The Duke: Dems need better ground game

Former governor Mike Dukakis is worried. Despite President Bush's low poll numbers, the Republicans, he says, will out-spend and out-organize the Democrats once again in next year's presidential race if his party doesn't get working fast.

Dukakis tells The New York Observer that Democrats have to get smarter about organizing at the local level, and said he's working informally with the Democratic National Committee to do just that.

"We have to organize every damn precinct in the United States of America—all 185,000," Dukakis told the Observer. "I’m serious. I'm deadly serious. I didn't do it after the primary [in 1988]. Don't ask me why, because that’s the way I got myself elected from the time I was running for town meeting in Brookline to the time I ran for governor."

Dukakis continued, "And I mean starting a year in advance. I'm not talking about parachuting in with two weeks to go. That's baloney. And these people are people who've got to be from the precinct, of the precinct, look like the precinct and talk like the precinct."

Dukakis tells the Observer that none of the party's candidates seem to be embracing his idea of organzing. But Barack Obama's campaign, which has begun training volunteers around the country in what it calls Camp Obama, would vigorously disagree.

(Hat tip to Taegan Goddard.)