Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics
by Ari Berman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 302 pp.

hese days it is hard to conjure up the marzipan dreams and sugarplum fantasies that wafted through the liberal firmament (and the publishing world) in the weeks following Barack Obama’s election. Middle-aged adults not prone to gush were describing the election night rally in Grant Park as the best night of their lives—a statement that was, of course, a depressing indictment of their romantic history. Obama operatives like David Plouffe and David Axelrod were hailed as the greatest strategists since Sun Tzu dined alone. And a president elect who had been in the Illinois state senate just four years earlier was routinely being compared to Abraham Lincoln (remember the Team of Rivals obsession?).

Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, Ari Berman’s paean to the Democratic Party’s grassroots activists, reads as if it were commissioned or at least shaped during this heady hope-y change-y period of liberal wish fulfillment. But now—on the eve of another long winter of Democratic discontent, the just-published book inspires a sense of temporal displacement. It seems off-key and out-of-step with what we know, akin to a Dick Cheney biography that ends with him serving as a triumphant secretary of defense during the Gulf War.

Berman, a youthful writer for the Nation,knows his politics, and it shows. He gets extra credit from me, an aging and creaky boy on the bus, for somehow gleaning that Richard Nixon in 1960 ran the last fifty-state presidential campaign. His account of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, built around interviews with the right people, is smart and nuanced. Berman has also admirably gotten out of Washington and therefore understands—in a way that most TV talking heads do not—how Obama managed, for example, to carry Indiana, a state that last went Democratic for president in the 1964 LBJ landslide. (The Hoosier explanation: Obama won the state by putting organizers into suburban Republican bastions like Hamilton County and thereby picking up more than 20,000 votes simply by sharply cutting the GOP’s 2004 margin.)

But—and this is the problem with maladroit political timing—Herding Donkeys has been corralled by fate. At a time when the troubadours and troublemakers of the Tea Party movement are transforming the Republican Party while dispirited Democrats teeter on window ledges, it is a curious exercise to relive the organizing triumphs of 2006 and 2008. In his chronicle of fired-up local Democratic activists in unlikely places like rural North Carolina and militia-mad Idaho, Berman never directly confronts the question of whether this enthusiasm could ever have been sustained once convenient villains like George W. Bush were frog-marched offstage. I remember well that the anti–Vietnam War movement—another epic burst of left-wing activism—eventually morphed into the Yuppified Eighties once deprived of the catalysts from the military draft and Richard Nixon’s painfully awkward V for Victory hand gestures.

At its core, though, Herding Donkeys is a well-argued and convincing defense of Howard Dean’s legacy as chairman of the Democratic National Committee and his fifty-state strategy, which was often derided by Washington consultants. Dean’s predecessor Terry McAuliffe was, in Berman’s words, “great at raising money and loved appearing on TV, but didn’t care much about the nuts and bolts of grassroots politics, which is precisely where Republicans had been kicking donkey’s ass.” (The last clause in the prior sentence made me wince, but Berman’s prose is usually better than this.) Dean was elected DNC chairman against ragtag opposition in early 2005, in part because of his bold promise to send organizers to all fifty states and help fund the state parties.

Many rank-and-file Democratic loyalists probably naively believe that this is what the DNC had been doing for decades. But, in truth, the national party was little more than a money-laundering machine collecting donations from the wealthy and ladling them out to favored candidates, consultants, and causes. Dean’s enthusiastic embrace of DNC grassroots organizing was, in many ways, more radical than any policy position he espoused during his blast-off-and-crash 2004 presidential campaign.

Dean’s bottom-up vision inevitably led to an epic confrontation during the run-up to the 2006 elections with Rahm Emanuel, then the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Rahm wanted Dean to give him $150,000 to $200,000 each for forty targeted House races,” Berman writes. “When Dean insisted that DNC money be spent solely on the fifty-state strategy, Rahm flew into a rage.” Dean was, in retrospect, on the right side of history, since Emanuel (despite his overhyped reputation) had an uncanny knack for anointing losing House candidates like Tammy Duckworth, a disabled Iraq War veteran, from his home state of Illinois. Chuck Schumer, as the head of the Senate campaign committee, had a less tempestuous relationship with Dean and a far better track record in the breakthrough 2006 elections.

At this juncture, I should mention that I am writing this review in a hotel room in Omaha where I am also reporting a story about Democrat Tom White’s drive to knock off six-term GOP House incumbent Lee Terry in the Nebraska congressional district that Obama—against all odds—carried in 2008 to pick up a lone electoral vote. The White campaign attributes its ability to be competitive in Nebraska in a terrible year for the Democrats to—wait for it—Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 Obama campaign.

Having made Dean his hero, Berman slides periodically into mawkish hagiography. In Berman’s telling, the saintly Dean refused to discuss his confrontation with Emanuel, but (warning: shocking revelation ahead) “Rahm exercised no such restraint. He knew all of Washington’s best reporters and didn’t hesitate to tell them what a disaster Dean was.” Describing the Democratic sweep on election night 2006, Berman writes, “There would be no confetti or heralded embrace with the party’s glitterati for the Democratic chairman. He was still an outcast in his own party.” Berman also misses the political pork-barrel aspects of the fifty-state strategy: by funneling money to the state chairmen—the people who elected him DNC chief—Dean was buying loyalty from the only voters who could oust him from office before the 2008 election.

As Berman carries the story up through the health care debate in Congress, the Nation writer suddenly glimpses the downside of the fifty-state strategy in the inherent caution and conservatism of Democrats elected from House districts that had been mostly ignored before Howard Dean. “The Republicans had become obsessed with ideological purity, losing their majorities and struggling in the wilderness as a consequence,” Berman declares, “but Democrats, if anything, weren’t ideological enough … A whole crew of Democrats now roamed the halls of Congress … standing for little else but political expediency.”

The obvious counterargument to Berman comes via a slight revamping of a famous Sophie Tucker line: “I’ve been in the majority and I’ve been in the minority—and, believe me, being in the majority is better.”

n his epilogue (the book does ramble through Obama’s first year in an effort to give it contemporary relevance), Berman reluctantly acknowledges how evanescent it all was: “The permanent campaign—especially an insurgent one—gets old after a while. Many Obamaphiles … [who] still supported the president, by and large, had understandably wandered back to their previous lives.”

This passage is telling. If three or four years truly represent the life expectancy of left-of-center political passions in troubling times, then maybe the Democrats should depend on their well-paid Washington consultants more than the mercurial moods of grassroots amateurs. (By the way, I share many of Berman’s frustrations with the Democrats’ cadre of professional operatives who force candidates to robotically repeat phrases like “working families” and mouth promises to “keep fighting for you.”) Even Berman’s offhand comment that these Obama acolytes continue to back the president by and large is an acknowledgment of the unreasonable expectations of the summer soldiers of politics.

Perseverance (or, as they called it in my elementary school, stick-to-it-ive-ness) is an underappreciated virtue in politics. Far more important to the conservative movement than, say, Fox News or the Wall Street Journal editorial page is their hard-won understanding (dating back to the Goldwater years) that lasting political change often takes decades, if it happens at all. Liberals, in contrast, often combine the patience of a Hollywood agent with the pessimism of Schopenhauer—and flee from the tawdry compromises and inevitable disappointments of politics after a few election cycles.

My most indelible memory of the 2008 campaign was the infectious optimism in Obama’s America—particularly, the people waiting endlessly in an early-voting line in Columbus, Ohio, on the Thursday afternoon before the election. They included (and I went back to check my notes): a social worker reading her book club novel; a semi-employed cellist; an African American engineer who methodically calculated his time in line to vote (two hours, twelve minutes); a pair of librarians from the suburbs who introduced themselves as life partners; a financial services consultant for an insurance company taking her eighty-year-old mother to vote; a nineteen-year-old cosmologist with pierced eyebrows; and a mother-and-daughter pair of hospital nurses. Ari Berman obviously loves this up-with-people side of politics as much as I do. I just wish that the story he tries to tell in the sadly mistimed Herding Donkeys had a happier ending.