What alternative reality did Cornell Belcher live in during the 1970's-80's? This is what Barack Obama's pollster says about Ronald Reagan, via TM:

I am not necessarily saying Reagan wasn't able to brand himself as such through the mainstream media, but Reagan was an extremist in both rhetoric and action; and during the run-up to his presidency, he was an rapid partisan Republican. In short, the myth of Reagan lives only in the aftermath of the Reagan's multiple candidacies and his Presidency. Besides the historical ignorance, how can Obama's pollster saying this help Obama win the Democratic nomination?

This is correct:

From my limited perspective, Obama is doing well in South Carolina. He was the only one with a strong volunteer presence outside the SC YouTube debate. In talking with a few of his on-the-ground staffers there, I was impressed by their gains in the state. I went and watched a Clinton post-debate rally, and it was not that well-attended, with about 200 people, filling half the room. This being a early primary state, that's not a bad number, and the room was predominantly black women.

Obama's staff invoking Reagan as a model for his campaign is more than just "blasphemy for Democrats" is suicidal for Obama among older black Americans and white liberals. I'd suggest Belcher and Obama do a little historical reading and find out just how bad the 1980's were for the African-American community. Maybe Belcher can poll how many Reagan-Democrats are still around too.

Look, I'm not anti-Obama, but  praising Reagan as a model of hope for Obama? That's gotta rank up there with one of the most stupidest things I've ever heard a consultant be quoted on in a Democratic primary.

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The problem highlighted in this piece in the Politico about black consultants in the Democratic Party is a symptom of a party structure in need of renewal.

Interviews with more than a dozen African-American consultants and an analysis of campaign spending showed that Democratic candidates, national committees, unions and liberal advocacy groups known as 527s do very little business with black-owned consulting firms.

An analysis done for The Politico by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that Democratic campaign spending in 2006 on black-owned firms or shops, with at least one senior principal who is black, amounted to less than 1 percent of the overall spending total. In fact, several white-owned firms, on their own, greatly out-earned all black-owned firms combined.

This is something I've had a number of conversations about with black consultants and operatives in the Democratic Party.  There's a pervasive feeling that the plum jobs tend to go to white people who have been around for a long time and are in the club.  This clubbiness is why elites don't accept genuine populist progressives as legitimate actors in the process, and it has a racial element highlighted by this article.  

It's a mixed picture, though.  

Minyon Moore, formerly President Clinton's White House political director and now a senior partner at the Dewey Square Group consulting firm, said the relatively small amount of Democratic spending on black consultants is important because of the party's long history with black voters.

The consultant ideology of the Mark Penn's is also at work with people like Minyon Moore, who helped lobby for News Corps in 2004 in an aggressive team-sport with the Clinton's DLC nexis.  And let's just say that Dewey Square isn't into diversity for the social justice component, what with their long list of happy corporate clients and astroturfing techniques.  There's more.

But a long-running effort is under way to break open the industry. The class of black consultants that does exist is actively working to diversify the consulting business, beginning at the staff level on Capitol Hill and working up to the top Democratic committees and presidential campaigns.

Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) said that the caucus, through its CBC Institute, is also working hard to open access to party business.

The CBC Institute is the vehicle seeking to host the Fox News debate, so why is this the place where new progressive leadership in the African-American community should come from?  Where are the other institutional resource bases for this community that are actually progressive?  It's very clear that diversity in leadership positions is a critical component of a healthy multi-racial progressive party, but I don't like that the consultant class is perceived as having such an important leadership role in the party.  That's a problem in and of itself, because it's a closed circuit.  We need multi-racial, open and progressive leadership structures, not people like Mark Penn and Minyon Moore running their own closed robocall and micro-polling shops.

As Chris noted, this is an intertwined execution and an investment problem.  It takes financial and social capital to build structures to support an independent and progressive leadership class, white black or brown.  And it takes a willingness on the part of every community to assert leadership, to take risks, and to make this party their own.  That's ultimately what's got to happen.  People like Moore and Penn know that power and morality is color-blind.  People aren't, but power is.

I don't want to get away from a simple point here.  I mean, it's pretty obvious that party elites should hire more black and Hispanic consultants.  I just think there's an added element of how the party structure needs to change to make sure that the new consulting class is both multi-racial and progressive.  Both are critical.  This is as true for the blogosphere as it is for the consulting world, though the constraints on the blogosphere are somewhat different and in all likelihood will correct itself over time as new power-savvy characters emerge to wield power online.  There's a long-standing debate in disempowered communities about a tangentially related dilemma going back centuries, the talented tenth and all that.  I'm curious what you think.  

Update [2007-5-11 8:56:25 by Matt Stoller]:: Bloggernista has more.

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