Some of today’s progressives hold a counterintuitive belief that voting for Barack Obama was all they should have to do. They fancy themselves revolutionaries, yet they want a turnkey movement to which they can hitch their wagons with somebody else doing all the work. This dynamic is present on every progressive website I visit. Twenty months out and people are having a whine and cheese party about how Obama is disrespecting them. Can you imagine what it would be like had they lost?
There are two things they don’t understand; winning and organizing, however they do a damn fine job of pissing and moaning. I’m an old man of 56, but I see so many opportunities on the left for a young organizer willing to work that it’s absolutely crazy. There’s an entire generation of Millennials just begging to be harvested and formed into a constituency for a leader not sitting at home consumed with self pity. Maybe they should take a page out of Karl Rove’s playbook. It begs the question, did these whiners think they weren’t going to have to work for it?
I was just out of the military in 1977, and there wasn’t a Republican to be found on any college campus in the country. Conservatives were openly mocked and ridiculed by us pot smoking hippies, so no one under 25 would admit to being a Republican. When Rove seized power of the Young College Republicans in early 1980 there were only 20 chapters left in the entire United States. (Let that sink in for a moment.) By the end of 1980 there was over 1000 chapters, and they had helped get Ronald Reagan elected president.
While they involved themselves in national elections, they concentrated at the state and local level, getting as many state legislators and even city councilmen elected as possible. They built a strong foundation, grooming candidates to ascend to national office and getting people familiar with their message. A central thesis of a college paper I wrote was for Republicans to return the power they needed to gain control of the majority of state legislatures. By 1990 they had done so and could significantly gerrymander congressional districts in their favor.
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