Whenever these contentious arguments erupt, a common response from progressives is to bemoan the “circular firing squad” and point to the right, where this sort of self-destructive behavior is rarely ever seen. Instead, the right exhibits a fanatic message discipline that would have made the Politburo envious. Grover Norquist holds his famous “Wednesday meetings” where right-wing strategy and message are coordinated. Frank Luntz provides the talking points, backed by his research. And from there, and from numerous other nodes in the right-wing network, the message gets blasted out. Conservatives dutifully repeat the refrain, which becomes a cacophony that generates its own political force. Republicans ruthlessly use that message, that agenda, to shift the nation’s politics to the right, even as Americans themselves remain on the center-left of most issues.

“Can’t we be more like them?” ask these progressives who understandably grow tired of the Obama wars. The conservatives’ disciplined communications strategy typically gets ascribed to one of these factors. Some see it as an inherent feature of their ideology – the right is hierarchical, the left is anarchic. (Of course, the 20th century Communist movement disproved that.) Others see it as an inherent feature of their brains – conservatives are said to have an “authoritarian” brain where everything is black and white and where values and ideas are simply accepted from a higher-up, whereas liberals have brains that see nuance and prize critical thinking, making them predisposed to squabble instead of unite. And still others just see the conservatives as being smarter, knowing not to tear each other down, with the implication that progressives who engage in these bruising internal battles simply don’t know any better, or are so reckless as not to care.

Perhaps some of those factors are all at work. But I want to argue that the truth is far simpler. Conservatives simply understand how coalitions work, and progressives don’t. Conservative communication discipline is enabled only by the fact that everyone in the coalition knows they will get something for their participation. A right-winger will repeat the same talking points even on an issue he or she doesn’t care about or even agree with because he or she knows that their turn will come soon, when the rest of the movement will do the same thing for them.

Progressives do not operate this way. We spend way too much time selling each other out, and way too little time having each other’s back. This is especially true within the Democratic Party, where progressives share a political party with another group of people – the corporate neoliberals – who we disagree with on almost every single issue of substance. But within our own movement, there is nothing stopping us from exhibiting the same kind of effective messaging – if we understood the value of coalitions.

A coalition is an essential piece of political organizing. It stems from the basic fact of human life that we are not all the same. We do not have the same political motivations, or care about the same issues with equal weight. Some people are more motivated by social issues, others by economic issues. There is plenty of overlap, thanks to share core values of equality, justice, and empathy. But in a political system such as ours, we can’t do everything at once. Priorities have to be picked, and certain issues will come before others.

How that gets handled is essential to an effective political movement. If one part of the coalition gets everything and the other parts get nothing, then the coalition will break down as those who got nothing will get unhappy, restive, and will eventually leave. Good coalitions understand that everyone has to get their issue taken care of, their goals met – in one way or another – for the thing to hold together.

Conservatives understand this implicitly. The Wednesday meeting is essentially a coalition maintenance session, keeping together what could be a fractious and restive movement. Everyone knows they will get their turn. Why would someone who is primarily motivated by a desire to outlaw abortion support an oil company that wants to drill offshore? Because the anti-choicers know that in a few weeks, the rest of the coalition will unite to defund Planned Parenthood. And a few weeks after that, everyone will come together to appease Wall Street and the billionaires by fighting Elizabeth Warren. And then they’ll all appease the US Chamber by fighting to break a union.

There are underlying values that knit all those things together, common threads that make the communications coherent. But those policies get advanced because their advocates work together to sell the narrative.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is primarily a fiscal conservative. So why would he attack domestic partner benefits? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is not an anti-science zealot. So why would he refuse to say if he believes in evolution or creationism? Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported marriage equality and refused to defend Prop 8 in court. So why did he twice veto a bill passed by the state legislature to veto marriage equality?

The answer to the above is simple: because they knew the importance of keeping the coalition together. They know that each part has to be looked after, or else the thing will fall apart as different constituencies turn on the person who failed to advance their agenda.

Members of the conservative coalition do not expect to get everything all at once. An anti-choice advocate would love to overturn Roe v. Wade tomorrow. But they don’t get angry when that doesn’t happen in a given year. Not because they are self-disciplined and patient, but because they get important victories year after year that move toward that goal. One year it could be a partial-birth abortion ban. The next year it could be defunding of Planned Parenthood. The year after that it could be a ban on any kind of federal funding of abortions, even indirect. (And in 2011, they’re getting some of these at the same time.)

More importantly, they know that even if their issue doesn’t get advanced in a given year, they also know that the other members of the coalition will not allow them to lose ground. If there’s no way to further restrain abortion rights (Dems control Congress, the voters repeal an insane law like South Dakota’s attempt to ban abortion), fine, the conservative coalition will at least fight to ensure that ground isn’t lost. They’ll unite to fight efforts to rescind a partial-birth abortion ban, or add new funding to Planned Parenthood. Those efforts to prevent losses are just as important to holding the coalition together as are the efforts to achieve policy gains.

Being in the conservative coalition means never having to lose a policy fight – or if you do lose, it won’t be because your allies abandoned you.

This is where the real contrast with the progressive and Democratic coalitions lies. Within the Democratic Party, for example, members of the coalition are constantly told it would be politically reckless to advance their goals, or that they have to give up ground previously won. The implicit message to that member of the coalition is that they don’t matter as much, that their goals or values are less important. That’s a recipe for a weak and ineffectual coalition.

There are lots of examples to illustrate the point. If someone is primarily motivated to become politically active because they oppose war, then telling them to support bombing of Libya in order to be part of the coalition is never, ever going to work. If someone was outraged by torture policies under President Bush, you’ll never get them to believe that torture is OK when President Obama orders it. If someone is motivated by taking action on climate change, then Democrats should probably pass a climate bill instead of abandoning it and instead promoting coal and oil drilling. If someone supports universal health care and wants insurance companies out of the picture, you need to at least give them something (like a public option) if you’re going to otherwise mandate Americans buy private insurance.

The LGBT rights movement offered an excellent example of this. For his first two years in office, not only did President Obama drag his feet on advancing LGBT rights goals, he actively began handing them losses, such as discharging LGBT soldiers under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy or having his Justice Department file briefs in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama argued that he could not advance the policy goals of DADT or DOMA repeal, but even if that were true, he was breaking up his coalition by also handing the LGBT rights movement losses on things like discharges and defending DOMA. It was only when LGBT organizations, activists, and donors threatened to leave the Obama coalition that the White House finally took action to end DADT.

A good coalition recognizes that not everyone is there for the same reason. The “Obama wars” online tend to happen because its participants do not recognize this fact. For a lot of progressives and even a lot of Democrats, re-electing President Obama is not the reason they are in politics. And if Obama has been handing them losses, then appealing to them on the basis of “Obama’s doing the best he can” or “the GOP won’t let him go further” is an argument that they’ll find insulting. This works in reverse. If someone believes that Obama is a good leader, or that even if he isn’t perfect he’s better than any alternative (especially a Republican alternative) then they won’t react well to a criticism of Obama for not attending to this or that progressive policy matter.

Cornel West has basically argued that he is leaving the Obama coalition because Obama turned his back on West’s agenda. That’s a legitimate reaction, whether you agree or not with the words West used to describe what happened. Cornel West won’t sway someone whose primarily political motivation is to defend Obama if he calls Obama a “black mascot” and an Obama defender won’t sway Cornel West if they’re telling West that he’s wrong to expect Obama to deliver on his agenda.

The bigger problem is that it is very difficult to successfully maintain a coalition in today’s Democratic Party. Michael Gerson has identified something I have been arguing for some time – that the Democratic Party is actually two parties artificially melded together. I wrote about this in the California context last fall – today’s Democratic Party has two wings to it. One wing is progressive, anti-corporate, and distrusts the free market. The other wing is neoliberal, pro-corporate, and trusts the free market.

These two wings have antithetical views on many, many things. Neoliberals believe that privatization of public schools is a good idea. Progressives vow to fight that with every bone in their body. Neoliberals believe that less regulation means a healthier economy. Progressives believe that we are in a severe recession right now precisely because of less regulation. Neoliberals believe that corporate power is just fine, progressives see it as a threat to democracy.

The only reason these two antithetical groups share a political party is because the Republicans won’t have either one. The neoliberals tend to be socially liberal – they support civil unions or outright marriage equality, don’t hate immigrants, and know that we share a common ancestor with the chimps. 35 years ago they might have still had a place in the Republican Party, but in the post-Reagan era, they don’t. So they came over to the Democrats, who after 1980 were happy to have as many votes as possible – and whose leaders were uneasy at the growing ranks of dirty hippies among the party base.

As to those progressives, destroying their values and institutions is the reason today’s GOP exists, so they clearly can’t go to that party. They don’t have the money to completely dominate the Democratic Party. Neither do they have the money to start their own political party, and right now they don’t want to, given the widespread belief that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and led to the Bush disaster.

To our north, the neoliberals and progressives do have their own parties. The Canadian election earlier this month gave Conservatives a majority, but it also gave a historic boost to the New Democratic Party, home of Canada’s progressives, while the Liberal Party, home of Canada’s neoliberals, lost half their seats. Those parties have an easier time holding together their coalitions, and that enabled the NDP to break through and become the party that is poised to take power at the next election once Canadians react against Stephen Harper’s extremist agenda.

Still, for a variety of structural, financial, and practical reasons most American progressives are not yet ready to go down the path of starting their own party. And that makes mastery of coalition politics even more important.

Cornel West needlessly personalized things. He would have been on stronger ground had he pointed out, correctly, that Obama has not done a good job of coalition politics. Progressives have not only failed to advance much of their agenda, but are increasingly being told to accept rollbacks, which as we’ve seen doesn’t happen on the other side and is key to holding conservatism together as an effective political force. Obama told unions to accept a tax increase on their health benefits, and promptly lost his filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate in the Massachusetts special election. While Republicans are facing a big political backlash for actually turning on members of their coalition – for the first time in a long time – by proposing to end Medicare, Obama risks alienating more of his coalition by promoting further austerity. Civil libertarians have seen loss after loss under Obama (which explains clearly why Glenn Greenwald does not feel any need to defend Obama). Obama has consistently sided with the banks and has done nothing to help homeowners facing foreclosure. Hardly anybody has been prosecuted for the crimes and fraud at the heart of Wall Street during the 2000s boom.

There’s no doubt that any Democratic president faces a difficult task in holding together a political coalition made up of two groups – progressives and neoliberals – who distrust each other and are in many ways fighting each other over the basic economic issues facing this country. But Obama has not made much effort to keep progressives on his side. He halfheartedly advocated for their goals, did some things to roll back progressive gains and values, and expects progressives to remain in the coalition largely out of fear of a Republican presidency. That’s a legitimate reason to stay, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t work for everybody, and nobody should be surprised when some progressives walk. Everyone has their limit.

It has been clear that Obama is of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. He always was (and so too was Hillary Clinton). It’s far easier for a neoliberal Democrat to win over just enough progressives to gain the party presidential nomination than vice-versa. Progressives are debating amongst themselves whether it makes sense to stay in that coalition if the terms are, as they have been since the late 1970s, subservience to a neoliberal agenda. I do not expect that debate to end anytime soon.

What we can do – and what we must do – is ensure that within the progressive coalition, we DO practice good coalitional behavior. If we are going to stay inside the Democratic Party, then we have to overcome the neoliberal wing. To do that, we have to be a disciplined and effective coalition. And to do that, we have to have each other’s back. We have to attend to each other’s needs. We have to recognize that everyone who wants to be in the coalition has a legitimate reason to be here, and has legitimate policy goals. If we have different goals – if Person A cares most about ending the death penalty, if Person B cares most about reducing carbon emissions, and if Person C cares most about single-payer health care, we have to make sure everyone not only gets their turn, but also make sure that each does not have to suffer a loss at our hands. If we find that we have goals that are in conflict, then we have to resolve that somehow.

One thing is clear: no coalition has ever succeeded with one part telling the other that their values are flawed, that they are wrong to want what they want, that they are wrong to be upset when they don’t get something. We are not going to change people’s values, and we should not make doing so the price of admission to a coalition. Unless we want to. In which case we have to accept the political consequences. I’d be happy to say we will never, and must never, coalition with neoliberals. But that has political consequences that many other progressives find unacceptable.

If we are going to address the severe crisis that is engulfing our country, we need to become better at building and maintaining coalitions. That means we have to decide who we want in the coalition, how we will satisfy their needs, and what price to maintain the coalition is too high to pay. Those are necessary, even essential political practices. It’s time we did that, rather than beating each other over the head for not seeing things exactly the way we do ourselves.

Only then will be become the disciplined and effective operation that we want.

This afternoon in the Rules Committee Rep. Jim McGovern gave prepared remarks about an amendment he plans to introduce to prohibit any federal funds from being used to advertise on Fox News!

Excerpt from the statement Rep. McGovern made to the Rules Committee (note these may not be his exact words as I was sent this before he spoke, but the ideas remain the same):

”

Mr. Chairman, this bill is a bad idea.

We all know what’s going on here.  The reason this bill is before us is that a discredited, right-wing activist recently made a selectively-edited, 11 minute video of a two-hour conversation.  The target of his little sting was a fundraising executive at NPR who no longer works there.

That executive made what appeared to be disparaging remarks about the Republican Party.  Now, if you look at what he actually said, in full context, it’s clear that he was paraphrasing what other Republicans had said about the direction of the party.

In any case, there is absolutely no reason to cut off funds for NPR because of this issue.  There is no reason to jeopardize the news and entertainment that millions and millions of Americans rely on and enjoy.

But if you insist on going down this road, Mr. Chairman, then we should be “fair and balanced” in the way we do it.

Over the past several years, it has become clear that the Fox News channel is wildly biased.  They continue to employ a talk show host who called President Obama a racist.  They continue to employ several prospective Republican Presidential candidates as “analysts,” giving them hours and hours of free air time.  And their parent company has donated millions to GOP-linked groups.

My amendment would prohibit federal funds – taxpayer dollars – from being used for advertising on the partisan, political platform of Fox News.”

So there you have it.  Finally, our friend @StopBeck is getting some help from DC.  For those that don’t know @StopBeck with his legions of friends have just about put the fork in Glenn Beck…no advertisers in the UK for months…over 300 advertisers here in the US stopped dead in their tracks.

And now Rep. McGovern steps up to the plate and hits a home run.  Will the ammendment pass? I’d like to dream it would but I’m a realist.  Does it make a statement and help to give the people an actual voice in DC? In the words of she who shall not be named “you betcha (wink)”

Listen to the interview here!

(If the link doesn’t work, you can get the podcast here.)

Conventional Un-Wisdom: In this district, you need to project a more moderate message, avoid sounding like or looking like a Dirty Hippie at all costs.  To win, you need to win Republican votes, so you need to target them from the start.  Make it a habit of “Hippie Punching” on a regular basis, it will give you the separation from those values you need to win.

This is very commonly recited in long held Republican districts, and some of the most established and well regarded political consultants and “celebrity politicos” push it on TV and in print.   I’ve worked in some of the reddest districts and communities across America, from Utah County, Utah to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to western Iowa, to north Florida.  I’ve found it doesn’t matter where you are in America or where you actually fall on the political spectrum, what matters most is the conviction you project.  People respect leaders with the courage of their convictions, they want to know the person they are trusting to represent them in the halls of government have confidence in their own capacity and beliefs.

If you are running as a Democratic candidate and have Dirty Hippie values, whether your district is the bluest blue or the reddest red, the first steps are the same – build your base by engaging and motivating your base. As donors, as volunteers, as word of mouth message dissemination machines – you need this base to support the growth of your campaign to the strength needed to motivate the conversion of “less likely” supporters to join the team.

Some will encourage you to engage in “Hippie Punching”, the fine art of kicking the progressive movement in the teeth.  Scolding those that would encourage you to act upon your values, giving them a backhand for calling you or your friends out for not doing enough to advance progressive causes.  Mocking those that would have the audacity to suggest that options exist beyond what the beltway punditry have put forward.  Don’t do it.  Recognize that those most likely to support you are also going to be critical at times and constantly encourage you to be better.  They are your motivating force, not your weakness.  Applaud them, thank them, and punch the jackasses telling you to sell out instead.  If you do “Hippie Punch,”  you will alienate your most ardent supporters and still be tagged as being a dirty hippie, but worse, a dirty hippie that even the dirty hippies don’t like.

If you are a moderate, tried and true (which is exceedingly rare), you should be both proud of the party designation you have chosen and the beliefs you hold. You should project those beliefs with confidence and conviction, just as a dirty hippie should.  It is the strength of your projected conviction that carries your support, energizes and motivates volunteers and donors to part with precious time and treasure. It is that perceived conviction that will get people in the center and on the opposite side of the political spectrum to support you, despite disagreements on a few particular issues or even nearly every issue. When you have a high level of distrust/dissatisfaction for the incumbent, this is the greatest opportunity for these “cross-over votes” from registered members of the opposite party. You don’t target these votes, they come to you as a result of the strength of your campaign, the desire for a change and the passion and conviction you project. Some will be caught by mass media efforts, some will be motivated by earned media coverage, but the most impressive means of “converting” registered members of the opposing party is word of mouth/personal networks.

For word of mouth/personal networking to have any chance of playing a significant role in the outcome of an election, you must understand the ‘physics’ of communications among a chain of people. The minimum

chain of communications is Candidate > Supporter > Voter, where the candidate has direct and intimate contact with the supporter who then is motivated and conveys their passion to a voter they have a personal relationship with, persuading them to join them in support of the candidate. If you are running in a district of 10,000 votes, this short chain may work fine, but if you need upwards of 30,000 votes, you will need to recognize that with every  ‘link in the chain’, the level of energy/passion/conviction dissipates a bit, until you reach the Ferris Bueller chain of indeterminable relation where the end of the line is not going to convince anyone to join the cause. The stronger the projection of passion and conviction from the candidate, the more ‘links’ can be placed in the chain and still support campaign growth. If you start from mild, lacking conviction and passion, minimally inspiring, you aren’t going to gain any votes beyond direct contact. If you are Rep. Alan Grayson or Senator Bernie Sanders, you can support chains longer than a dozen people (which luckily for Sanders is nearly all the voters in his state).

In a well executed (and some what idealized) situation, by the later stages of the campaign, a number of registered Republicans who passionately support the campaign will have been identified and those supporters will make calls to potentially persuadable registered R’s and NPA/3^rd party voters. Using their own personal narrative, why they have chosen to cross party lines, they will have a much better chance of persuading conversions, and be less likely to motivate voters for the opposition. Dirty Hippie volunteers calling registered R’s is never a good idea.   In a particularly wild demonstration of “Un-Wisdom”, a 2008 Congressional campaign gave Jim Dean of DFA (brother of Howard) a canvassing list that was 50% R, 40% NPA and 10% D. Exactly what does Jim Dean say to a Republican to convince them to vote for a DFA Endorsed candidate for Congress?  In the late stages of a campaign, the focus must be GOTV, reaching out to your own identified supporters and high percentage unidentified voters (registered D, likely voters, of favorable demographics) and getting them to the polls.  If you are putting your resources in September and October into contacting Republicans and unknown NPA/3rd party voters, you are more likely to active votes for your opponent.

Back to the beginning, if the district is 28% Democratic, 38% Republican and 44% NPA/3^rd Party, basic math tells you that you need all or nearly all the Democratic vote, a majority of the NPA/3^rd party vote, but keep in mind some percentage of those voters are more conservative than the registered R’s, so maybe 25% from D’s, 22% from NPA/3^rd, leaving you a need to get 5% from the Republican spectrum, since we aim for 52%. If you focus on getting those 5% of R’s, you will bleed voters from the other two spectrum, requiring you to get more R’s to compensate – this creates a situation were you are basically bailing out a sinking boat with a spoon. If you project strength and passion, you will gain votes you were never accounting for and gain more monetary and volunteer support with which to further disseminate your message.  Additionally, you will increase turnout rates among your “base demographics,” while your opponent may see reduced turnout.  Given that few election contests in America see turnout over 60% overall, and more often well below that level, there is no need to panic at being “out-numbered” by the opposition party, just do a better job of getting your people out to vote and that gap disappears pretty quick.

Beyond the numbers above, one must further understand the dynamics of cyclical elections on communities. If there is no competitive candidates from one side for a number of cycles, the other side gains ground in both the numbers and the rhetoric projected by the community, inserting strong candidates to counter that for one or more consecutive cycles can neutralize that effect and create a very competitive district where it appeared impossible previously. The numbers can also be overcome with a very emotional action or event, from personal scandal/corruption to a devastating blow to the community like a natural disaster or economic strife.

The long term effects are more pronounced and dangerous – if today’s candidate avoids progressive symbols and rhetoric, they reinforce the negativity of those symbols and positions, making it even harder for the next candidate. If you win eschewing the party, you make your re-election harder and you make it harder for candidates above and below you on the ballot. While you should not blindly support anyone who carries the same party identifier as you, you should support those who share the bulk of your beliefs and you believe to be honorable and decent. In the end it will foster a stronger opportunity for you to effect the changes that motivated you to run in the first place.

In short, be proud of your Dirty Hippie values, speak about them with passion and confidence, and your supporters will step up and do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.  Play the middle like a sissy, and you’ll be all alone election night, feeling like a hooker that took a bad check.

Mario Piscatella is a political consultant with extensive experience campaigning all over the country. In addition to general consulting and strategy, he is focusing on improving the quality of campaigns through training of candidates, staff, surrogates and volunteers.  He is the founder of MPA Political, LLC and does trainings for Democracy for America and other organizations around the country.

Anyone following the developments in Wisconsin knows that this is a result of a falsely created budget deficit and an excuse to eliminate the freedom to contract by public workers – something that has absolutely no impact on the current budget. Indiana is going through a similar assault on public employees with legislation targeting collective bargaining. And no sooner was Andrew Cuomo elected as Governor in New York that he attached public workers.

In New Jersey – a state whose public schools are consistently in the very top tier of the country, Governor Christie has attacked and demonized teachers unions, skipped out on the state’s pension plan payment in order to “balance” his budget last year, while cutting taxes for those earning over $400,000 and costing the state $1 billion in revenue. Most ironically here, Christie talked about “two classes of citizens” but instead of talking about those who can afford such things as heat, food and medicine all at the same time and those who can’t, he focused on health and pension benefits. Even more ironic is that these are the same people who either don’t think anyone should have “rich health benefits” or that you should only have if you can afford to pay for them. On top of this, while Christie is being hailed by those who don’t know any better, he too is looking to raise the estate tax exemption in NJ and give more tax breaks to the wealthy.

On the Federal and state level, “budget and spending cuts” merely translate to slashing of services that are needed most at this time – all in the laughable name of responsibility – coming from the same Republican Party that is directly responsible (maybe that is why they are using that term) for the economic ruin that many Americans face now. The key element of this “blueprint for disaster” is the job killing tax cuts (which clearly didn’t work for the Bush tax cuts) and the cutting of services.

Couple this with massive income tax breaks for the top 1-5%, a reduction in social security tax payments at the same time a manufactured “crisis” is trotted out (with the help of Obama administration), and the reality is that even if every single public worker is fired, the structural problems that directly relate to the lowest income and estate taxes in history on those who need it least while vital services to everyone else are drastically reduced will only lead to a widening of the already overwhelming wealth gap between the small number of “haves” and the huge and growing number of “have-nots”.

This is precisely what the Republicans want. This is precisely what they have done in the past – pick a scapegoat to distract from their real agenda of killing jobs and killing the middle class, all while lining the pockets of the super rich that keep them in power. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This time, hopefully Americans are on to this deadly game and will recognize this for what it is – a direct assault on the economy, since an economy can’t function without a robust middle class. When even Goldman Sachs sees danger in the Republican blueprint for disaster, you know it is serious.