Training the Left to Win

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Well-established groups like Green Corps function as a sort of West Point for organizers, grooming elite leaders to draft battle plans and strategize behind the lines. Start-ups like Wellstone Action, named for the late Minnesota senator and liberal firebrand Paul Wellstone, are in the business of training the ground troops. In its first three years the organization, founded by Wellstone's sons Mark and David, has put 10,000 people through its weekend crash courses in basic grassroots activism.

Employing a strategy pioneered by Senator Wellstone in the 1990s (he died in a plane crash in 2002), Wellstone Action encourages people to go beyond issue advocacy and actually run for office themselves. 'In every state, we need to get serious about developing leaders-starting with school board, city council, county commissioner, mayoral, and state legislative races,' the senator wrote in his 2001 book The Conscience of a Liberal (Random House).

Hundreds of veterans of the Wellstone seminars have already run for local office. This fall some 150 candidates will use Wellstone's populist, grassroots approach to campaigning in hopes of being elected to state and federal offices in key political states such as Ohio, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

To understand the logic behind Wellstone Action's approach, one need only look back to the 2004 elections. Several Democrats, like Montana governor Brian Schweitzer and Colorado senator Ken Salazar, shocked political pundits when they prevailed in states where President Bush won in a walk. Those candidates successfully 'translated a populist economic agenda into powerful cultural and values messages,' wrote David Sirota in the American Prospect two months after the election. 'This is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans.'

In the presidential race, challenger John Kerry chose to forgo this populist approach, focusing instead on his competence to govern. The Bush campaign emphasized the president's character and authenticity. Kerry's strategy, says Jeff Blodgett, executive director of Wellstone Action, was fatal. Compared to Bush's simple, powerful message-'I'm resolute and you always know where I stand'-Kerry sounded like a wooden policy wonk and was effectively labeled a 'flip-flopper.'

According to Blodgett, it's all about 'messaging,' a buzzword among politicos that refers to all the things a campaign does to tell its story, to control how it is portrayed in the press and perceived by the public. It's also a field of battle where the right has long enjoyed a distinct advantage, turning partisan monikers like Healthy Forests, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 'death tax' into widely accepted rhetorical shortcuts in public discourse and on the front page.

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