Why it absolutely must be a 50-state strategy for Democrats

It has a lot to do with whether you are going to win swing states or not. There was a saying once popular, “The Medium is the Message,” coined by media guru Marshall Macluhan. It meant, roughly, that how you do it may send a stronger message than the one you literally send. When the party abandons any connection with the Red States, and thus inevitably abandons the large minority of Democrats in any of those states, it sends a terrible signal that resonates with ordinary working people in the Blue State. Many of them may have more in common culturally and economically with Southerners than with their in-state big-city slickers, but may be inclined to favor the Democrats on economic issues. Simply abandoning the Red States says, yes, the Republicans are right -- except for African-Americans and maybe other minorities, the Democratic Party is not really a national party, it's the party of the coastal and educated elites in the Blue States. If they don’t care about Democrats in the Red States, they really can’t care about us, either. No sum of media millions can overcome that.

Howard is right, at least until immediately before the election when tactics take over from strategy. The consultants who say otherwise don’t have a clue. All those who think they might want to run for President in 2008 should be laying the groundwork right now right in the belly of the beast: highly visible personal appearances, meeting with ordinary people expressly to dispel the lies the Right-Wing is telling them, in towns, and not only college towns, from South Carolina through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and all the other places where they have become scared to death of “liberals.”

You can't rebuild a national party until you try to re-build a national party