Every governing movement needs people who can find arbitrage opportunities. Every time you or anyone else flies into DCA - National Airport, you are benefiting from some sharp eyed New Dealer who told FDR that there was a pot of money, and that it could be used to create a commercial airfield. Those who have, and hoard, pots of money don't like it, but the benefits of putting them into use are undeniable. This ability is the point of the needle - a smooth piercing of the problems of the day.

Chris Bowers has that gift, and if his use it or lose it campaign to get uncontested Democratic incumbents to put their unused cash in to the kitty doesn't make him a candidate for working in, or advising, the next Democratic Majority, then the Democratic Party needs new Human Resources people. It is officially all over the traditional media.

Chris Bowers is unpreposessing to look at - thin, vaguely unkempt in the way that people who spend their time focusing on details and problems often are, and without that trace of self-possession that is often mistaken for arrogance by others. Instead, Chris let's his ideas speak for themselves. And I mean "idea" in the sense of a term of art. In politics and business an "idea" is an arbitrage opportunity - where there is money just sitting there, waiting to be put to better use. Ideas, the big meta-ideological kind, are ways to get people to generate ideas. That's how a governing era works - it has big Ideas, and from them people generate the day to day shifts of effort and allocations of money and resources which push the country along in the right direction. A party taking power, in particular needs ideas of this kind, because it needs something to generate visible results while the longer term changes are put into place.

Chris Bowers is an idea guy, where the ideas come attached to action items - he finds arbitrage, and then goes after it. The current campaign - to get Democratic incumbents to make their own lives a bit less secure, in order to secure a majority - is one example. google bombing the election is another. There's link equity out there, and there are Democrats willing to use it. A third is how to turn the Great Backlash narrative on its head - and take areas that were moved conservative by an anti-metropolitan wave.

This kind of thinking - targetting specific money, actions or areas - is one that the Democratic Party has a particular need of. It isn't that the Democrats don't have wonks who can find buried pots of money. It is that they have mishandled these kinds of ideas in the past.

Let me take an example, early on in the 2004 election game, John Kerry was pressed on how he was going to pay for various programs. Unlike a Republican Candidate, who tells people he is going to cut taxes and have more money - Democrats feel a compulsion to answer this question with something more specific than cutting "waste, fraud and abuse". His staff came up with an answer - repatriation of foreignn profits held by American corporations. Before the election had even happened, the Republican Congress had sunk this into their tax bill, and the pot of money was sucked dry. It produced a short gain in business investment, as companies rushed to bring money home at concessionary tax rates. The Republican implementation hurt the US in the medium term, because previously those foreign profits were generating an income stream which was repatriated. The effect is small, but measurable.

This is an example of Democrats misusing arbitrage ideas. Instead of holding them in reserve - for when there is the need for a quick hit of liquidity - they spend them to curry favor with the Washington press corps, which just simply doesn't believe in any negative wedge from liberal policies.

Similarly, the Democrats for years poured television advertising into close districts in the South, not realizing that the districts were not really winnable or holdable. As a result, untold millions were pushed into ephemeral ads in an area of the country where the Democrats have seen a steady decline and whose few victories have been almost as costly as defeats - Southern Democrats being the ones most willing to defect on big issues of war, budget and civil rights.

Without good eyes for arbitrage, and a good sense of how to apply those ideas, a party flounders because it is unable to blunt a string of bad events with a quick and bold counter move. If there is a cardinal case of this in recent years, it is the fall of Gray Davis from the Governorship of California. Faced with a criminal conspiracy to raise electrical prices - read Enron - he could only flail about. The ineffectual response created the explosive anger that became the recall effort, and Arnold Schwarzenhagger is now cruising to a reëlection.

Schwarzenhagger, for his part, shows the other side of the coin. Embattled and headed for political irrelevance as a foot soldier for the GOP, he turned direction on policy. His real job is to veto any California redistricting plan after 2010 that would squeeze more Democratic districts out of a very blue state. 5 wouldn't be impossible and one could train chimpanzees to find 3. He realized that to protect national GOP seats, he had to give way on things like carbon emissions, which don't really matter on the large scale of things, since 1) it is already going to happen 2) what he is proposing is a drop in the bucket, and can be achieved almost by attrition of old equipment and some offshoring. Arbitrage.

This kind of thinking can run in both directions - one way is to find arbitrage, the other way is to show people how to create arbitrage. this piece from June 23rd of this year is an example: "The importance of movement candidates":

This is a flawed way of thinking. It is based on the assumption that the people who donate to, volunteer for, and create buzz on behalf of Democratic candidates / progressive causes will give a fixed amount of resources no matter what those candidates do and how those causes are run. That simply isn't not true, and even though many people like William Buetler and Hillary Clinton talk as though it is true, they know it is not true. If there were really a fixed amount of resources available for Democratic campaigns and progressive causes, there would be no need for any campaign to hire any fundraising staff. Instead, each campaign would simply receive its automatic, fixed share of resources via a single, one sentence reminder to donors, volunteers and progressive media, and then move forward.

Obviously, that is absurd, and isn't the way it works on any campaign. In order to raise money, all large campaigns hire fundraising staff, make contracts with direct mail vendors, build donor databases, send out fundraising emails, and make sure the candidate conducts significant call time. The reason campaigns do this is because everyone knows that in order for people to donate their money, their time, or their creative juices to a campaign or cause, they need to be convinced that the campaign or cause is worth it. This is why direct mail pieces are drafted and edited multiple times. This is why street and door-to-door canvassers are trained on their pitch every day by progressive organizations. This is why the candidate is often asked to deal personally with the large donors. Campaigns know that the better job they do convincing activsts that their campaing is worthy, the more resources they are likely to receive.

Here is is taking on the "lump of politics" fallacy, the assumption that we have a lumpenelectorate with a fixed amount of time and money to donate to politics. Chris knows this isn't so - politics is one market out of many markets. People choose which market they spend their time and effort in to get the best result. Maybe the job market is best for somethings - but the political market is best for others. Give people more reasons to spend time in the political markets versus say, the leisure market - and they will come through. By putting more red meat on the table, or in this case, blue meat, the Democrats can draw people in. As indeed has happened with the Lamont campaign, which has cemented an entire swath of people as progressives, simply because they have been told they are by Lieberman.

Another example is how he argues that shifting the order of issues is often a much faster way of changing party position than trying to change people's mind on a particular issue:

If all issues are of equal importance to the electorate, and the electorate has equal swing potential on all issues, than it does not matter what issues Democrats make gains on, as long as they make gains. It is not a reasonable argument to claim that just because Democrats are losing among those who cite "terrorism" as they top issue that Democrats must focus on "terrorism" instead of, say "education." If all things were equal, developing an even greater lead on "education" would be just as useful as closing the gap on "terrorism."

In otherwords, don't slam head on into people's preconceptions - which requires disorganizing and reorganizing their world views, get them to pay attention where they haven't which only requires organization.

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The Liberal idea of government understands that there are, indeed, arbitrage moments in the market that can be exploited. These have come to have names in game theory, such as "the free rider problem" - but they were understood before intuitively. Attacking these large sources of wasted effort and pent up energy produces more. In fact, the liberal movement was so successful, that the Republicans really only reached political dominance when they could pretend to find, in the "Laffer curve" a similar kind of efficiency arbitrage.

Chris Bowers has show a consistent ability to create the kind of arbitrage ideas that are the fuel of staying in front of events, recognizing longer term arbitrage possibilities, and the ability to connect how he does this with larger ideological principles and ideas. As importantly, he can break this process down for other people so that they can participate in it right now, and push forward the longer term possibilities, so that they will mature when the time comes.

When Jerome Armstrong first picked Chris to be a major blogger on his campaign to reinvent and reinvigorate mydd.com - there were some eyebrows raised. "The who he?" response was heard from some quarters. But he rapidly put it to rest - and soon everyone in the blogosphere knew who he was. Pretty soon, everyone in Washington DC will too.