Simon Rosenberg - The western choice

Today Simon Rosenberg announced his campaign for Chair of the DNC. Directly after his announcement speech at the National Press Club, Rosenberg spent 45 minutes on a half an hour conference call with BlogPAC.

Annatopia, Chris Bowers, and Tim Tagaris have more on the call and Kos posted on Rosenberg this morning.

I'm going to examine how a Rosenberg DNC would affect western democrats.

For 8 years, America enjoyed the strongest economy in history.
In the last four, Republicans in Washington have given us the worst in a generation.
Now, Americans are sending a message.
About 1.6 million jobs lost.
Over 170,000 Colorado children without health insurance
A record surplus transformed into a record deficit.
It’s time to restore the promise of America.

That is the one of the ads in the Restoring the Promise of America campaign that Simon Rosenberg's New Democrat Network ran (see the ad):

NDN used state specific polling to design effective messages for each state. Then, NDN tests the ads to ensure they were effective before putting them on the air. The tests conducted on ads for Alaska, Colorado and Oklahoma showed that the ads were very effective. Viewing the ads make swing voters more favorable towards the Democratic Party, more unfavorable to the Republican Party, more likely to vote Democratic, and less likely to vote Republican.

This is a very important thing for western Democrats. For too long, too many party leaders have viewed the Rocky Mountain states as the south with snow. The most important thing for westerner's to consider is a party chair who will do no harm. Many out west would prefer to be left to our own devices rather than have to worry about the east-coasters coming along and screwing things up. For me, this is a primia facia burden. One that Rosenberg meets.

Simon Rosenberg and the West

Back before the election a couple of Montanans sat down for dinner with Mr. Rosenberg and I left believing he could do a lot of good for the Montana Democratic Party. He understands narrowcasting message and has enough of a business perspective to go with what can be proved to work. Rosenberg was heavily involved in Alaska and Colorado and also invested in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. He values the strategic nature of the west enough to invest half of his resources in the mountian states -- something I can appreciate. He understands the west.

He also seems intent on campaigning everywhere (even Idaho). Since media markets don't end at the border, this seems like a good approach. With the ease of long distance communication I agree that we need to talk to everyone to convince the people we need. Montanans in the north-west corner would do better if we didn't write-off North Dakota and there are dozens of examples throughout the west where fighting hard everywhere may allow us to win anywhere. Not all of the time, but our over-reliance on targeting has proven to be less than successful.

Communication was a big topic during today's call. While most candidates are running to be Chair of the DNC, Rosenberg seems to be running to turn the DNC into a Democratic Empire. It was as if he ripped up the job description and instead offered plan to do 1000 times as much as any of us had ever imagined the party doing. Simon has actually been building the vast left wing conspiracy and allowing him to Chair the DNC would provide further tools for the media future he has been working on for years. He understands message and he is working already to create the vehicles necessary to distribute our message.

Out west, population density means that we are prime candidates for agressive use of the netroots. This is a very important realm for modernization. I've written a three-part series on this for Rosenberg's NDN Blog (1, 2, 3). He really gets it.


- Bob Brigham
Bay to the Beltway
+ San Francisco Campaigns + San Francisco Politics + San Francisco Elections