Building Top Down or Building Locally

The Obama campaign did a top down effort and were successful in 2008. The GOP is now building from the local base and has been successful in every major election since then. The two guys leading both of those efforts, David Plouffe for the Dems and Ed Gillespie for the GOP are profiled a bit in this piece at The Washington Examiner:

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is heading to the White House to help out after his 14-month victory tour.

It must have dawned on him that you can't Keep claiming credit for creating a juggernaut that changed politics forever when the hopeful masses are running around with pitchforks.

Plouffe, who extols the genius of his organization for 400 pages in "The Audacity to Win," explains how he took a 46-year-old freshman senator to the presidency by channeling the desire of Americans for change into the candidacy of Barack Obama.
Now, Plouffe is going to go help clean up the mess he helped create.

By having Obama run as a shamanistic healer rather than as a politician with a program, Plouffe set up the president for a precipitous fall.

Before Plouffe gets to the White House, one guy he should call is Ed Gillespie....

But Plouffe should take note of what Gillespie is doing today: taking over as chairman of the Republican State Leadership Committee.

He will focus on winning the statehouse races this year that will decide the direction of the redistricting after the 2010 census. Gillespie figures that 57 state legislative races will have an effect on 120 seats in Congress for the next decade, and he wants to help make sure the new districts lean Republican.

But beyond the cold calculus of Gerrymandering, there's also the issue of what to do with millions of Americans who are angry as rattlesnakes over what's going on in Washington.

Gillespie doesn't want to send tea partiers e-mails telling them to invest their hopes in someone else, he wants them to run for their state house of delegates or get involved in local politics -- not foot soldiers in someone else's revolution, but field commanders in their own movement.

Gillespie points to Sen.-elect Scott Brown, who got mad about taxes and spending, ran for the state legislature, and was ready to pounce when an opportunity arose.
"When the social conservatives came into the party in the 1980s, the country club Republicans were a little uncomfortable," Gillespie said. "Now some people say we can't incorporate this new energy. I disagree. We're looking at the people who will be the farm team for the next generation of national leaders."

I skipped Gillespie's bio section, but you can read that at the link. I think the success already seen by the GOP in VA, NJ and MA tells you that the bottom-up approach is working, and taking those local state races builds the infrastructure for the national races.

Plouffe gave us a Messiah who, unfortunately for him and the country, lacked any actual magical powers. We've already seen the spin campaign he's starting in which he will try and convince you that everything is working just as planned, but I think the day has passed for something like that work. The voters were badly fooled by Obama and they won't be fooled by spin now.