The Democrats’
loss in Tuesday’s special election for U.S.
senator in the dark blue state of
Massachusetts, after losses in Virginia and
New Jersey last year, should finally make it
clear to all but the party’s most
out-of-touch campaign strategists that the
only route to victory is to follow the path
President Barack Obama took to win in 2008
and quit trying to recreate the politics of
the Clinton era. All four Ms — messenger,
message, media and money — of the party’s
campaign plans must change if it is to win
in 2010.
Martha Coakley
was the kind of messenger that Democrats
used to look for in the 1990s — tough on
crime, connected to the party establishment,
and with elective experience to command
respect. But that formula didn’t work for
Hillary Clinton in 2008 and it didn’t work
so well this time either. Her background
prevented her from running as an
anti-establishment candidate and her
disconnect from the average voter in
Massachusetts can be summed up in one name —
Curt Schilling. Future Democratic
messengers, like Obama in 2008, will have to
have demonstrated their ability to lead
change in their community and not take any
vote for granted.
That is the
only way they will be able to deliver
Obama’s message of change and transformation
with any credibility. Instead of defending
programs or arguing policy, Democrats will
need a message that captures the anger and
frustration of the electorate and channels
that passion into job creation and reform of
the existing economic power structure.
Coakley, just
like the Democratic gubernatorial candidates
who lost last year, also let the
technological superiority of Obama’s 2008
campaign flip over to the Republican side.
Unlike Democratic campaign strategists still
wrapped up in old media tactics and
television, the Republicans studied what
Obama did to bring the power of online
campaigning into the center of a campaign’s
strategy, and won the “Internet/Twitter”
wars hands down. The TV ads that Coakley did
run were off-target, featuring older white
voters rather than the young Millennials,
African-Americans, and Latinos who were so
crucial to Barack Obama’s winning coalition
in 2008. Meanwhile Brown put his Millennial
daughters front and center in his media.
All of these
advantages led to Brown’s ability to raise
money at a million dollars a day pace in the
final days of the campaign. Obama, indeed
Howard Dean before him, showed how to use
the Net to raise lots of money from lots of
people but only Republicans seem to have
learned the lesson.
Perhaps the
Democrats should bring David Plouffe back
and have him conduct some “re-education
camps” for Democratic strategists where they
can learn the new four Ms of politics and
erase their old ways of doing business from
their minds for good.
