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A letter from a reader in <$NoAd$>respose to yesterday’s post about the Democrats’ consultocracy. With the letter writer’s permission, I’ve removed certain portions of the letter to maintain the person’s anonymity …

Excellent post on the state of the Democratic party, its operatives and its message. I think there are two separate points here, each of which is worthy of far further discussion. The idea of an aristocracy of Democratic consultants and operative has been a huge problem for a long time, and I will comment on that mostly in this post, since that is something with which I have experience.

[Here the letter writer explains that he is a mid-level political operative, roughly TPM’s age, and notes the various positions he’s held in the infrastructure of the Democratic party, its various committees and campaigns, over the last ten or fifteen years.]

I give you this background because I want to point out that many of us mid level political hacks who no one has ever heard off have been having these conversations for a long time. And the problem you identify has sent many of them to lucrative and non-political lives elsewhere.

Its is a depressing fact that for a candidate to become credible in Democratic politics, they have to hire from among a group of consultants who give them credibility with the fundraisers on K St.. The problem from my perspective? None of these firms are new. It’s the same group of consultants who have been running Dem. campaigns since the late 1980’s. If you look at the partners of the major media firms, for example, you can almost guarantee that they were players for someone in the 1988 campaign.

This creates a different problem. For those of my generation of political operatives, the searing election experience was 1994. And the animating ideas, strategy, and tactics of the Republican House majority still dominate the way the Republicans do their politics. Unfortunately, for most of the folks still at the top level of our party, the 1994 election was just one of many elections, and you win some and lose some. For example, it would have been impossible for anybody who lived through 1994 as their baptism into politics to assume that the Swift Boat Veterans attack was anything but harmful and required any reaction but a vicious and immediate counter attack. Yet, that is what the Kerry campaign did….inexplicable. But clearly a decision made by our “older” party hands…one that I believe proved decisive.

The further problem is that in order to succeed with careers in Dem politics – well, you got to join the big boys — i.e., the young successes in Dem politics tend to hold the same ideas as the people in charge.

I have many, many more thoughts about this, as it’s been a ongoing conversation for some of my close colleagues and I for years. Hope this is helpful a little.

It’s not about right or left. It’s not an argument that things would have turned out differently if we’d only had better consultants and spin-meisters. But it’s a conversation that Democrats should be having.

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