While it’s tough to overcome a wave election, I believe the DFL could have done better, and I believe we must do better. There are lessons to be learned from the 2010 election, and we need to learn them. To argue that the party doesn’t need to make any changes is just crazy, but I believe that’s exactly what Brian Melendez, chair of the DFL party, is doing.

Having taken some hits for the party’s losses in the blogosphere (from both Eric Pusey and myself, among others), as well as from some members of the state central committee, Melendez responded yesterday. His email to the central committee was published by Sally Jo Sorenson at Bluestem Prairie, and I think it deserves a thorough response.

First, though, let me reiterate my problem with the DFL’s performance over the past few years. I don’t believe we have effectively communicated our accomplishments, our plans, or even our values. That can’t all be laid at Melendez’s door. Neither the state party nor the legislative caucuses have been successful at this. In fact, it’s a national problem too. Democrats in Congress have done even worse than the Minnesota DFL. But I don’t really care about whose fault it is — I want to talk about how we can fix it.

If this were a problem unique to 2010, I’d be willing to just chalk it up to the Republican wave and move on. But our messaging problems go back way farther than this cycle. I hope our recent losses will be the kick in the pants we need to finally get our act together.

I’ll have more to say about our messaging either later today or, more likely, tomorrow morning. For now, I want to respond fully to Melendez’s arguments. Below the break are some excerpts from Melendez’s letter and my responses. I’m not going to quote the entire thing, because it’s long, but I will do my best not to take anything out of context, either.

After an introduction more focused on national trends, Melendez gets right down to calling us “Wednesday-morning quarterbacks:”

Here in Minnesota, Javier Morillo-Alicea wrote an article on the Bluestem Prairie blog titled “Filling the glass: an organizer’s take on Tuesday in Minnesota,” which pushes back on the “defeatism” with which many DFLers viewed the election results. And while others were focused on Wednesday-morning quarterbacking and the blame game, Nathan Hunstad turned the discussion in a factual direction and gave us the first comprehensive analysis of “Local elections and turnout.

Is what I’m doing — talking about what the DFL needs to improve — “defeatism?” That’s an infuriating charge, and I won’t stand for it. After any election, even one that we win, we should be talking about what we could do better. And after one in which we lose both houses of the Legislature, if you’re not willing to talk about what we can improve, you need to step aside immediately. It’s not enough, in my book, to argue that we were close, as Melendez does:

As Bob Spaulding pointed out on this list, a shift of just 1,590 votes would have left the Minnesota Senate in DFL hands. And a similar shift would have left the Minnesota House under DFL leadership. We are just six seats away from retaking the House, and four seats from retaking the Senate — and a shift of merely four thousand votes in key districts would have made all the difference.

When a newspaper article early in the Kennedy administration referred to the President’s aide Arthur Schlesinger as “coruscatingly brilliant,” Kennedy reminded him that “a hundred thousand votes the other way and they’d all be coruscatingly stupid.”

I’m not arguing this. We were very, very close to holding onto both houses of the legislature. To me, though, that’s not success. I don’t want to accept “close enough.” Instead, it begs a question: Because we were so close, what could we have done to put us over the top? What did we fail to do that we need to be sure we don’t neglect in 2012?

But no. Melendez continues making the case that actually, we had a great election!

One way of measuring the Party’s electoral strength in historical context is… a formula that assigns a score where the Legislature is worth 200 points, divided equally between the House and the Senate; the state Executive branch is worth 200 points, divided equally between the Governorship and the other constitutional offices; and Minnesota’s congressional delegation is worth 200 points, divided equally between the House and the Senate….

So looked at in this context, this cycle was the third best in the Party’s history. We won the governorship for the first time in 24 years. We swept every other statewide constitutional office and, with Senators Klobuchar and Franken in office, we now hold every statewide office. And we are on the cusp of regaining legislative control….

What a ridiculous thing to say. As Joe Bodell writes, the way the “score” is calculated in Melendez’s fake statistic is just silly. Although I’m very glad all of our constitutional officers won, I agree with Joe that I’d gladly trade control of the Auditor’s office for control of the legislature.

…after two decades without a DFL Governor, we have become conditioned to thinking of electoral success in terms of legislative elections, since the Legislature is the only arena in state government where we have succeeded in the past generation. We aren’t accustomed to appreciating the power of a gubernatorial administration: the power of staffing and directing every cabinet office and state department, the power of filling judicial vacancies, the power of the veto pen. We’ll get used to it — and when the most powerful figure in state politics is on our side for a change, it will be a powerful antidote. But right now that power seems remote and unfamiliar, while the loss of our legislative majorities seems all too real.

Ah, now we’re reaching the crux of the problem. This is why I’ so concerned about messaging. Melendez believes that Dayton will be in pretty much the same position Pawlenty has enjoyed. I’m afraid that controlling the Governor’s mansion instead of the legislature won’t make a difference for the DFL, precisely because of our messaging problems.

We routinely got whipped by Pawlenty because we could never bring any public pressure to bear on him. He almost always won debates with the DFL, and the Republicans caucuses’ communications played a large role in that. The DFL usually backed down first in their confrontations with Pawlenty, because the GOP was able to frame the debate in a way that made the DFL look like the bad guys. Will the DFLers in the legislature be as effective in supporting Dayton’s vetoes? Or will we allow the GOP to gain the upper hand and make Dayton look like the bad guy?

So while I acknowledge that we had some fantastic successes, I’m very concerned that our party-wide communication problems are going to be a serious drag on Dayton’s effectiveness. Melendez, though, not only doesn’t seem to thing communication is a problem, he’s downright dismissive of it:

…change for change’s sake isn’t a strategy. There is a saying that half of the money spent in advertising is wasted; the problem is, nobody knows which half. And indulging our knee-jerk reactions and pet peeves, without waiting for the facts, without gaining some perspective, may easily head us down the wrong path — even though it will make us feel like we are in control. We definitely did many things right in 2006 and 2008 — so was it a mistake when we did them again in 2010? Maybe it was. But let’s examine carefully before we jump to that conclusion. Maybe Al Juhnke’s point was valid in a broader sense, and the political wind was bound to take its toll no matter what we did. (I do have a hard time believing that we could have withstood a tidal wave that toppled a titan like Jim Oberstar if we had just found a better bumper-sticker slogan, or had used social media differently.) … [Emphasis added]

Is that what Melendez thinks I want? Better bumper stickers and using Facebook differently? That’s not what I want. I want every Minnesotan to know what the DFL stands for, to know that the DFL stands for everyday working people, to know that the DFL is working to maintain our quality of life in Minnesota. Until we achieve that, bumper stickers and Facebook pages won’t get through to Minnesotans anyway.

I don’t know how I can support a leader who has such a disdainful view of communications. You can’t have political success without communicating your values! I also don’t know how I can support someone who shares Melendez’s definition of “perspective,” which seems to me to be nothing more than whitewashing:

First … we need facts before we can draw meaningful conclusions. We’re getting smarter every day: Election Day was on Tuesday the 2nd. By Thursday the 4th, Bob Spaulding had shared Representative Carlos Mariani’s statistical analysis of the Minnesota Senate turnover, and Nathan Hunstad’s analysis of margins and turnout appeared. It wasn’t until Thursday the 11th that the StarTribune published Steve Elkins’s commentary exposing how pro-business groups quietly pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a dozen legislative races at the eleventh hour, which may easily have affected several outcomes. We should weigh such information before we draw conclusions.

Yes, we’re getting better at finding reasons why this wasn’t our fault. And, you know, maybe it wasn’t. But even if that were true, there are still lessons to be learned from this election. To argue that we’re doing great, and that there is nothing to change, is unacceptable. In truth, that is a defeatist attitude.

There were both successes and failures this November for the DFL. And I’m not arguing that the elections were an abject failure — in fact, to a large extent, I agree that we’re in good shape for 2012. But there are lessons we need to learn from 2010, and to argue otherwise is to say that you think the party is “good enough,” and that you don’t want to improve.