On March 2nd I laid out on Twitter most of the problems that have put Liberals in the position we're in. Here is the recap of the three main problems:
1.) There is a severe gap in the money arms race between Liberals & Conservatives, especially after Citizens United.
2.) The fact that media has become almost completely corporate & only cares about profit.
3.) The fact that Liberals really don't talk to each other.
To me the third problem I listed is the most important problem. The reason why is that the third problem allows the other two problems to become worse. Luckily there is time to fix these problems.
The recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News taken in the Wisconsin labor fight shows that Americans overwhelmingly support Liberal positions when it comes to workers' rights. The poll also shows that a large amount of these very people consider themselves to be Conservatives. Now why would people call themselves Conservatives if they in fact support Liberal positions? The answer lies in the third problem.
Liberals not speaking to each other has caused us to not have the infrastructure in place to stop the distortions like the one shown in the poll. If you're wondering what I mean by infrastructure I mean we Liberals have no local networks that can fight Conservative spin.
Now this is the part where most Liberals would yell out "Wait a minute, what about organizations like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and MoveOn? don't they work local Dem markets as well?" The answer is that no, they don't really. I'm not discounting what these organizations do. I mainly have issue with their approach, which is the same approach that nearly all Liberal organizations have. Liberal organizations tend to have a NATIONAL approach to their goals. That approach has not helped in local endeavours whatsoever unless it becomes a national story. Sure, we Liberals get e-mails asking us if they should endorse candidates in House & mayoral races but that's about it as far as local involvements. Even then the effort is minuscule. This lack of local infrastructure is a major disadvantage when it comes to fighting Conservative groups that do have their boots on the ground.
The group that suffer most from this other than the general populace is the local Democratic parties who have to field candidates who feel that they have little backing outside of their base. This problem was supposed to be fixed by President Obama's grassroots group, Organizing for America, but even then we dropped the ball. OFA's reach has only reached the state level with mixed results at best.
Now that we know how bad the problem it's time to for the solutions. If one thinks about it, the solution is simple but requires hard work. If the current recall efforts targeting Wisconsin state Republicans show anything is that we Liberals are capable of the solution I'm proposing. The solution to our infrastructure problem is to not wait for the PCCC or MoveOn to do the work for us, we have to do it. Start by going to your local Democratic Party headquarters (yes they do exist) & see how organized they are. Then you can build on the strenghts and fix the weaknesses of these offices. One can find that the local Dem Party is tied to a lot of organizations that they have never heard of before. In my case one of those organizations is the Working Families Party of New York.
Once that is done you can coordinate events with the local offices to reach average citizens. Bake sales, car washes, cookouts, town halls, and other grassroots operations are some of the ways we can connect the communities we live in. Once we have built a strong connection with the community expand to neighboring places. Help build the local ties between towns and counties, it will help in reversing the advantage that Conservatives have right now.
The main goal here is that it will become easier work to establish our foothold when election time comes rolling. Doing the work of building local political infrastructures ourselves would actually make the jobs of national organizations like the PCCC & MoveOn a lot easier & would help them use their resources in areas that are needed.
Whew... that was a lot for the first time. If you have more ideas that can help please feel free to express them. The more we Liberals can do ourselves to fix things the sooner we can stop the Conservatives from destroying this country.
