I'll give you another reason we don't have a farm team:  Unpaid internships.

I am well off, and I was able to take an unpaid internship in 2004 that has opened many doors for me.  However, I have several friends who's families could not afford to bankroll them for a summer.

Pay your help.

Here's another problem: nobody cares about state or local races. Specifically, the netroots don't care. They don't care about state senate or attorneys general or anything like that. Can you imagine what would happen if, as a group, the netroots took on a couple state legislatures instead of chasing senators? imagine the lasting impact of electing dozens of legislators.

Shit. If I had maybe $100 more, I could just start up an on-line course titled: "How to be a big-time politician."

I read somewhere that there are around 90,000 units of sub-state-level government in the US.

That's hundreds of thousands of elected jobs - unglamorous, unpaid, mundane, admittedly - that have got to be filled by someone.

Why not Democrats?

There's a four-way benefit:

   
• Candidates get practice in running for election that they can use in running for higher-level jobs.
     
• Campaign machinery gets de-rusted or set up, that can be used for other campaigns.
     
• Local people get drawn in to face-to-face politics: a soft-sell that can make them more inclined to vote for other Dems on the ticket.
     
• The job gets filled by someone who (hopefully!) will do it better than the incumbent.

The other nice thing about local campaigns is that even one or two dedicated volunteers can make a huge difference.  Me, a few other students, and one older community member helped a college student get elected to city council here in Ames, where he beat an incumbent by a pretty wide margin.  I hope we can do the same thing in 2007.

The Dems don't have farm team because without the WH it is a mechanical problem, you can't get your voice heard.  The reason why the Republicans were able to because more people identify themselves as conservatives more than liberal, so when the opportunity arose in 1994, the country went back to its conserv roots, with weak presidency by Bill Clinton.  And after that, Bill Clinton was a weak president but he was able to cover up that weakness by using his political and legal skills.  But after the 1994 campaign, after the Dems suffered that blow, the party became weakened and other Democratic leaders were unable to cover up that weakness and they lost touch with the American people and that's why we have lost every single election since that time.  Well in 1998, we picked up seats, but we didn't win control of either House.  So, we need to find  a way to connect with the American people, and the 2006 campaign can be that way with gaining seats but not control and we can add onto the message in 2008.  We are predicted to take 2-3 seats in the Senate and 5-10 seats in the house and I think that is as far as we can go, without the WH, unless we come up with better leadership than folding on the Alito nom and folding on the Patriot act bill.