike Brown doesn't come over well on TV. He's doesn't give off a take charge vibe in the least. And his message is not focused. He downplayed the looting as an impediment to rescue ef

a politics of sets: basics

Let's say you could break, for simplicity's sake, all Democrats into three subsets: Urban Democrats, Suburban Democrats, and Rural Democrats. You could then represent each group like this: Urban Democrats = UDs Suburban Democrats = SDs Rural Democrats = RDs Now, in a given election, or on a given issue, Democrats as a whole would look to unify all of these voters in one set of voters. That set might look like this: ( UDs + SDs + RDs ) That seems obvious enough. Now, what any Democrat who seeks to speak to this broad coalition is trying to do is create an overarching rationale to bring the disparate groups of our coalition together, is to build a message . In terms of sets, that message might look like this: ( UDs + SDs + RDs ) Message, however, is not really coalition building. It's simply something papered over the top of our coalition by candidates. Coalition building, Democratic Unity is about the ties that bind the members of our coalition together, and how