How Many Have Been Fired So Far?

by tristero

I three questions for the hive mind, which I can't seem to find a really decent answer to:

1. Who, in the national or Massachusetts Democratic party, has been fired since the Coakley/Brown debacle?

2. What contracts with consultants, pollsters and media advisors have either the national or Massachusetts Dems terminated?

3. If people and groups have been let go, who has been hired to replace them? (Here's a partial answer, David Plouffe, but it's short on details.)

I would say that a good metric to gauge how serious the Democrats are about hanging on to Congress in the fall would be the extent to which they've decided to get rid of dead weight, and hire competent political operators.

(And run electable candidates, of course, but that is a somewhat different issue, involving, as it does, first having competent people to locate and recruit electable candidates.)

From what I can tell from the above Times link, the post-Massachusetts strategy doesn't seem so much to fire anyone as it is to establish a parallel organization to circumvent potential future failures. There are social/political advantages to this tactic, of course. You end up not antagonizing potential allies, and you avoid ugly confrontations as well as threats to tell all the nasty secrets of a campaign to the press. But let's face it: with allies like the people who ran Coakley and failed to see the warning signs of imminent disaster, who needs enemies? As for hopefully avoiding the airing of dirty laundry in public, it's just not gonna happen, not in the media climate of the early Third Millenium. We're going to know all the sordid details sooner rather than later even if no one gets fired.

And there are problems with being nice to the folks that screwed up Massachusetts, that is, in taking Kerry's advice to avoid a "circular firing squad." First is the fact that one of the well-known hallmarks of incompetent people is that they don't know they're incompetent. Leaving them around, even if they are "subverted," as the article put it, enables them to create an enormous amount of havoc. At the very least, it's a complete waste of money.

There's also another issue. The people who screwed up are using a combination of truly bad, and badly false, arguments to excuse their failure. Obama is too far left! (In our dreams.) It was primarily the economy! Healthcare reform is very unpopular! Coakley was the worst senatorial candidate in the history of the Republic!

As long as they have even a smidgeon of power, the Dem strategists and consultants who failed so miserably will still have the power to influence the party's strategy. And sure enough, we are hearing about how Obama has to tack right (a very bad idea), we're getting a renewed populist focus on the economy (probably a good idea), Dems are abandoning healthcare reform (awful), and Coakley 's been demonized (deserved, but utterly besides the point). The finger points everywhere but at the Democratic party operatives who were in charge of electing party members to Congress, and the army of consultants, pollsters, and necromancers who they hired to help them. To say the least, they deserve a huge share of the blame for what happened.

UPDATE: Joan Walsh squarely blames Obama. Sure, he screwed up royally this past year - in so many ways - but he's not who I'm talking about here. Obama didn't exactly ignore Coakley's problems; they were details that he probably assumed his team was on top of. After all, being president, he had much more to worry about than filling Kennedy's seat. It's the folks who were empowered to work full time to make sure Democrats kept their majorities (and supermajorities) that I'm focused on here. I don't mean to excuse Obama, but I'm not gonna let the people who were directly responsible for the debacle off the hook, either.

Here's an interesting aside in this game of letting the losers stay on. James Carville blames none of his fellow Democrats by name for Massachusetts (if you follow the link, you may have to register at FT to read the op-ed), and he also adopts the "circular firing squad" trope. Naturally, I can't, and won't, argue against Carville's suggestion to pin on Bush the ultimate blame for all the catastrophic situations we find ourselves in. But it was Democratic strategists who failed to see and implement that patently obvious tactic, specific Democratic strategists, and Carville fails to call them out. What makes Carville's reticence to blame particular Democratic leaders interesting is that this is the same James Carville who, immediately after the game-changing 2006 midterm victories for Democrats, blamed Howard Dean by name for not winning even more races. A further aside: Who did Carville want to replace Dean with? Harold Ford. Anyway...

Another good metric to learn whether the Dems are being serious is the speed at which they move to fire the fools. Times a'wasting, people.