[Mb-civic] The organisation man The Economist

Mon Dec 20 09:53:48 PST 2004

 Articles by subject: Topics: US Election 2004

UNITED STATES

 Lexington 

The organisation man

Dec 16th 2004 
>From The Economist print edition

The Republicans have already taken an important step towards keeping the
White House in 2008

THIRTY years ago, political commentators from David Broder down were all
busy writing their obituaries of America's political parties. Today the
parties are arguably more important than they have been for a century.
Partisanship is on the rise; ticket-splitting is on the decline; legislative
compromise is a dying art. Politically active Americans are increasingly
divided into two well-organised warring tribes, liberals and conservatives,
who disagree about the most fundamental issues of life.

An age of political parties is also an age of party mechanics. Races are won
not just by charismatic drivers, but by the toilers who spend their lives
fine-tuning the political engines. The Republican National Committee (RNC)
and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which help to raise money,
support candidates and co-ordinate campaigns, can make all the difference in
contests that often depend on mobilising loyalists rather than persuading
swing voters.

The Republicans clearly won the organisation war this November. The
Democrats didn't do badly: John Kerry's popular vote was 12% more than Al
Gore's. But the Republicans did better: George Bush's popular vote jumped by
a fifth. In the past fortnight both Terry McAuliffe, the outgoing chairman
of the DNC, and Howard Dean, the darling of the ³Democratic wing of the
Democratic Party², have gone out of their way to praise the Republicans. ³We
ran the best grass-roots campaign that I've seen in my lifetime,² said Mr
Dean. ³They ran a better one.²

The Republicans are now consolidating this organisational advantage. While
the Democrats face a civil war over who should succeed Mr McAuliffe at the
DNC, with eight candidates (including Mr Dean) sparring for the job, the
Republicans have already settled on their man for the RNC.

A mere 38 years old, Ken Mehlman does not fit many stereotypes. He isn't a
Washington veteran like the current chairman, Ed Gillespie (who retires in
January to return to his lobbying firm). He isn't a ³character² like the
smooth-as-molasses Haley Barbour. He isn't a nationally known figure like
George Bush senior. He comes across as a classic company man‹the
whippersnapper CEO of a data-management company in Plano, Texas,
perhaps‹rather than a back-slapping pol. But it is impossible to find
anybody in political circles, Democratic as well as Republican, who doesn't
think that he's the ideal man for the job.

 Karl Rove may have been the architect of Mr Bush's victory‹the man with the
grand strategic visions and the sweeping sense of history. But Mr Mehlman
was the mechanic who translated those strategic visions into reality. His
main assets are an extraordinary command of detail (his colleagues dubbed
him ³Rain Man² because he can reel off election statistics much as Dustin
Hoffman, in the film, could calculate at a glance the number of toothpicks
spilt from a box) and the iron discipline necessary to keep Mr Bush's unruly
army together.

 In the last election, the Democrats seemed to take the more modern
managerial approach: they contracted out much of the grunt work of politics
to outside ³527² organisations and made extensive use of paid canvassers to
register and turn out voters. Trade unions paid 5,000 people to work
full-time on the election, for example. By contrast, Mr Mehlman slowly built
up a volunteer army of 1.4m loyal Republicans.

The volunteers made much better salespeople than the Democrats' paid hacks.
(³Who do you find more believable?² asks Mr Mehlman. ³A paid worker from
outside or a friend and neighbour?²) They also operated under the political
radar; the Democrats systematically underestimated the Republican effort.
And they allowed Mr Bush's campaign dollars to stretch much further: in
Ohio, the Bush-Cheney campaign had only a couple of hundred paid staff but
80,000 volunteers.

Yet this volunteer army also required an inordinate amount of management. Mr
Mehlman dug up Republicans in the corners of America that campaign managers
often overlooked‹especially the new exurbs. He used all sorts of business
metrics: marketing data to find potential supporters, performance measures
to make sure they were doing their job and rewards to keep them motivated
(successful volunteers were invited to Mr Bush's rallies, for example). He
bristles at the idea that Democrats like Mr Dean won the internet wars. The
Democrats used the internet primarily for fundraising, he says. The
Republicans used it for organising, with 7.5m e-activists.

All revved up and somewhere to go

Mr Mehlman faces two obvious challenges. First, the Democrats are already
learning from their opponents. Mr McAuliffe, for instance, waxes lyrical
about the Republicans' use of targeted advertising. Second, it is
notoriously hard to keep up the enthusiasm of volunteer armies: look at the
way the Christian Coalition has faded to a shadow of its former self. Mr
Mehlman argues that the best way to keep volunteers motivated is to keep
delivering the legislative goods to Bush voters. But it is easy for a
second-term president's legislative agenda to stall.

Even allowing for these problems, though, it is plain that Mr Mehlman's
Ferrari is in far better nick than his opponents' Lada. The Democrats, after
all, are still only talking about how to catch up, not actually doing so.
And Mr Mehlman is already laying plans for the next round of elections.

 Moreover, the political terrain still looks better for the Republicans. Mr
McAuliffe's successor will have to concentrate on shoring up his party's
defences: hanging on to core Democratic constituencies such as blacks and
Latinos. The Republicans are flourishing in almost all the fastest-growing
bits of the country. If the biggest challenge in American politics is
reinventing parties for the age of the internet and the exurb, then the
Republicans are streets ahead of the opposition.