Rhetorically, anyway.
Carville ... said Democrats could have picked up as many as 50 House seats, instead of the nearly 30 they have so far.
The reason they didn’t, he said, is the Democratic National Committee did not spend some $6 million it could have put into so-called “third tier” House races against vulnerable Republicans....
Asked by a reporter whether Dean should be dumped, Carville replied, “In a word, do I think? Yes.”...
He added, “I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its competence.”
I refer you to my earlier post on the subject, which is that Carville frankly needs to get some perspective. Dean argued all along that it was foolish to compromise the party's 2008 chances in order to pick up a few extra seats in 2006. And he's right. The money he might have spent in this election cycle he is now free to put toward building out the party's infrastructure for 2008. That will do more to solidify the Democratic majority than would picking up a few extra seats while riding a tide of anti-incumbency.
Carville keeps trying to float this argument, and he keeps getting smacked down. Maybe someone should ask him politely to shut up.
Oh, wait. They are. Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, the request is not phrased quite so daintily.
Howard Dean, Carville, politics, midtopia
2 comments:
Actually I see his point because I'm living with it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm THRILLED for the country right now but...we gained seats in areas that normally never go blue, and likely will have 0 inclination to stay blue in '08 and lost big time in areas that had been progressively more blue over the past decade.
That isn't making any headlines right now in the post-election euphoria but it had better concern us. Rather than beat on either Dean or Carville I think we'd be better served by looking at strategies to win back the areas we were trounced in. Areas that have historically been more likely to vote dem than most of the areas we just took.
I hadn't seen that breakdown; do you have a link?
But we agree on the broad outline: the gains this year are not necessarily sustainable; Dems likely will lose many of those seats in 2008, so it's important for them to spend the next two years figuring out how they're going to make up those losses.
To me, Dean's "50 state" plan is the most logical way to get there. But certainly there's room for intensive cultivation of neglected base districts.
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