More about the GOP Chair race,and the future of the position, later in the week.<\/p>\n
The question for today is “what should a party look like these days?”<\/p>\n
The DFL has followed a model similar to many IT companies; they are basically a shell.that administers groups of programmers in India, Ukraine and the Philippines.<\/p>\n
The DFL is more or less the same. They’ve farmed out a lot of that policy, publicity, advertising, and interacting with the public stuff to other groups: \u00a0Alliance for a Better Minnesota,whose mission is to collect money from “progressive” plutocrats and unions to waterboard context about Republicans; “Win \u00a0Minnesota”, which collects money from plutocrats and unions to distribute to, well, Alliance for a Better Minnesota. \u00a0Then there’s the unions – the MFT,AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, Teamsters…<\/p>\n
…and of course, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, Take-Action Minnesota, Common Cause,the League of Women Voters, MPIRG,and all the other non-profit agenda pimps…<\/p>\n
…to say nothing of Big Feminist, Big Environment, Big Gay, Big Minority and Big Grievance (by which I mean the big, institutional lobbying arms of those social movements)<\/p>\n
So what does this mean for a political party?<\/p>\n
It means that the party can focus on running endorsements and a few other things, and leave all of the complicated stuff – advertising, communicating with voters, fundraising – to other other groups. \u00a0This is especially useful when it comes to trying to appeal to “big tents” full of voters; the unions can reach out to their constituents, and have their messages carefully sequestered away from Big Environment’s countervailing message, and neither will be the wiser. \u00a0(I think that’s part of the reason that so much of the messaging coming from the DFL proper is so very very stupid<\/a>; all the talented communicators are working for 527s.<\/p>\n Of course, this means that the 527s are a little more equal than the voters – and to the DFL’s activists. And if Republicans wonder about how their party’s budget’s been spent, and want more transparency? \u00a0The money spent getting Democrats elected is accountable only to a raft of non-profit boards, union leadership and private parties with deep pockets.<\/p>\n Not a few Republicans have pondered if that’s the future of political parties; since so many businesses are doing more or less the same thing. \u00a0It’s probably irrelevant at the moment; there are not enough Republican-leaning 527s. \u00a0I’m not sure it’s something the GOP wants to do; I like the idea of standing in contrast <\/em>with<\/p>\n More later this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More about the GOP Chair race,and the future of the position, later in the week. The question for today is “what should a party look like these days?” The DFL has followed a model similar to many IT companies; they are basically a shell.that administers groups of programmers in India, Ukraine and the Philippines. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[115],"class_list":["post-24833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-the-hell","tag-abm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24833"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47824,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24833\/revisions\/47824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}