What do the Democrats need to do to Win?

I was writing about this on dKos last November and now Bill Bradley comes to my support. Why did Kerry (and Gore before him) lose the Presidency? Simple. Republicans are organized to win elections. The Democrats are looking for a few charismatic "leaders" who will save their asses.*

This from the Grey Lady, publishing Bill Bradley and this from Donkey Rising where Ruy Teixeira points it out.

Go look at those things. You don't need to read further here if my long-winded attempts at analysis bore you. You have been warned.

The Democrats offered several really attractive Presidential candidates in 2003, including Kerry, Dean, and Clark. For pure charisma (before they beat each other up) any of them should have beat Bush. In 2000 Gore should have taken the election in a walk-away - even with Nadar attempting to sabotage him. What happened?

No party structure. Each candidate has to create his own as he goes along and as he gathers sufficient reputation as a winner to collect the funds he needs. The money guys hang back until they can tell who is most likely to win before they throw money at them. This results in a hastily thrown together campaign organization made up of people who have not worked together in the same organization previously. In the 17th Century soldiers and politicians realized that such ad hoc organizations usually lost to long-term, well-trained professional armies. It should be obvious to Democrats that the same is true in politics today. (It has long been obvious to the Republicans.)

Think Bush had the problem of gathering money and assembling a campaign organization?

That's enough thinking. Of course he didn't. Bush was recruited by the Republican money people, and handed his platform to run on by the Heritage Foundation and the CATO institute. You will notice that the ideas were already well poll-tested and well-publicized before Bush ran on them.

Rove's position in this has been as a broker. He picked out Bush as being a good candidate (name recognition and personality skills) then used the political operative-level of the party to connect with the money and the organizations that collected the money. He was doing this during Bush's first term as Governor of Texas. Along the way he was collecting the platform ideas.

The Democrats have the political operatives, but they don't have the well-paid publicists like Limbaugh, Coulter, and Hannity. They also haven't had in place the organizations needed to run a national campaign and the funds to support all that.

Some of these were created for the last election, and the fund-raising has gotten a lot better. I think Kos is an example of the new, better, and more effective Democrat. But I don't see the think tanks assembling, testing and publicizing the platforms, and I don't see the well funded publicists (Well, OK. Air America is a start.) But most of all, I don't see an overall Democratic strategy to pull all this together into a structure that, like the Republicans, recruits Presidential candidates.

It will get here, but maybe not until we lose again in 2008. My only question, really, is how many losses does it take to make the Democratic Party hungry enough to break out of the past and do what it takes to win?

* (pun intended)