On Running Races and Pointing Fingers

there is a place where campaigns can be made successful by will alone; where fundraising and political contributions are unnecessary...But back here on Earth, we live in a society that requires politicians to compete in those functions that are vital to the position they desire, which requires substantial funding.

When Van Os came to Denton, I too was attracted to his rhetoric of sidestepping big interests and major donors in order to connect with and properly serve the people. But as George points out here, there is simply no way to overcome the financial obstacles to implementing a constituency's demands without first winning a large monetary approval.

I agree 100% that we should not waste our time examining the individual losses for a particular flashpoint that resulted in an overall TDP failure. Van Os' bid(s), however, is a great example of how Texas Democrats should not run their campaign in 2008.

Ps. George, your article rocked! I think it should go state-wide!

Which 5 seats did the Democrats pick up in 2006? I haven't been able to find the list.

I must agree with George here. I was talking with DVO early in the primaries and he said something to me then that made my blood run cold. I asked him if he was ready to win the AG race, his response was, "It’s not about winning, it’s about the fight." Let me be the 1st to say, if you did not come to seriously try to win, go home. For those of us who are suffering the effects of bad legislation, deregulation, and rampant corruption, it is only about WINNING..

Mr. Nassar, you act as if DVO is just sour grapes and yet he is making very valid points. I worked very hard to get the TDP to run a statewide Vote Straight Dem ticket campaign that would carry every candidate from Bell on down to local races. The TDP had produced a very mediocre flier for a VSDT campaign and it sat collecting dust mostly. There was no statewide coordinated effort and it would have made all the difference in the world for all the statewide candidates. We need to have a visible and vibrant Party to make that “D” on the ballot mean something. Instead, our state Party sat silent. We had real issues, such as coal fired power plants, voter verifiable paper ballots, education, the TTC, healthcare, Iraq, etc and they could have rallied the masses and taken advantage of the great discontent that was throughout the country and this state. Instead, we were busy rebuilding for 2010.

There is no accountability in the Party and that is an excellent point that DVO makes. SDEC members, as well as county and precinct chairs can sit back and do nothing without anyone taking notice. Many were just waiting for marching orders that never came. One SDEC member justified their lack of effort because “these were not the candidates that they would have chosen” and in 2010, he assured me that we will have candidates worthy of support. This is just unacceptable. I think they feared that if Bell won, it would spoil their plans for 2010.

The ongoing battle over Party control keeps it divided and irrelevant. It is not run as a “Big Tent” party because the grassroots have been left completely out of the process and liberals are often shun in some areas by those who are actively modeling our Party as Republican Lite. All the TDP and SDEC really seems to want from us is our sustaining membership, even though they don’t communicate what is going, share a vision, produce a game plan for winning, educate our people on the issues or create opportunities for activism. There is so much that could be done with talented volunteers and very little money. The effort alone would have raised more money than imaginable.

I believe that the Party needs voices like DVO's to help identify the problems and get the Party moving in the right direction, particularly in a Progressive direction. To treat him like he is a problem is wrong.

Peggy Walton
Conroe, TX

George-

I enjoyed your column and agree in many respects. I've met David on numerous occasions, along with Chris, Barb, Hank and others. I also ran for Congress (TX12) back in 2000, so have some sense of what it feels like to be in the candidates' shoes. The common complaint I hear from all but the most favored candidates is that they start out from square zero, and on this they are right. I remember sitting in a Texas Observer lunch with Molly Ivin back in 1999 or 2000 at which she described the Republicans as having a "toaster," where they drop in a candidate and pop out a winner, while the Democratic candidate has to start by planting their own wheat, milling their own flour, building and stoking their own oven...you get the drill.

Right now is the time for Democrats to be doing the organizing and infrastructure work that will create a favorable environment to recruit, run and win with good candidates in 08. What do you see happening?

We did do well, better than expected I would say, this past November. Let's be real, though - this had as much or more to do with Bush's negatives and the overall Republican failures than anything we did exceptionally well on our side. David and his cohort can be a bit shrill and counterproductive, but they're not all wrong in what they say.

FYI, the three areas in which we screwed ourselves most soundly last go 'round were (A) big Dem money not getting behind Chris early enough or loud enough, (B) Big Dem money not getting behind Barbara at all, and (C) everyone ignoring Hank Gilbert, who I would argue was the best candidate on our entire statewide ticket.

Keep up the good work.

Other statewide candidates have told me the same things that David shared in his diary. The TDP did not support the nominees of the Democratic party for statewide office in 2006. Hank Gilbert, Bill Moody, Valinda Hathcox, Maria Luisa Alvarado and Fred Head have all told me the same things that David mentioned in his article. More than money is involved in presenting and supporting the party's candidates.

The TDP deserves a FAILING assessment on all fronts. When the party discounts the candidates privately and publically, it creates barriers that are UNNECESSARY obstacles to the success of a campaign. The staff of the TDP was consistently INSULTING to the candidates. It went far beyond the mere failure of adequate fundraising.

Unless the TDP staff is changed from top to bottom, there is little hope of turning Texas Blue.

When the TPD does not concur with the selection of the voters in the primary and get on board to do EVERYTHING humanly and legally possible to support the candidates, it fails. They did not even do the MINIMUM this year. For example, Bill Moody's Austin press conference held a few blocks from TDP headquarters was not attended by ONE TDP staff person.

Candidates were "presented" to the delegates of State Convention AFTER 90% of the delegates had left the hall.

The list is much longer. There was an attitude of insult and dismissal on the part of staffers that consistently showed the candidates that they were having to overcome the obstacles erected by party staffers. I was told by more than one statewide candidate that they were prepared for the battle with Republicans but were less prepared to face the battles from their own party.

Faith Chatham

In October, I was often finding voters who wanted to support Democrats who had no idea that there was a Democratic candidate for Governor. The week before the election, I had several swing voters individually comment to me that they were very impressed with Chris' debate performance but had reservations in voting for him because "even his own party is not supporting him." On November 7th, I went into a bank in Uptown Dallas wearing a Chris Bell t-shirt. The teller asked me who he was.

I personally witnessed some of the grueling schedule Chris and his team worked on less-than-minimal funds. I personally witnessed his discipline in regularly calling potential donors between events. In contrast, when I attended Campaign Camp in Austin (which was very worthwhile), Boyd Ritchie and other TDP representatives said nothing - not even names- about the campaigns of our statewide candidates. Even on a barebones budget, the party could have sent out daily emails to Democrats educating them about the candidates and ways to help their campaigns. Some good old "rah-rah!" would have helped. It is obvious that the TDP did not meet their responsibilities to Democratic candidates. Most Democratic ACTIVists I know have given up on the TDP and, instead, donate and volunteer for candidates directly.

Gangy, Dallas

Its grassroots vs power politics. Dean vs. Emanuel. Its 50 states in the nation and 254 counties in Texas. Progressives organize people not money. Yes, of course we cannot ignore money, but to the degree that we place faith in the principles of democracy, we believe and act as if power comes from the people. There seems to be quite a few people claiming the moniker of populist and progressive in this state that do not understand the fundamental values contained in the most basic meaning of these words.

It is really very simple; we must organize at a precinct level. While we would like such an effort to be organized by the TDP, it seems senseless to wait for that to happen. Get Busy.

I am posting this at the request of Lloyd Criss. I completely agree with him.

The Texas Blue:

I, for one, resent the recent attacks on David Van Os. He is a person who, along with our other statewide candidates, have given much of themselves for the betterment of our state and party.

His motivation is not to bellyache about the past, it is to do better in the future. He and the others have earned their right to critique.

The truth is our statewide candidates did not win in the general election because our party failed to get out the base Democratic vote in their behalf. A negative “can’t win” attitude prevailed throughout our party and state.

Bush, Rove, DeLay and party have whipped us down and demoralized us so bad for so long that many of our major party contributors left the party and joined the Strayhorn fiasco. We heard can’t win from top to bottom.

Our party will come back and win again when we learn to believe in it the way Van Os did. We had victories in Dallas County, Galveston County, 69 state house districts and two new congressional districts because the Democrats there believed we could win.

I do not see any advancing progressive ideas coming from the Texas Blue.

Lloyd Criss, Chair

Galveston County Democratic Party

SDEC Member, District 11

No flame this time. The anger I previously expressed over your earlier postings has been set aside, in order to move forward in discussion, hopefully without rancor or hostility.

I think I may possibly have finally understood at least some of what you have been trying to get at.

It seems to me, boiled down to the essence, that one of the things you are criticizing is my lack of greater in-depth campaign staff.

It is a perfectly valid critique. I agree with your criticism. But I think you have made a factual error, and that is in an apparent assumption that I didn't have more in-depth staff because I didn't want it. That's, pardon the colloquialism, nuts. Of course I would have loved to have a comprehensive campaign staff.

If you think I enjoyed the frenetic daily experience of doing too many things myself because I didn't have enough staff help, while at the same time going through the minute-by-minute mental discipline to be ready to give the next speech, also while supervising from long-distance the work of the lawyers who are my younger law-firm associates, think again. If you think that my one semi-employee and my many volunteers enjoyed having the same experience themselves, think again. None of us were sufficiently masochistic to relish hitting the brink of exhaustion on a daily basis. But we all did it because we believed so much in the cause of putting a different kind of lawyer in the Attorney General’s office from the corporate shill and political hack who is presently using the office to cheat the people of Texas.

I would have given practically anything I had for a more comprehensive campaign staff, definitely to include a press secretary. But I didn't have anything left to give. And thanks to what I have tenderly called the "culture of defeatism" that affected the community of Democrats who used to regularly donate larger contributions at the levels of $250 and up to statewide Democratic nominees, the ability to hire comprehensive staff did not exist.

(Note: I am not saying the grassroots Democrats and county chairs were part of the culture of defeatism. They weren't. I think you have misunderstood me about this. The grassroots Democrats and county chairs, at least most of them to my observation, were enthusiastic as hell and marvelously active in 2006. The culture of defeatism comes from elitists higher up the food chain, whose defeatism betrays the grassroots Democrats and county-level Democratic leadership. I did not ever intend to suggest that local county chairs, local clubs like Denton County YDs, or grassroots Democratic activists were purveyors of the culture of defeatism. The full responsibility for your misunderstanding rests with my less than perfect communicating.)

I think also it is a possibility that you have not personally experienced the mental and emotional discipline required of all political candidates who do a lot of stump speaking in their campaigns, day in and day out, several times a day to different groups of strangers. I am certainly not complaining or playing martyr here - I love the stimulation and challenge of a continuous stump-speech campaign. It is an opportunity to connect at deep levels with fellow human beings by pouring out one's heart and one's deepest convictions to them, exposing one's soul to strangers, putting oneself out there at the highest levels of personal vulnerability, sharing with strangers all day long one's core beliefs and one's greatest hopes for the kind of world we should be living in and leaving to future generations.

It requires constant focus and mental discipline to do this. Everyone who has ever run hard for political office has experienced at least some level of it. Your posts seemed to me to display an unseemly minimizing of these things on your part toward any hard-working Democratic candidate who doesn't meet your judgmental criteria for candidate-worthiness.

To the extent that you may think I did not attempt to press hard on the metropolitan journalists about their disregard of the statewide candidates, such an assumption would not be accurate. I badgered and battered the hell out of them about their obstinate and arrogant dismissal of the statewide Democratic nominees' candidacies, in phone calls, emails, letters, person-to-person meetings, speeches (in my Convention address I criticized the journalists’ disregard of our candidates), you name it. You might have enjoyed being a fly on the wall at my editorial board interviews where I jumped on them about it. It could have made a meaningful difference if the TDP had also pressed the newspapers about their dismissive attitude toward the statewide nominees. The top political columnist for one of the big 5 metropolitan papers finally told me, "I appreciate what you're saying, but the people at TDP keep giving us signals that they do not think you statewide guys have a chance in hell to win." Then he/she immediately swore me to confidentiality on his remark. I agreed to honor his/her request for confidentiality. Having made that agreement I won't break it, though I would love to be able to tell you the columnist’s name.

I think maybe, George, that the culture of defeatism that all the statewide nominees experienced was so crazy, so unusual, so beyond the pale, that your assumptions may not have been equipped to take it into account, simply because normally one would never assume that such a pervasive defeatist attitude would ever happen at the state-party level. I've been active in Democratic Party politics for 35 years, year in and year out. I've run on the statewide ticket three times now. And I have never seen such a pervasive "we can't win so let's not try" attitude applied to the top levels of our Democratic ticket in Texas. It's been pretty bad before, but never as bad as in 2006.

Hell, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Jim Dunnam, openly said to the Houston Chronicle, "There was a decision made in 2005 that we were not going to attempt to be a state-level party in 2006." Trial lawyers who are friends of mine and who heard, "we're all agreed not to help the statewides because we don't think they have a chance," have told me about it. A Democratic State Senator who is a friend of mine told me late in the season, in mid October, that the decision everybody had bought into to, to abandon the statewide candidates made him/her sick. It wasn't any dad-gum secret within the aristocracy of the Democratic political community, George, not a secret at all. But they didn't tell the grassroots activists and county chairs about it (or at least not most of them) because they didn't want to dampen any enthusiasm that existed among the activists.

I think maybe you're also applying a somewhat unrealistic belief that a statewide candidate's campaign organization is not credible if the ideal model of a campaign organization doesn't exist in every county. Good lord man, there are 254 counties. And, with the obstacle of the upper-echelon culture of defeatism, reinforced day in and day out by the big newspapers, it was almost a miracle to have the levels of organization that we did.

Using your county as an example, the level of organization and discipline of the wonderful grassroots support organization for my campaign in Denton County was indeed a miracle for me, and they pulled off miracles. And as for the 254-county tour, developing a comprehensive series of routes and schedules so as to make the whole state fit together in an almost perfect set of jigsaw puzzle pieces of five counties per day, mapped so as to be timed to reach five county seat towns per day in almost perfect map order, starting at the first stop of each day no earlier than 8:00 a.m, and ending at the fifth stop of each day no later than 4:30 p.m., and making it all fit together across the state without doubling back through counties, wasn't just almost a miracle, it was a miracle, thanks to the incredibly dedicated and talented volunteers who put it all together.

I think also maybe you've been trying to say that you think I ignored independent media. Hardly! My volunteers and I intensely cultivated the independent media. Some of the volunteers who routed and scheduled the tour also worked extraordinarily hard at getting the independent media - the small-town and rural newspapers and radio stations - to cover the tour. My volunteers who worked on this aspect were extraordinarily successful. The small-town and rural press covered my tour extensively. Over 120 newspaper stories resulted, the overwhelming majority with decidedly favorable tones. Didn't and doesn't matter to me whether they call themselves "liberal", "conservative", or "progressive"; they were important to us, they covered, and covered in a friendly manner. One of the most rewarding aspects of the tour for me was getting to know so many dedicated, idealistic, hard-working, and talented small town and rural journalists.

You might like to know that some of my volunteers who worked so hard at all those activities and pulled off those miracles have read your posts on the Blogs. I am not trying to throw any more personalized flame your way and hope not to get started down that road again; I just think you ought to know this. They are human beings too, and they matter a lot. People like them are the heart and soul of every Democratic Party effort. They are the heart and soul of the political process. They are the heart and soul of democracy itself. I won't tell you what specific comments they have made to me, but if you would stop and consider it you might imagine how your postings might have made them feel. Let's just say they are not exactly in love with you.

Finally, I infer from a few of your comments a possibility that you may have - I'm not drawing a conclusion, I'm saying “infer a possibility” and "may have" - offered some help to my campaign and not received a response. If that is the case, I apologize. Believe me please, to ignore someone who wanted to help would definitely not be something I wanted to happen. If such is the case, I would appreciate your contacting me directly at david@vanoslaw.com and telling me about it specifically.

Perhaps some might question, why did David Van Os respond in such an angry fashion to George Nassar's original comments about his campaign on The Texas Blue? George, you publicly wrote some things in a journalistic format that described the functioning of my campaign organization in a highly negative light in a widely distributed publication to my fellow Democrats. In so doing you placed not only me, but also my wonderful, hard-working, dedicated campaign volunteers in a highly unfavorable light concerning something very important to us all, i.e., the legitimacy and meaningfulness of our efforts.

What made me truly angry was that you did it on the basis of assumptions that factually were way off base (how do I know they were off base? - simple: I had first-hand knowledge of things you spoke of, and you didn't), and were sourced on very little first-hand knowledge and virtually zero attempt to investigate the factual bases of those assumptions.

I'm willing to apologize, and I do hereby apologize to you, for displaying my anger toward you in such an inflammatory manner on the public Blogs without trying to talk with you first. I should have contacted you personally, pointed out the problems, and tried to resolve your factual misunderstandings. Having it to do over, that is what I would have done. It was poor judgment on my part not to do so. It was wrong.

I wish I had a penny for every time in my life I’ve made a mistake, exercised poor judgment, or wished I had done something in a different way; I would be able to contribute all the philanthropy and charity I’ve ever wished I could contribute.

One of the things I am asking my fellow Democrats to do with respect to political campaign theory is simply, to listen a little more to their hearts and little less to bean-counting. I respectfully submit it is the path to the successes the people need from our party in order to obtain relief from robber barony and anti-Constitutionalism.

Though you may disagree, I ask you at least to respect. Thank you for your courteous attention.

Sincerely,

David Van Os

P.S. You and your colleagues at The Texas Blue are turning out a very impressive product. I extend my congratulations and I wish you the best.