Some election news this week. Jon Ossoff, Democratic party candidate in the Georgia 6th congressional district “jungle” primary topped 48% of the vote tally, which is impressive in Tom Price/Newt Gingrich territory but still a couple of points below an outright victory. As always, the Republicans furiously worked the refs on this race, establishing the easy-bake narrative that Ossoff needed to win an outright majority and that anything short of that would be an abject failure. The mainstream media, of course, adopted this line because it’s simple and requires zero analysis (a lot of stories run this way), so the news shows the morning after the election were full of Democrats falling short postmortems. Useful.
Okay, because I am at heart a fair person, I will admit that the likes of Joe Scarborough said something that I actually agreed with this past Wednesday – something to the effect that Democrats need to rediscover getting out the vote, knocking on doors, calling people, etc. I agree. If Dems are ever going to return from the electoral wilderness, they need to start building their ground game right now. With the Georgia race and the contest in Kansas for that open House seat (lost to the GOP by seven points), that point has now been underlined and circled in red. (Okay, you can go back to despising Scarborough again.)
This doesn’t amount to a repeat of the same “air war” strategy the national Democratic party keeps running over and over again, dropping TV ads at the last minute. Democrats need to be a factor on the ground; they need to be a positive force in people’s lives. In my region, the congressional seat is held by a tea party Republican, way to the right of her district. We have only elected one Democrat in my lifetime – Michael Arcuri back in 2006. The only reason why he won was that the Democratic party invested in the race. They sent paid, seasoned campaign organizers to the district. They invested in a sizeable call center. They ran phone banks and knocked on doors. That – not the ads – was what put Arcuri over the top. I remember one of the party organizers giving a pep talk to the volunteers, telling us that a good ground game can add three percent to the vote total on election day. “We’re going to need that three percent,” he said.
There’s a coda to that story: two years later, there was none of that. Calling was done out of a cramped room in the local labor council office, and Arcuri just barely squeaked by in a presidential election year. In 2010 he got knocked off; same problem. This past fall, I was dialing for the Democratic candidate at the labor council again, working from a pretty crappy list. It’s not just lack of investment – it’s lack of the right kind of investment that kills our chances.
We have to start winning elections. It’s not the only thing we have to do, but it’s goddamned important.
luv u,
jp
Think about it for half a second. When we open leasing on all that real estate again, no matter when that happens, will we have any trouble finding someone to drill, drill, drill? Of course not. What the hell, do they only have one rig? Is Hanna and the PI suggesting they can only drill in one place at a time? Pathetically ludicrous. 
principle behind this choice – for example, the fact that the bill is flawed, that it gives too much to the insurance companies, that it doesn’t have a strong public option, that it is not a single payer plan, etc. But his reasoning appears to be based solely on political calculus. He’s reading the polling, and it’s showing a large majority of his district turning against the bill. Now, this isn’t too surprising, since the airwaves have been flooded with attack ads over the past month in particular, many sponsored by the national Chamber of Commerce (the folks who helped bring you our lack of a national health insurance plan in the first place). And, of course, they’ve stripped out some of the most popular aspects of the original plan in an attempt to please people who would never vote for the legislation in any form.
Mike’s take on this as that it should be done incrementally. Note to Congressman Arcuri: this is doing it incrementally. It would be a mistake to think of this bill as the last word on national health care. It is merely a stake in the ground, establishing the principle of a national system. Yeah, I think it’s a mess, and I’ve said so. It excludes far too many people. It preserves the profits of large sectors of our money-obsessed health care delivery system. It lacks the virtue of a public option for people who simply cannot get a decent plan in the private market. But the alternative is the wild west system (or lack of same) we have now. That is clearly unsustainable. Voting against an admittedly imperfect solution simply to please people like Don Jeror and other “tea party” basket cases is farcical, at best.