Dean has Demos on rebuilding path

WASHINGTON – Howard Dean is no longer screaming. He’s scheming.

The failed presidential candidate whose howling adieu to the Iowa caucuses helped seal his fate as a presidential candidate is plotting to overhaul the Democratic Party.

Borrowing ideas from President Bush’s re-election campaign, Madison Avenue and his own Internet-driven White House bid, the Democratic National Committee chairman hopes to drag the party into the 21st century.

“What I’m trying to do is impose a system and run this place like a business,” Dean said during an interview in his office overlooking the Capitol.

That vision would be welcome news to party strategists who have complained that the DNC and its chairman of nine months lag behind Republicans in the political arts of messaging, targeting and organizing.

Among Dean’s goals are:

•Making Democrats the party of values, community and reform. Armed with extensive DNC polling, Dean is consulting with party leaders in Congress, mayors and governors to recast the public’s image of Democrats with a unified message.

•Improving the party’s “micro-targeting,” the tactic of merging political information about voters with their consumer habits to figure out how to appeal to them.

•Building a 50-state grass-roots organization, using the same Internet and community-building tools that took Dean’s presidential bid from obscurity to the front of the pack before Iowa.

This is where Dean and Bush have something in common. Both their campaigns benefited from networks of supporters promoting their candidacies person to person – friends telling friends, family and associates how to vote.

A look at Dean’s approach:

Message

The DNC is getting outside help from private-sector consultants who specialize in creating and strengthening corporate images – or “brands.”

“The last time this party was branded was Lyndon Johnson,” Dean said. “We’d been in power so long that we didn’t think we needed to do it.”

The lack of a message or brand makes it difficult for Democrats to capitalize on Bush’s political slump and a series of GOP scandals. While the party is unified in accusing Republicans of creating a “culture of corruption,” Democrats still need to give voters a compelling alternative to GOP rule.

A March 23 memo by DNC pollster Cornell Belcher found that most voters view politics through a values-laden prism rather than through the economic framing traditionally used by Democrats.

On a list of issue choices, “moral values” ranked in the middle of the pack and well ahead of abortion and gay rights. That suggested to Belcher that moral values has a broader meaning for voters than do social wedge issues.

Dean’s take on the polling is that Democrats must recast the values-and-morals debate.

“It’s morally wrong that so many children live in poverty. It’s morally wrong that we have so many working poor people who can’t pull themselves out of poverty,” he said.

Micro-targeting

Bush’s campaign revolutionized the use of micro-targeting to find potential GOP voters and tailor messages to their tastes.

Republicans also used niche media – including cable television, radio, the Internet and even internal video feeds at gyms – to push their message in 2004. In an era of iPods, text-messaging and blogs, Dean said new media will grow in influence as the power of traditional network TV advertising wanes.

The Bush campaign worked with consumer data-mining companies to place every battleground state voter into one of 20 to 30 “clusters” of like-minded people. The DNC’s current system has eight to 16 clusters.

If the DNC can afford it, Dean’s advisers hope to have 40 clusters in time for the next presidential race.

Organizing

Dean is putting four or five DNC staff members in every state with orders to organize every precinct. One of the organizers’ first mandates is to conduct four major events a year, one or two of which are mainly social.

“You’ve got to recruit people. You’ve got to ask them to do something,” Dean said. “You have to treat them like a community.”