Heckuva Job Rummy

(Madame Speaker, how's that for a change?)

Well, at least when it come to Donald Rumsfeld, the President has no fear of cutting and running. In fact, he was against letting his Secretary of Defense go before he was for it. After running around the country telling America that a vote for a Democrat would be a vote for terrorists and defeat in Iraq, the President explained that he had simply lied a week ago when he told reporters “Donald Rumfeld and Dick Cheney are doing fantastic jobs and will stay through the rest of my term.”

He revealed today that in fact he had been in discussions with Rumsfeld and had been seeking possible replacements for him since well before the election. The W’s excuse? “I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war into the final days of the campaign.”

Did Tony Snow and Karl Rove secretly go on strike? If this explanation is the President’s own best attempt at spin, my head is definitely spinning. In the meantime, last I heard the Vice President left for a hunting trip while everyone else of significance was campaigning this week. Is the president looking for a replacement for Uncle Dick as well? Even Rush Limbaugh turned on the administration by saying that he’d felt uncomfortable having to tout some of the now deposed congress’s policies. Apparently it was James Talent who forced Rush to make fun of Michael J. Fox’s tremors.

Wow! I’m being a bad sport. This is a time to be gracious. One of the hallmarks of American democracy has been that except for the election of Lincoln a lost election has never started a civil war. This tradition of orderly transition from one party to the other after an election may be our democracy’s most valuable asset. I congratulate both Conrad Burns and George Allen for respecting the spirit of that tradition by conceding their very close races.

While the results speak for themselves, one sign to me before Tuesday that the left was learning how to strategize in a 21st century election was my experience with Moveon’s Call for Change, a phone bank program that married flat rate long distance to the internet. The idea was very much around in 2004 when I made 200 + phone calls on behalf of John Kerry, but the database, script, and method were far cruder. This time, the script changed as the days passed, had several categories of useful information, and I stopped reaching people who were already the chair of the local party or who had gotten seventy four calls on the same day. It told me that the grassroots people had been listening, refining, and thinking through the technology very carefully and possibly matched Karl Rove’s firepower for once.

I’m fairly shy, so it’s still hard for me to call total strangers, but as far as I’m concerned any strategy based on regular people talking directly to other regular people has to be good for Democracy not just democrats. Hopefully, these kinds of strategies will always beat things like robocalling and spending billions on ad time.

Even more impressive, my friend Mr. Pogblog made more than 2,000 dials and over 600 actual live contacts with voters. In any case, she called so many times that she wound up number one on Moveon’s list of individual callers, something they tracked in the software (another good idea, if you’ve ever played arcade video games and looked at the hall of fame you know what I mean). She’s worked on political campaigns for more than ten years and has attacked every elective cause with the same level of energy. Up to now, she’s lost most of the time. Mr. Pogblog was one of many unsung heroes of the 2006 midterm elections. Call for Change claimed that over 6 million calls got made, so if Mr. Pogblog was at the top of the list an awful lot of people made calls.

I don’t know that having Democrats in control of both houses of congress is necessarily a cure all. I am, however, quite aware of the fact that for the last six years, they weren’t the disease. It was nice to wake up on a Wednesday morning and not cringe at the news. While it’s great fun at times to make Karl Rove and George Bush jokes, it would actually be far nicer not to have to for a while.

Still, I have to say that the election likely wasn’t about liberal vs. conservative. I suspect most of us just want public servants who actually serve the public. I hope both parties keep that in mind.


chancelucky