Old Dogs Move Over

One of the featured speakers at the day-long staff retreat I attended today was a very highly placed manager from the Gore campaign. He was ostensibly speaking to us about maintaining creativity and innovative thinking, but his talk was focused on how companies should orient themselves to encourage it.

He was unbelievably irritating in that he embodied so much that I hate about my party.

First, it took him forty minutes to convey fifteen minutes of information because he was utterly unable to make a declarative sentence without three layers of caveats. "At my company...I've seen...it's hard work...you just have to...and I hate this, but...uncomfortable environments encourage creative thinking." He's a partner in a firm that's a major player in the world of Democratic politics, and he's long been a major player in Democratic politics, so I've no doubt that he's quite sure he's right. But you'd never guess that from the way he conveyed his ideas.

Second, his principles for organization could be boiled down to, "no one should really be in charge." He openly advocated chaos as a means for encouraging innovation, and argued that the only appropriate place for accountability is in the end result. At one point he actually argued that the leadership of an organization shouldn't make all of the key decisions, since people other than leaders can have good ideas you wouldn't want leaders to quash. "Have lines of authority without hierarchy," he said.

If any two things could explain the lion's share of Kerry's loss, and Gore's before him, these two would go a long way. If my party is ever going to earn a governing majority, we've got to learn how to state our beliefs directly, without apology. Then we've got to learn that campaigns, like most other major endeavors, cannot be effective without effective leadership - and that means someone's got to be in charge.

If this guy was any indication, the Democratic Party "leaders" need to step aside and let a new breed of Democrat, one that's neither embarrassed by expressing our ideals, nor confused about the difference between hierarchy and oppression, take over.