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Susan Montee’s plans for the party, Part 1

In case you don’t know how we got four years of Baby Blunt in 2004 instead  of Claire, it happened partly because of how the Democratic party was organized–and I use that word “organized” with one raised eyebrow. The party has usually been simply an extension of the campaign of the highest elected official, so in ’04 that meant that it was run at the behest and for the benefit of Gov. Holden. Then McCaskill beat him in the primary. Since the party organization that year was full of Holden volunteers, Claire depended on the Kerry organization for workers. Three weeks before the election, Kerry pulled out of Missouri, leaving Claire without any boots on the ground. She lost by a little less than three percent.

So when she ran for the Senate two years later, she did the smart thing: she made the party self sustaining, separate from the highest elected Dem official, and put Roger Wilson in charge (for no salary). He set about fundraising for the party and telling Missourians what Democrats stood for. Those were the days when Jack Cardetti badgered members of the Missouri press daily to print the Democratic point of view.

But after Wilson left in 2007, the party reverted to arm-of-the-highest-elected-official status and has gradually turned into a nonentity. This last cycle it did next to nothing to get an effective message out either to party members or to the populace in general. Furthermore, the party is broke. Susan Montee, the new chairman, hopes to change the dismal performance and the financial picture. At Rea Kleeman’s condo in St. Louis week before last, she discussed her plans with a group of activists who want to improve the quality of the message Missouri Democrats put out and who want to put one out–which would be a refreshing change.

Montee talks to Rea Kleeman and Marty Walsh

That group, Progressive Dems–STL (it adopted its new name at the Sat. Jan. 8th meeting) was pleased to hear what Montee plans. For starters, she wants the party to be independent of the top elected official again, in this case Nixon. And she points that, oddly enough, the lack of campaign finance limits makes doing so more practical. When the governor was limited to taking $1250 from a given individual, people who wanted to give him more routed the money through the party coffers. Since that is no longer necessary, no state official needs to tie the party to his apron strings.

Montee wants Democrats to see her getting our message out effectively, and she figures that when they realize that is happening, they’ll be willing to contribute to the party. She’ll have to work from the ground up, though. Here’s how pitiful the party organization is: there isn’t even a list of contact info for the State Party Committee members. Her first task is to put that together. Then she plans to make local party leaders aware that she’s on the job by reaching out to the county chairs immediately about the ballot initiatives that are already getting revved up.

Another way to get the attention of Democrats is to cover what’s going on this legislative session. The state faces a $700 million budget shortfall, so there will be plenty to report, as the legislature wrestles with where to make the cuts. Montee told the Progressive Dems that the party has a huge e-mail database, and that she plans to make the most of it to spread the word about doings in the lege in the upcoming months. Furthermore, she will send info to party officials in St. Louis and Jackson counties and ask them to forward it to the people on their e-mail lists.

Still another step in reviving the party is to urge county chairs to set up web pages and keep them current. Since she will be sending them articles about what’s going on in Jeff City, at least some of the content for those web pages will be ready made for them.

Montee believes … No, Montee knows that this state has plenty of Democrats. They’re out there, but they were fed up last election by the Walter Mittys in our ranks who were afraid to stand tall and speak out proudly about Democratic achievements and values. She’s not afraid to stand up to the Republican message machine, and she expects that the national party is waking up as well to that necessity. Indeed, the national party has set up a rapid response team to respond to an expected surge of lies and misunderstandings about the new health care law.

Could it be that we have a new party chairman who has some fire in her belly? Rea Kleeman hopes it is so and said that, for the kind of dedication Montee is showing, Montee should be paid. Right now, our new chairman is working part time for a law firm in St. Jo to pay the bills so that she can spend the rest of her work week (and, no doubt, burn lots of midnight oil) trying to give this party new life. Kleeman asked if Democratic Party chairmen in other states work for free.

Montee said that right now, given the recent, uh, less than stellar performance of the state party, she doesn’t feel as if she could ask its members to come up with a salary for her. She’s more intent on getting it reinvigorated. That said, though, she admitted that in other states it is a paid position. In fact, in some states, candidates for the office have spent up to $100,000 to campaign for the job. You can bet that when Ann Wagner chaired the Republican state party, she got paid.

I have no idea how much Susan Montee ought to be compensated for her organizational and political expertise. What I do know is that she’ll need wisdom and energy for the task she’s taking on. So I thank her for taking on the challenge–and hope that eventually she gets monetary thanks commensurate with her efforts.

And by the way, any progressives interested in joining Progressive Dems–STL may do so by contacting Rea Kleeman: (314) 727-7374, beckkleeman@charter.net

Last November, the state of Missouri lost an auditor who won the 2009 “Excellence in Accountability Award” from the state auditors association and gained a financial dimwit in Tom Schweich. So lord knows that I am not going to claim Montee’s loss is a blessing in disguise, but I will say that she plans to make lemonade out of it.

I like lemonade. Her brand of it anyway.

Montee and her aide, Allison Bruns, drove to St. Louis from Jeff City last Thursday to confer with some members of a newly formed group, the St. Louis Progressive Democrats. Rea Kleeman, who founded the group, invited her when Kleeman realized that Montee’s aims as the new Democratic Party Chairman matched the issues the STL Progressive Dems have begun working on. As a member of the group, I attended with an eye toward informing you about changes Montee hopes to make in the party structure and messaging.

Montee considers herself exhibit A that both those aspects of the Missouri Democratic Party need reform. She was well aware of how current weaknesses in the party hurt her chances of reelection. So now that she is in charge of the party, she has plans. First, she wants to get the message out that we are more than merely not-that-corrupt-Roy-Blunt. Missourians knew Blunt was corrupt; yet they voted for him and other Republicans because the Democratic Party didn’t give them a reason to vote for Democrats. We got pummeled at the polls in November for failing to impress on voters what we had done for them. The messaging failure started at the national level and permeated our own state.

Montee and the St. Louis Progressive Democrats in the room last Thursday shared that conviction.

We agreed that there’s no excuse for the fact that many voters think their taxes have gone up under Obama. Democrats haven’t impressed upon them that they not only got a tax cut, but that it was, depending on how you figure it, either the biggest tax cut or the second biggest in U.S. history. Oh, and Republicans voted against it. But if the electorate doesn’t know about its huge tax cut, it’s because Democrats apparently thought they could murmur the news, and it would be widely disseminated. ESP might have worked as effectively.

We also found it maddening that the electorate swallowed the “government takeover of health care” nonsense and never got the memo telling them that health care reform is, among other things, going to create thousands of jobs in Missouri, not to mention making health care available to many thousands of hard working people in this state who don’t have it now.

Furthermore, lots of voters don’t know that Democrats passed a bill to regulate banks, much less that Republicans want to defund the regulatory mechanisms it sets up. Bankers are currently less popular in this country than Satan, and yet Democrats aren’t screaming bloody murder about Republican efforts to let the bankers play as freely with our cash as if it were Monopoly money.

The Democratic Party has passed some excellent legislation. But mum’s the word. Look, in politics, modesty is suicide.

Nor have Democrats pounded Republicans as the culprits in this recession. This economy should have been labeled “Bush’s Blunder” and that phrase should have been seared into American brains by daily repetition. Voters should have been told how Democrats changed the job picture.

They should have seen dozens of thirty second ads showing the chart above with a voiceover intoning something like: “President Bush led us into this recessionary swamp, but Barack Obama has been reversing the damage. We were losing almost 800,000 jobs a month under Bush. Now we’re gaining almost 300,000 a month. That’s what President Obama’s stimulus accomplished. It staved off another Great Depression.” I didn’t see anything laying into the Republicans or educating the electorate on those basic facts. Did you?

The message from the national party was Pit.I.Ful. There was so much to beat the drums about but not enough noise to flush a jackrabbit. The same too often held true at the state level. From many Democratic candidates, the message was, “Barack who? Never heard of him. Got nothing to do with him.” Many such candidates tried to distance themselves from the president and went down with a thud. Ben Franklin had advice about that kind of behavior: “We must all, indeed, hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

So we took a thumping. But Susan Montee maintains that it wasn’t because the Republicans convinced a huge chunk of voters that government can never do anything right and that social programs should be eviscerated. It’s true that when we failed to get our message out, we lost many undecided voters, but even more important we demoralized the base. Montee said:

“I think, on the whole, boy we really had a lot of accomplishments. My criticism is how badly they handled talking about them. There was a huge amount of Democrats that didn’t turn out to vote, and it’s not because they were mad at the policies that came out of the White House over the last couple of years. They were happy about those. They were mad because it was handled so badly. They felt beat up. Everybody kept saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to lose everything. You’re going to lose everything.’ So why would they turn out to vote?”

Brian Wahby, the Chairman of the St. Louis City Democratic Central Committee, who attended the meeting at Montee’s invitation, added that Missouri had a quarter a million fewer voters this year than in 2008 and most of those who stayed away were Democrats. The raw numbers of Democratic voters in St. Louis City were about the same this year and in 2006, but the city numbers should have been much higher than the 2006 figures because of all the new Democrats that were registered in the city in 2008.

Montee echoed that point:

“So when people go ‘Oh, the voters have spoken and now we’re all (inaudible) here,’ I say ‘No we’re not!’ It’s just that people stayed home. You can take the 2006 numbers and the 2010 numbers from my race as a good indicator. You can overlay all these counties where the Republican candidate in’06 and in ’10 got exactly the same numbers. So you go, okay, well, this woman in ’06 got 17,000 votes and Schweich got 17,000 votes. The difference was that in ’06, I got 20 and this time I only got 15. And that’s all over the place. I could pull 10, 20 counties and show those exact same percentages. So it wasn’t that people who in ’06 voted Democratic shifted over. They didn’t show up at all. And that’s why we know that we can do something about it. Because if it was that all these people now are voting Republican, how do we get ’em back, that’s a whole different question than I think the question that we’re dealing with, which is how do we get our people to care enough to turn out.

Montee knows that to do that, we have to communicate effectively. First, we have to decide what we need to let the voters know. Basically, this year that would have been the items in my rant above. She didn’t speak to every one of those last Thursday, so I can’t swear she’d agree 100 percent. But I do know she wishes that both the national party and our state candidates had evoked the same strong message about what we accomplished.

Once we know what we want to say, then we have to figure out how to improve party structure to get tha
t message out to our own people, to start with. They have to believe that we’re going to speak up for their ideals, and that there’s an actual working entity there instead of a black hole where the party ought to be.

Changing party structure to achieve that is a large topic. I’ll tackle that in the next posting.

Pictured above: first, Susan Montee; second, from left to right are Cindy Brown, Rea Kleeman and Marty Walsh; third, Brian Wahby