Here is an article that Rueben Rajala forwarded to me. It's a great article about what republicans do right and what dems need to do. He is collecting and sending out tons of good articles like this. Email him to have him put you on his forwarding list.

A Party Inverted By BILL BRADLEY

Here is a quote about what the republicans do right:

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the
1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint.
Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again.
Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin
foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance
conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute
and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second
level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level
of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph
Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and
careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will
appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an
assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy
position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth
level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and
networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the
pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works
fine.

Here is a quote about what the dems do:

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a
pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential
candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by
themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike
Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have
to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a
campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of
political, media and idea people.

Good Reading, thanks Reuben