Training the Left to Win

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In fact, Blodgett is obsessed with messaging-and for good reason. Senator Wellstone may have been an academic (he taught political science at Carleton College for 21 years), but his political theories were based on real-world experience. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he used his classroom as a community organizing lab. Teacher and students, including a young Blodgett, worked on countless campaigns with family farmers, environmentalists, labor unions, and poor communities.

Wellstone's first run for the Senate changed the way electoral campaigns in Minnesota are waged. Unable to afford expensive television and radio ads, he built a massive grassroots volunteer base. The few commercials he did produce were so clever that they generated free media coverage. In his first 30-second spot he said, 'Unlike my opponent, I don't have $6 million, so I'm gonna have to talk fast . . .' Then the film speeds up, showing him racing around the state visiting people and places he cares about-a small farm, a lake, a school, his family. Wellstone's frenetic energy and passionate rhetorical style inspired young people, who flocked to volunteer for his campaign.

Green Corps invited Blodgett to its February gathering. Flipping through his PowerPoint slides, he pulled up a diagram called the 'message box,' a tool he used as Wellstone's campaign manager in 1990, 1996, and 2002. A simple table with four quadrants, it allows you to weigh the strength of different messages side by side. In one column, you fill in your own messages: what we are saying about ourselves; what we are saying about them. In the other column, you write down your opposition's messages: what they are saying about themselves; what they are saying about us.

The trick in effective messaging, he told the class, is to tell a more compelling story than your opponent, one that connects with people on a deeper, more human level. Then he quoted his late boss: 'Too many progressives make the mistake of believing people are galvanized around 10-point programs. They are not! People respond according to their sense of right and wrong. They respond to a leadership of values.'

The lesson jibes with Green Corps' mission. Throughout the year organizers study how to write press releases and letters to the editor, organizing news conferences, creating good visuals, and practicing sound bites. In the Arctic drilling campaign, for instance, they could have focused their message on foreign oil or the need for alternatives. Instead, they chose to focus on the intrinsic value of the earth, asking whether destroying a priceless piece of American wilderness is worth saving a quarter at the gas pump. For visual effect, and to leaven their dire message with a little humor, they wore fake caribou antlers at protests and press conferences. The media couldn't get enough.

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