Bill Bradley's Three Pointer

Former Democrat Senator and two-time NBA champion Bill Bradley knows a few things about winning. A three-time All-American at Princeton, he delayed going pro so he could put in a couple of years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. As a forward for the New York Knicks he helped them win their first NBA championship in 1970 and a second in 1973. In 1977 he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in his very first year of eligibility. His jersey number 24 was retired by the Knicks in 1984.

Following the 2004 election "victory" by the Bush-Diebold team, he wrote the following essay which appeared in the New York Times. Although it has since become clear that the Kerry-Edwards ticket likely won the election, especially in light of the confirmation of the GOP's massive use of voter caging revealed during the Gonzales hearings, Bradley's salient points are still highly relevant. His argument is that until the Democrats create a three-point strategy to develop the central ideals that guide their leadership, they are doomed to only occasional possession of the White House, largely based on lucking into a charismatic leader similar to a Kennedy or Clinton.

According to Bradley, the places to incubate, test and spread political strategies and principles are on campuses, in academic journals and in the news media. More than anything, he's advising the Democratic leadership to take the long view (admittedly, something progressives sometimes have difficulty with) and borrow a page directly from the Republican's play book. When you carefully consider his thesis, its very compelling.

Why hasn't it gained credence with the party and the people who fund progressive politics in this country? Is it true, as critics of the Dems say, that what the party lacks is a sense of the 'big picture' and where they're going? Or, even worse, maybe the Democrats, always quick to appease, ready to capitulate and eager to compromise, just don't have a sense of where they are unless a great leader can bring it all into focus.

A Party Inverted
by Bill Bradley
Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 by the New York Times

Five months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid. You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.
Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.

In such a system tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. In the worst case, they embrace "Republican lite" platforms - never realizing that in doing so they're allowing the Republicans to define the terms of the debate.

A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

Bill Bradley, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey, is a managing director of Allen & Company.

© 2005 New York Times, Co.

Random Thought as the Democrats Prepare to Either Waltz to Victory Next Year or Sprint to Defeat:

"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."

~ Susan Sontag, American novelist, essayist and critic