The American left is still shaken by the success of spontaneous conservative grassroots participation in tea party activities leading up to the 2010 elections.  In desperation, leftists now hope to profit from the Occupy Wall Street gatherings which have spread to many other locations.

Haven’t the mainstream print and broadcast media, overwhelmingly liberal, given massive and sympathetic coverage to the Occupiers?  Isn’t this a good way to build enthusiasm among the base the left needs to win the 2012 elections?

Probably not, even though Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, many extremist labor unions, the Socialist Party USA, the Communist Party USA, and others on the left are singing praises of the current demonstrators.  So many want to lead the Occupiers.

One week after the Occupy Wall Street protesters first gathered, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Michael Kazin, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?,” offering his guidance in left-wing movement building.  He urged the demonstrators to focus on “demanding millions of new jobs that pay a livable wage.”

A fat lot of good that demand would do.

Creating new jobs requires creation of new wealth, something that government has never been able to do.  Government can and frequently does destroy jobs by interfering with wealth creation.  At best, government can facilitate the creation of wealth (and jobs) by restricting its activity to protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, punishing fraud, and deterring violence.

The idea of leftists “demanding millions of new jobs that pay a livable wage” reminds one of the famous “cargo cults” which sprang up in the South Pacific after World War II.  Allied forces visited many remote islands during that war, built air strips, and flew in large quantities of goods needed in the war effort.  Native islanders, unfamiliar with modern civilization, received some of those goods from Allied forces who wanted friendly relations with them.

After the war, the planes stopped coming.  Some primitive islanders created cargo cults.  They built crude replicas of airplanes and prayed to the replicas, hoping to receive additional free goods from the sky.  As evidence of the persistence of human folly, a handful of the cargo cults still survive, but most have faded away after generations of disappointment.  Leftists demanding from government millions of new jobs will be similarly disappointed.

For better or worse, though, the Occupiers are too diverse to unite on a single demand.  What attracts their current supporters, from top government officials to the avowed Marxists and Leninists, is their potential usefulness in promoting class warfare, an ancient and common thread which runs through the entire left.  Maybe, somehow, the Occupiers will build a great surge of hate, invigorate class warfare, and help the left to maintain and increase its power, despite the growing public disapproval of President Obama and his allies.

And maybe not.  We’ll see.

Right now, the protesters don’t seem to be winning public approval, despite sympathetic news coverage stressing their “idealism.”  My late father often said, “Anyone can get his name in the newspapers if he’s willing to take his pants off in public.”  Many of the Occupiers have done that and worse, which generates for them more contempt than admiration.  The TV interviews with randomly selected Occupiers are suitable to run only on comedy shows.

Before the current age of easy communication, every community had its village idiot, someone everyone knew couldn’t think straight.  The local village idiot was pretty isolated and usually tolerated well, often with affection because of his affliction.  “Poor fellow.”

Today, village idiots can find each other easily online, and sometimes they can gather in large numbers.  Such gatherings are ugly, but they attract media attention, which attracts more idiots.  Their idiocy, when it is directed toward leftist politics, may be ignored or soft-pedaled by the major news media, but the mainstream media has lost its former monopoly on mass communications.

Most Americans have easy access to conservative media’s broadcast, print, and online communications which widely expose the idiots’ wackiness and bad behavior.

Who but the willfully blind still approve of the Occupiers’ protests and flights of fancy?  Political linkage to these demonstrators will hurt, not help candidates in the 2012 elections.  But this doesn’t occur to the left, who are stuck in a rut with an outmoded world-view just when millions of conservative Americans have become newly activated as responsible political participants.  The left cannot accept the increasingly obvious fact that big government is destroying jobs and bankrupting our country and its people.
Leftists are fascinated by the Occupy Wall Street protesters because, for generations, their organizing principle hasn’t changed.  It was best stated in 1901 by future Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin in his newspaper Iskra (The Spark).

Lenin wrote, “Our task is to utilize every manifestation of discontent, and to gather and turn to the best account every protest, however small … Concentrate all droplets of popular resentment.  Combine all these streamlets into a single gigantic torrent.”

More recently, Saul Alinsky taught much the same thing to many who now cannot resist applauding the Occupiers.

That old strategy won’t work in America today.  Most experienced political analysts predict that President Obama cannot be re-elected unless our national economy improves dramatically before November 2012.

More government can’t generate the growth necessary to save the left in next year’s election.  And even if it could, the current Congress would defeat any major attempts to increase government spending and government control of the economy.

The ironic fact is that the Occupy Wall Street protesters will, to the extent that they vilify profits and shame and frighten employers and prospective employers, discourage private investment in new activity which alone can create new jobs.  By linking himself and his allies to these protests, President Obama is scaring off job creators and damaging his chance of re-election, not building his base of support.  Fortunately, there aren’t enough idiots out there.

As our country approaches the hour of decision on raising the federal government’s debt limit, several conservative sources have offered different plans to prevent the national government bankruptcy that every sensible person knows is inevitable unless major systemic changes are made.  If some systemic changes are made in connection with raising the debt limit, those changes will, at best, “kick the can down the road,” leaving yet to be achieved the major reforms necessary to solve America’s long-term fiscal crisis.

Prosperity will not return until the uncertainty which grips the private sector is relaxed.  The economy will get worse as the dollar drops in value.  Interest rates across the economy will surge upward as soon as purchasers cannot be found for U.S. government debt at the currently low interest rates.  Inflation will do more than creep up when all the money created out of thin air in recent years finally has the effect Milton Friedman predicted and the Federal Reserve is seen to have run out of useful ways to mask the effects of so much fiat money.

The greater the number of well-thought-out plans offered now to incentivize growth, the better.  Each new, reasonable plan brings its supporters into the fray.   plan may turn out to motivate the newly active conservative grassroots activists to maintain and increase their campaign participation in 2012.

The next elections may put into office sufficient numbers of politicians who are ready to enact measures to enable economic growth through limiting the burden of government, primarily through cutting spending and taxes and eliminating counter-productive regulations.  The supporters of the various constructive plans will unite and pass these good changes.  That is, we will do this if we are wise.

History often teaches useful lessons.  Conservatives should familiarize ourselves with the story of the French monarchists after Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III’s empire in 1870.  Monarchists won a comfortable majority in the new National Assembly, but they were divided into supporters of the senior Bourbon line (Legitimists) and supporters of the Orleanists (King Louis Phillipe’s family).  The two sides negotiated and agreed that the senior line’s comte de Chambord would become king.  He was an old man, unlikely to have children, and the last male of the senior line.  Upon Chambord’s death, the comte de Paris, head of the Orleanist branch of the Bourbons, would unquestionably be the legitimate heir to the throne.

Unfortunately for their cause, the two sides couldn’t agree on the flag of a restored monarchy.  Chambord demanded the old regime’s field of lilies flag.  The Orleanists insisted on the revolutionary tricolor flag, which Louis Phillipe had adopted for his July 1830 monarchy.  The two sets of monarchists stubbornly deadlocked.  Time passed.  Popular opinion shifted, and special elections resulted in the defeat of so many monarchists on both sides that the republicans gained a majority – and the hopes of French monarchists were dashed, probably forever.

When the time comes for united action, U.S. conservatives should act more wisely than the French Bourbons did.

Most states would lose power in U.S. presidential elections under the proposed National Popular Vote (NPV) plan now being considered by many state legislatures.

In support of the National Popular Vote State Compact, some states have already passed laws awarding all their electoral votes to the U.S. presidential candidate who wins a national plurality of the popular vote.  This bad idea would be constitutional because Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution gives the respective state legislatures the right to appoint presidential electors.  Congressional approval isn’t required.  The Compact would take effect if states with a majority of the electoral votes pass it.

Proponents of the NPV plan are now making a push to persuade state legislators to enact it, arguing that polls show Americans favor electing our presidents by popular votes rather than electoral votes determined by each state.  What proponents don’t mention is that 31 states would lose power in presidential elections under this plan.  Nineteen states would lose more than 20% of their power, and ten states would lose more than 40% of their power.

The accompanying table shows the effect of NPV on each state.

For example, New Hampshire’s four electoral votes amount to 0.74% of the 538 presidential electors.  Based on the 2008 presidential election, New Hampshire cast just 0.54% of the popular vote in the 2008 presidential election.  Under NPV, the state would have lost 26.58% of its power in the last presidential election.

If NPV had been in effect in 2008, Delaware would have lost 44% of its power.  Rhode Island would have lost 51.49% of its power.  Wyoming’s power would have dropped by 65.48%.  The pattern is the same for all the smaller-population states.

Gainers under NPV would be the larger states, but their gains wouldn’t be as dramatic as the losses for all the smaller states.  New York would have gained power in the 2008 presidential election by only 1.17%.  California’s power would have increased by only 1.49%.

In 2008, medium-sized states with many hotly contested congressional and state races drew disproportionately greater turnout than other states.  States where the presidential campaigns specially focused their national resources also had higher turnouts.  So in 2008, Ohio would have gained 17.25% in presidential -election power if the NPV had superseded the electoral-college system.  Michigan would have gained power by 20.40%.

State legislators should consider carefully the disruption NPV would bring to the electoral college system, which was a part of the grand compromise enacted at the 1789 Constitutional Convention to protect states’ rights and balance the power of the small states against the larger states.

In many ways, the constitutional separation of powers between the states and the federal government is being eroded.  The Founders never intended that the states should become merely administrative appendages of the federal government, much less that the United States become a unitary, centralized, plebiscitary democracy.  NPV would push America along that dangerous and originally unintended path.

Beyond preserving federalism, there are other powerful reasons to oppose the NPV plan, although Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have already passed it.

For example, NPV would greatly incentivize vote-stealing because big-city political machines would realize that massive numbers of fraudulent votes they could engender could swing the electoral votes beyond their states and be counted toward a national popular vote plurality victory for their presidential candidate.

However, for a change, this national decision on NPV is in the hands of state governments.

*********************************

Winners and Losers under National Popular Vote Plan

• 31 states would lose power under the National Popular Vote plan.
• 19 states would lose more than 20% of their power.
• 10 states would lose more than 40% of their power.

The key to understanding Newt Gingrich is that he positioned himself as the leader of conservative Republicans in the House, used the House Republican Study Committee (HRSC) as his vehicle for years to advance himself, and then, when he became Speaker, changed the rules to destroy the House Republican Study Committee.

He used the HRSC as a ladder to the top and then removed the ladder to eliminate its use as a check on him. Whatever his talents and his faults, for Newt it’s always about Newt.

After Newt, the House Republican Study Committee came back, stronger than ever. If he ever became President, it’s an open question as to whether or not the Republican Party ever could come back.

Last year’s election results provided many opportunities for conservatives to beat back the forces of big government which are about to bankrupt our country.  Some elected Republicans are missing the biggest of those opportunities they have.

See my letter, below, to my old friend, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels:

*******************************

March 1, 2010

The Honorable Mitch Daniels
Office of the Governor
Indiana Statehouse
200 W. Washington St., Room #206
Indianapolis, IN 46204

Dear Mitch,

As a long-time board member of the American Conservative Union, I congratulate you on your recent, well-crafted and well­ received speech at CPAC in Washington, D.C.

This speech introduced you to many conservative activists who don’t know you as I do but have heard reports that you will likely “throw your hat in the ring” for the Republican nomination for President.

But I found disturbing something I learned at CPAC, so I am writing to offer you some friendly advice.

Your work to stop passage of the Right to Work Bill in your own state of Indiana will cost you dearly should you decide to run for President.

If you have any aspiration of running for President, it’s absolutely vital that Indiana pass a Right to Work law in 2011.

The reason is simple.  Republican primary voters are staunch opponents of forced unionism.

That was true when I served as Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate in 1964 and during my time in the Reagan White House.  The sudden public awareness of the threat of government bankruptcies at every level, caused by caused by excessive union power, make it even more true today.

Coming off the very heated federal fight over “Card Check,” Big Labor’s role in ramming through “ObamaCare,” and the bloated public-sector union contracts that are just now coming to light across the country, grassroots opposition to forced unionism is quite possibly at its highest level ever.

Grassroots people who will determine the 2012 Republican presidential nominee see clearly now that organized labor is the engine of socialism in America and that compulsory unionism has forced unwilling workers to fund the power union bosses are using to expand the cost and power of government at every level.

That’s why I believe the grassroots will be searching for a candidate who will take on Big Labor and push for real reforms.

It’s unlikely you will be able to pass this test without passage of Right to Work.

What you do now will prove more important than anything you have done before regarding the abuses of organized labor.

In your speech before CPAC, you stated that “big changes take big majorities.”

Of course, freeing hundreds of thousands of Indiana workers from the shackles of compulsory unionism by passing Right to Work in Indiana would be considered a big and important change across the country.

You have said in the past that Indiana’s lack of a Right to Work law has cost your state economically.

And if you translate the Republican majorities in your own state legislature to the U.S. Congress, it would equal a 261 to 174 Republican majority in the U.S. House and a 74 to 26 majority in the U.S. Senate.

Based on those numbers, it’s clear that you have a large enough majority to pass Right to Work in Indiana should you so desire.

But it’s obvious that it takes something more than “big majorities,” as you stated, for real reform to take place.

It takes leadership.

Mitch, if the Presidency is something you desire, you must show that quality now by passing Right to Work.

Should you refuse, the political price you pay could be enormous.

Just consider that Right to Work has been the single hottest issue in Iowa’s state politics over the past several years as Big Labor was beaten back from repealing that state’s Right to Work law due to overwhelming grassroots opposition.

In the first primary state, New Hampshire, despite its having a Democrat Governor, Right to Work is a hot issue.  Right to Work legislation just passed the House and is on its way to the state Senate for consideration, with a massive battle ongoing.  You know which side GOP primary voters are on.

And in South Carolina, one of the least unionized states in the nation, support for forced unionism is virtually unheard of — even among Democrat voters.

Let me conclude by saying that you’re in a position that many great men and women throughout history would envy.

Right now, you have the opportunity and the majorities to pass a state Right to Work law in Indiana.

Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s something that would boost your stock as a Republican candidate for President.

But make no mistake, should you choose to continue along the path of working to defeat Right to Work, GOP voters will make sure the Presidency stays out of your reach.

That’s a decision only you can make.

But I’m urging you to stand up to Big Labor, and make Indiana the 23^rd Right to Work state this year.

Cordially,

Morton Blackwell
Virginia Republican National Committeeman

The most important political development of the just-concluded election cycle is the enormously effective, new, political involvement of grassroots conservatives through the Tea Party groups and other, major, analogous organizations.

My Leadership Institute has trained newly active conservatives in partnership with every one of these major groups.  My staff and I therefore probably understand all these groups as well or better than anyone else.

If these groups continue active and growing, the 2012 elections will go much as the 2010 elections did.

If newly empowered Republicans are seen to keep the faith with the grassroots conservatives who elected them, these new activists will stay involved and prove decisive again in two years.

If not, the grassroots will turn against them with a vengeance.

After many years in which being considered a conservative was often a path to winning elections, many content-free politicians have found it in their interest to campaign as conservatives.

For movement-oriented conservatives, that’s a problem of success.  I’d rather have the problems of success than the problems of failure, but problems of success are nonetheless real.

Since the November 2010 elections, Republican leaders have missed opportunities to show that they really learned the lessons they say they have learned.  The raising of Congressmen Fred Upton and Hal Rogers to important House committee chairs looks like business as usual.  There were much better alternatives.

We can expect many such important tests in the next few weeks and months.

In this era when claiming to be a conservative can be a pathway to power for opportunists, we must better define who is truly a conservative.

I suggest this criterion:  Conservatives are people who do more for conservative principles than they think they absolutely have to do.  Only meeting such a standard will sustain the enthusiasm of the millions of grassroots conservatives who emerged politically in 2010.

Even Barack Obama acts on conservative principles when he thinks he absolutely has to.  That does not make him a conservative.

Immediately following the November 2 election, I mailed a letter of advice to 27 just-elected conservative officials.  I have decided to release this letter to the public.

This historic election brings much opportunity and danger.  Hundreds of grassroots conservatives will soon enter local, state, and federal government.  Liberals in the bureaucracies, media, and the party establishments will do their very best to co-opt or derail principled conservatives.

I hope this advice prevents good men and women from falling into the traps that have caught newly elected conservative officials too often in the past.

The text of my letter follows.

*************************************

November 8, 2010

Dear Conservative Friend,

Congratulations on your election.

Some years ago, I gave some written advice to a just-elected conservative friend who took it to heart.

I had known him for many years, since he was a college freshman, and he appreciated and acted on my advice.  I hope you will too.

Here for you is an updated version of that advice.

You should be getting a lot smarter now.  That’s not because almost everyone will now tell you how smart you are.  They will, of course, like never before.  Even your old friends will laugh much harder at your jokes.  But saying you’re smart doesn’t make it so.

The reason you’re likely to be smarter is that you’re no longer a candidate.  Every candidate promptly loses about 30 I.Q. points.  Most people recover some of that loss if they win.  Losers sometimes make an even more rapid recovery of good judgment.

You now face a new set of problems and opportunities.  And as a conservative friend whose principles I believe you share, I hope to catch you now, while the possibilities are all open, with the best advice I can give.

The most important decisions you will make right now are personnel decisions.  Personnel is policy.

If you pick staff who genuinely share your policy priorities, you’re likely to achieve much of your agenda in office.  If not, you probably won’t be able to do very many of the important things you now hope to do.

I urge you to make full use of my Leadership Institute’s free Employment Placement Service, headed now by Andrea McCarthy (703-247-2000, amccarthy@limail.us).  Our user-friendly, special website, ConservativeJobs.com, has hundreds of resumes posted by conservative job seekers.

The people you hire necessarily must make decisions.  If you could make all decisions for them, you would not need to hire them.  As my grandmother often said, “Why keep a dog if you’re going to bark yourself?”

Instructing people who don’t share your beliefs to make decisions based on your beliefs doesn’t work very well.  Sometimes it causes disasters.

In a subordinate, principles without competence is at least dangerous and certainly ineffective for you.  But competence without principles can be deadly.  Hire people whose loyalty to you is based on your principles, not on your ability to advance their careers.

Conservatives make a great mistake if they think:

I’m as conservative as one can be and still be responsible.  Anyone to the right of me is to that extent irresponsible.  So I’ll hire only people who exactly share my philosophy and those who are to the left of me.

If you base your hiring on that thinking, you’ll inevitably be dragged to the left by your staff.  You’ll undermine your political base.  And you’ll fail to do most of what you now hope to do.

You can’t hire only people who share your exact beliefs.  No two people truly agree on everything.  You should hire as many people to the right of you as to the left of you.

Governing is campaigning by different means.  You should always keep a secure home base.  Those you hire in government should be broadly representative of the coalition which elected you.  Nothing reassures elements of your political base more than to know they have good representation among your staff.

If significant political forces which supported your election decide you can no longer be the object of their affection, they will make you the object of their pressure.  And when you run into a few troubles, as every elected official does, they won’t instinctively jump to support you.  They will ask themselves, “Why bother?”

Keep the faith.  You can’t make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends.  Learn to live with the reality that some people won’t like you if you do what you were elected to do.

No matter what you do, some people will be your enemies.  They will never love you, so don’t worry about trying to make them love you.  You can make most of them respect you, though.  If you work at it, you can learn better the art of how to say unpleasant things pleasantly — a not-widely-understood reason for Ronald Reagan’s political success.

For most people in your coalition, you are not the center of the universe.

You were a cause they thought worth fighting for, but most of them have fought for other good causes before and fully intend to fight for other good causes while you’re in office and long after that.

They know they are in a long ball game.  You may have the ball right now, but their long-term interest is to win the game.  So you have to show them by your actions that your main interest also is to win the game for them, not just to be the star who gets his picture in the newspapers.

The media are not your constituency, even if they think they are.

Your constituency is the voters, especially the coalition which elected you.  You can’t count on the news media to communicate your message to your constituency.  You must develop ways to communicate with your coalition which avoid the filters of the media.

Focus on your base.  Write to them.  Meet with them. Ask for their advice.  Honor them.  Show yourself to be proud of them.  Support their activities.  Show up at their events.  Help other politicians, activists, and leaders who share their priorities.

People expect politicians to be selfish, so they specially love politicians whose actions show them to be unselfish.

Power will certainly corrupt some of your colleagues and may tempt you.  Resist those shiny temptations and shun those who don’t deserve to be defended.  Keep your pants on and your hands out of other people’s wallets.  Character is what you do when you think no one is looking.

Liberals in the media failed to defeat you.  Now they will use carrots and sticks to tempt and to intimidate you.  They will define any betrayal of your coalition as a sign of “growth.”  Don’t fall for that nonsense.

The only way you can get the liberal media on your side is always to betray your supporters, which you know would be political suicide.

Media people on the left operate on a double standard.  They can forgive a liberal politician almost anything.  They hold conservatives to an absolute standard.

You could occasionally please leftist journalists by breaking with conservative principles, but they would make sure to rub it in so your supporters would never forget how you disappointed them.  And when you get into any political difficulty, you can never expect any mercy from the liberal media.

The local, state, and national political landscape is littered with the moldering wrecks of the careers of politicians who won conservative support by giving their word on conservative principles and then broke their pledges.

If you keep your word, you can keep your friends and win at least respect from most of your enemies.

Every issue that is a key priority of an important element of your coalition should always be a priority for you.

In a system of separation of powers and checks and balances, people realize you can’t accomplish everything you’d like to.  But you must say and do things which prove you are doing the best you can to live up to your supporters’ reasonable expectations.

Complete victories are delightful but rare.  That means you should prove yourself willing sometimes to win only incremental victories and sometimes to fight losing battles for good causes.

Curious as it may seem, a politician rarely hurts himself when he fights in a principled way for a cause which loses or against a cause which wins.

Be cautious about making promises, but once committed, keep your word no matter what.  You have two things, your word and your friends.  Go back on either and you’re dead in politics.

Back in 1967, when I worked for the national College Republicans, I went to Kentucky to be the full-time youth coordinator for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Louie Nunn.  My work in that campaign produced results which caused many people to start taking me seriously in politics.

Nunn narrowly won.

In December 2007, my wife Helen and I had dinner with Kentuckian Fred Karem and his wife Suzanne — old friends.  Fred had been campaign director for Nunn and served in high positions through all four years of Gov. Nunn’s Administration.

Fred Karem told me that, as soon as Gov. Nunn had picked all the major appointees who would serve in his administration, he assembled them for a meeting.  Louie addressed them and said, approximately:

“I am not worried about my political enemies now.  They can’t hurt me.  I know how to handle them.

“What worries me is you.  You could hurt me and perhaps ruin what I ran to achieve if any of you do things which are illegal or scandalous.

“Any of you not prepared to promise me today that you’ll behave to the highest standards during my administration should quietly leave today.”

The four years of Gov. Nunn’s administration had virtually no ethical problems.  He lived more than 30 years after serving as governor.  He actively supported Ronald Reagan for president in the nomination contests of 1976 and 1980.  He died respected by all and beloved by many.

You have the potential now to be highly successful.  Please, from the outset, make sure all the people you bring into government are vetted carefully.  And stress to them, together and separately, that you expect them to operate at all times consistent with the highest ethical and moral standards.

You may find that many people now believe you owe jobs to them or to their associates.  Sometimes it’s very hard to say no.  However, in the long run, it’s better to be seen as ungrateful than to hire people with dangerously flawed characters.

Let me know whenever I can be of help.

All the best.

Cordially,

Morton C. Blackwell
President, Leadership Institute

P.S.    Please make full use now of my Leadership Institute’s free Employment Placement Service and our special website, ConservativeJobs.com.

What I am about to share with you is probably the most important lesson you will learn at any time in your life about success in the public policy process.

Conservatives did not understand the real nature of politics for many years and certainly did not begin to teach it systematically until the early 1970s.  Many conservatives today haven’t learned it yet.

Please bear with me as I begin with the important historical background.  I’ll get to the key concepts soon enough.

What was the greatest difference between conservatives who supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 and those who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980?  Most people don’t know the answer.

The majority today aren’t old enough to remember the 1964 presidential campaign, but Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, is still available and widely read.

Fortunately, most people still remember Ronald Reagan and his conservative principles.

Anyone who supported Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1980 can tell you that there was no significant difference in philosophy between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

You can see this for yourself.  If you read The Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960, you will see that Barry Goldwater’s positions on public policy issues then were very close to those of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

I can tell you from my personal experiences in the 1964 Goldwater campaign and in the 1980 Reagan campaign that there was one great difference between the approach to politics of the Goldwater supporters and the Reagan supporters 16 years later.

The difference was that we Goldwater supporters tended to believe that being right, in the sense of being correct, was sufficient to win.

We firmly believed that if we could prove we were right, if we could logically demonstrate that our candidate was of higher character and that his policies would be better for our country, somehow victory would fall to our deserving hands like a ripe fruit off of a tree.

That’s not the real nature of politics.  I call that misconception the Sir Galahad theory:  “I will win because my heart is pure.”

Do you know what was the most used slogan of the Goldwater campaign?  It was this:  “In your heart, you know he’s right.”

Unfortunately the real world doesn’t work that way, as we who supported Goldwater found out when Lyndon Johnson trounced us.  Johnson got 41 million votes and Goldwater got 27 million votes.

To this day I’m convinced Barry Goldwater would have been a better President for the United States than Lyndon Johnson, but Lyndon Johnson won big.

Some Goldwater conservatives were so shocked and disappointed that they dropped out of politics and were never seen again.  But not all of the Goldwater people left.  Many of us stayed involved.  Lots of us travelled similar paths and wound up working together.

In 1964, I had served as the youngest elected Goldwater Delegate to the Republican National Convention.  The next year, 1965, I came to Washington to be executive director of the national College Republicans.

Others with solid Goldwater pedigrees moved into the national scene at about the same time.

A young Goldwater supporter named Richard Viguerie came to Washington in 1965 and created his direct mail firm.  He soon became the nationally dominant consultant in political direct mail and is still a leader in that field today.

Another notable young conservative, Ed Feulner, also came to Washington in 1965, to work for a think tank.  Then he became a leading conservative congressional staffer.  Now he is president of the massive and effective Heritage Foundation.

Another young Goldwater supporter, Paul Weyrich, came to Washington the next year, in 1966, to serve as press secretary for a conservative U.S. Senator from Colorado.

Weyrich soon became the key conservative expert on politics on Capitol Hill.  He later became America’s most successful organizer of conservative organizations and institutions, playing a key role for more than 40 years in founding important new groups.

All of us had supported Goldwater, but none of us was prominent in his campaign.

In fact, none us even knew each other until we got to the D.C. area and began to build our own national reputations as fighters in different ways for conservative principles.  But in those days, our past support of the Goldwater campaign was a priceless credential among fellow conservatives.

Lee Edwards, a friend of mine who served as Director of Information in the 1964 Goldwater campaign had founded in 1965 what was probably the D.C. area’s only conservative public relations firm.

Now Dr. Edwards, he has become the nation’s foremost historian and biographer of the conservative movement.  In May 1972, Edwards introduced me to Richard Viguerie.

A week later Viguerie hired me away from the conservative think tank where I then worked in D.C.  He said, “Morton, I want you to come help me build a conservative movement.”

Richard Viguerie meant what he said, and his words were music to my ears because building a conservative movement was exactly what I wanted to do.

Soon, with my help as his political assistant, Richard began to gather frequently a small group of experienced, totally reliable conservatives who were serious about trying to figure out how to win for conservative principles.

Included in our meetings were those I have named, including Lee Edwards, and others whom we believed shared our conservative principles and our determination eventually to win for those principles in government, politics, and the news media.

We were tired of losing.

We discussed what had worked well for the political left, why conservatives had lost so many political battles, and what conservatives might do to win in the future.

It came down to this:  What is the real nature of politics?

Here was our first great conclusion:  Being right in the sense of being correct is not sufficient to win.  You don’t win just because your heart is pure, even if you can prove logically that you are right.

What, then, does determine victory?

In our frequent meetings and discussions, we came to our second great conclusion:  The winner in a political contest over time is determined by the number and the effectiveness of the activists and leaders on the respective sides.

That fundamental understanding changed our thinking.  It explains why the side that’s right doesn’t necessarily win.

Next we considered the vital question of what determines the number and effectiveness of the activists and leaders on a given side.  Clearly, numbers and effectiveness do not depend on which side is right.

Our third great conclusion was:  The number and effectiveness of the activists and leaders on a given side in a political contest is determined by the political technology used by that side.

That explains a lot of political history, including why bad causes, like communism, attracted a lot of activists.  The people on the political left used effective political technology.  In contrast, most conservatives had relied on proving we are right.

Political technology can be roughly divided into communication technology and organization technology, with no neat line of separation between communication and organization.

Most political technology is philosophically neutral.

Techniques which work for the left can work for conservatives.  Techniques which work for Republicans can work for Democrats, and vice versa.  Similar techniques can work whether a public policy battle is an election or a legislative battle over tax rates, the right to keep and bear arms, abortion, or any other issue.

In the 1970s, when we made what were for us these discoveries about the real nature of politics, we saw this new understanding as a terrific insight which could lead to victory for conservative principles in the public policy process of government, politics, and the news media.

But because most political technology is philosophically neutral, most people who are deeply committed philosophically tend to disdain to study or use political technology.

Instinctively, people devoted to their political principles tend to think learning mere skills is beneath their dignity because techniques are philosophically neutral.

Such people are, after all, thinking about and proving their wonderful, deeply held views on important public policy questions.

Is abortion the murder of tiny babies?

What must be done to stop the spread of worldwide communism?

What must be done to keep big government from destroying economic liberty and prosperity?

“They will take my gun only by prying it from my cold dead fingers.  God made man, but Winchester made men equal!”

Serious questions.

Serious people can get very excited about issues and philosophic differences, but they instinctively tend to think poorly of the study or practice of philosophically neutral skills.

Political technology is composed of a universe of specific techniques.

Of course, not all political techniques are philosophically neutral.  Terror is an evil technique used most commonly by the left.  Communists famously and effectively use terror to grab power and keep it.

But most political technology has no inherent philosophical content.

How you design a piece of political literature, how you raise funds, how you organize a precinct, how you attract a crowd to a political event, how you communicate to a mass audience online — those techniques can work for anybody.

You may wonder now what I mean by techniques.

Most of the most useful techniques don’t involve complex computer programming.

Let me use, for example, the techniques available for something as simple as a nametag.

How often have you seen pre-printed nametags which begin, in big letters, with “HELLO, MY NAME IS”?

That’s a bad technique.  The printed message is useless, and it takes space on the nametag which could be used for communication.

How many times have you attended meetings where someone has thoughtfully printed nametags for everyone in advance, in letters about the size a typewriter would produce?  That’s a bad technique because it wastes space which be used for communication.

How many times have you had to write your name on a nametag with a thin-line ballpoint pen?  That’s a bad technique because a name written by a wide-line, felt-tip pen is easier to read.

Often people print or write names on nametags in all capital letters.  That’s a bad technique because capitalizing only the first letters makes the nametag easier to read.

The name on a nametag should comfortably fill the entire space available.

Where do you place a nametag?

Most people instinctively place their nametags on their left shoulders.  Wrong.  The best place for your nametag is on your right shoulder, where people can most easily read it when you extend your right hand to greet them.

Thousands of known techniques work.

Very few techniques in politics are as complex as rocket science.  Most are as simple as learning the types of print font which are easiest to read or what I have said about nametags.

The right techniques can make you more effective in everything you work to achieve.  Each good technique you use in politics makes it more likely that you will win.

But many philosophically committed conservatives tend to believe that being right, in the sense of being correct, is sufficient to win.

Those of us who began to meet in 1972 discovered the real nature of politics:

The winner in a political contest over time is determined by the number and the effectiveness of the activists and leaders on the respective sides, and,

The number and the effectiveness of the activists and leaders on a given side is determined by the political technology that side employs.

We knew that many of our conservative allies thought otherwise and that we would have to persuade them differently.

Here is how we convinced many of them.  We shared with them our analysis of the real nature of politics, and then said, “If that is true, you owe it to your philosophy to study how to win.  You owe it to your philosophy to study how to win.  You have a moral obligation to learn how to win.”

If you allow your opposition to learn better how to organize and communicate than you do and they implement that technology, they will beat you no matter how right you are — and you don’t deserve to win.

That is a persuasive argument.  When you talk in terms of a moral obligation, you’re talking in terms people can understand if they have a strong philosophical commitment.

We began to have success teaching committed conservatives this, the real nature of politics, and it had a remarkable and sudden impact.

New groups begin to spring up in a wide range of issue areas.  A wide variety of specialized organizations:  educational foundations, legal defense foundations, lobbying organizations, and political action committees.

Conservatives began to study how to win.  Existing conservative organizations also began to grow very rapidly.  For example, in 1972, one of the biggest, most effective, most famous, most respected and even most feared organizations on the conservative side was the National Right to Work Committee.

In 1972 they had 25,000 members, and they were thought of as really big stuff.

Then they began to study and use communication and organization technology.  They began to grow throughout the 1970s, from 25,000 members in 1972 to 1.7 million National Right to Work Committee members in 1979.  Then they really were big and could affect policy in a major way.

At first a handful of new conservative groups started.  Then dozens.  Then conservatives started hundreds of new national and local groups.  Each new or newly large group contributed an increase in the number and the effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders.

By 1980 conservatives had the political muscle across the country not only to nominate Ronald Reagan for President but to elect him.

That wasn’t the first time Reagan had run for President.  I was a Reagan alternate Delegate in the presidential campaign of 1968, when he made his first, brief run for President.  Again I was a Reagan alternate Delegate in 1976, when he ran against President Ford for the nomination and almost won.

By 1980 the conservative movement had grown remarkably.  Reagan won nomination convincingly and then won election.  And I got to serve three years on the Reagan White House Staff.

All of this is of central importance for you because the potential for growth of conservative political strength still exists.  The rapid, spontaneous growth of grassroots conservative activity in 2009 and 2010 proves that.

It turns out that the more groups you have and the greater the number of people you activate and teach how to be effective, the more power that you have to impact on the public policy process.

I don’t have to tell you how often Supreme Court decisions on liberal versus conservative issues are now decided on a five to four basis.  The next Congress is likely to be closely divided between conservatives and the left, with many congressional elections decided by only a handful of votes.

The next presidential election is likely to be very close.  Conservatives may once again be able to unite behind a conservative to win a presidential nomination and the 2012 presidential election.

The margins of victory in the American public policy process may be smaller now than at any other time in American history.  You can make a difference, now and in the future.

The number of American conservative activists and leaders is certainly growing.  To grow in effectiveness, they must study how to win.

My Leadership Institute now offers 40 types of training schools in the public policy process.  You can review those 40 types of schools at leadershipinstitute.org.  For the first time, political training for conservatives is available online, on demand, and free 24 hours a day.

Other conservative organizations also offer worthwhile training you should consider.

Nothing would be more disappointing politically than for conservatives to lose because of avoidable mistakes.

So I urge you, remember the real nature of politics and the clinching argument which has revived the power of conservative principles in America:

You owe it to your philosophy to study how to win.  You have a moral obligation to learn how to win.

At every meeting of the Republican National Committee (RNC), there’s a meeting of the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules, on which I serve for Virginia.

I proposed that a Party Unity Pledge with teeth in it be added to the national Rules of the Republican Party.  On August 5 the RNC Rules Committee approved this important change with only one negative vote.

After almost certain approval by the 2012 Republican National Convention, the new rule will take effect in the 2012 fall elections and thereafter.

Here’s the background.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist ran and raised millions as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate and then, earlier this year, outrageously declared himself an independent, general election candidate against Marco Rubio, the runaway leader in the Republican primary.

Last year in a special election for the congressional seat in New York’s 23rd District, Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava, running far behind, dropped out of the race and endorsed the Democrat nominee.

At the RNC’s August meeting in Kansas City, I moved, and, with a couple of friendly amendments by Bill Crocker of Texas and Saul Anuzis of Michigan, the Rules Committee passed what I call the Party Unity Pledge.

Here is the text of the Party Unity Pledge:

No candidate for public elected office shall receive money or in-kind support from the Republican National Committee prior to signing and delivering to the Committee the following pledge:

I, ____________, am a Republican and seek the office of ________________ in the general election to be held on ________(month) ___(day), _____ (year).  I make the following pledge:

I will run and campaign as a Republican for the office named above.  I will not oppose the Republican nominee for the office named above through time of the election specified above, whoever that may be.  I will not in any way endorse or support any other person for the office named above at any time before the election specified above who is not then a Republican candidate.

If I fail to comply with the foregoing pledge, I promise, and shall be personally liable, to repay to the Republican National Committee and to any other donor, promptly upon request, the amount of their respective monetary contributions to my campaign.

________________________

(signature)

Ordinarily, the Rules of the Republican Party cannot be changed by the RNC between national conventions.

Enabled to do so by a unique decision of the 2008 Republican National Convention, the Republican National Committee summer meeting in Kansas City narrowly approved a change (which I supported) in the delegate selection process for the 2012 National Convention.

The change was an effort to combat the tendency in recent election cycles for more and more states to select their delegates earlier and earlier, leading toward the undesirable result of a single, national presidential primary day.

If no change had been made, more than 30 states would have held their presidential primaries on the first Tuesday in February.

Four states (New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada) will be allowed without penalty to select their delegates in February of presidential election years.

States which select delegates in March may not conduct winner-take-all primaries but will have to institute some sort of proportional representation of delegates among the presidential candidates.

States which choose their national delegates in April or later will not be required to allocate those delegates among the presidential candidates by any form of proportional representation.

I do not consider this an ideal rules change, but it was the best possible under the circumstances.

This new rule provides that it will take effect if the Democratic National Committee adopts and adheres to the same provisions.

Among the millions of newly active grassroots conservatives in politics, thousands of the best are coming to the Leadership Institute this year to study how to win.

Institute staff and volunteer experts are teaching at dozens of Institute political training programs across America co-sponsored with LI separately by Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Nation, Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, FreedomFest, and many other grassroots-based organizations.

LI has launched for Tea Party Patriots (TPP) an online, on demand, and free offering of twelve activist training lectures for TPP members, our first major project of this type.  Other lectures will be added periodically.

Tea Party Patriots members will access this free training by going to TeaPartyTraining.org.

Many people have asked me if I think the remarkable new conservative grassroots activism will continue all the way to the November election.

My answer is simple.  Yes.

Why has this activism developed?  Because of citizen rage at the unprecedented number and variety of power grabs by the Obama Administration and the Pelosi/Reid Congress.

Our nation has seen nothing like this before, not even during the expansions of government in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Political activism now caused by citizen outrage might decline if the leftist power grabs ceased.  But Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are ideologues.  Their power grabs will continue through the November elections, so I fully expect the level of conservative outrage and activism to continue and even to grow in intensity.

In fact, I expect a lame-duck session of this Congress after the election to continue until the new Congress convenes next January.  Nancy Pelosi could probably pass the Communist Manifesto on the floor of the House, so the leftists won’t want to waste a minute as long as their congressional majorities last.

Another matter I see and hear often these days is the suggestion that all these new town hall and Tea Party folks are so far out of the mainstream of politics that they are somehow incompatible with previously active conservatives.  That’s baloney.

In different ways, I have taken part in three waves of newly activated conservatives entering politics.

I became politically active during the conservative awakening around Barry Goldwater in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  I was a member of the original Steering Committee of National Youth for Goldwater in 1963 and his youngest elected Delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent a lot of time helping conservative religious leaders who recruited millions of theologically conservative Americans into politics for the first time.  On the White House Staff, I served as President Reagan’s liaison to the emerging “religious right.”

Now in 2010, my Leadership Institute staff, faculty, and I are training thousands of newly activated conservatives who watch horrified as those now in charge of our government try to shred the Constitution, grab all power, permanently destroy all their opponents, and spend our country into bankruptcy.

There’s a pattern to these three waves.

In each case, the left and the mainstream media (not much difference) claimed that the newly active conservatives were ignorant extremists who could not possibly succeed in politics, were incompatible with previously active conservatives, and even were racists.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

New waves of active conservatives nominated Goldwater, nominated and elected Reagan, and appear likely to be decisive in the 2010 elections.

Moreover, the new activists don’t drop out of politics.  Many like me from the Goldwater era are still active.  Social-issue conservatives who changed the direction of America in 1980 still work effectively in the public policy process.

The process is cumulative.  Huge numbers of new activists who get their first taste of politics in conservative grassroots activity in this election cycle will keep fighting for their principles for decades to come.  Some will become a new generation of leaders.

Then there’s the fond hope of the left that their enemies can’t possibly work together.  We’ll see.

Centrifugal forces try to pull apart the elements in any coalition.  Different elements have different priorities, and some of those priorities sometimes conflict.

However, there are centripetal forces which pull people together in politics.

When the same organizations and the same leaders work side by side against the same enemies in a long series of election contests and legislative battles, they tend to become comfortable together.  They frequently confer, make plans around the same tables, and get to know each other on a first-name basis.

They learn which of their allies are trustworthy and come to like them.

Before long the leader of one group goes to dinner at the home of the leader of another group.  And when he arrives at the front door, the dog there wags its tail rather than barks.

Through such processes, movements and normal governing majorities are born.

Unity is easier in an embattled minority where survival is at risk.  Centrifugal forces grow in strength after a principled minority defeats its opposition.  Foolish elements of the new majority, heady with success, may take actions grossly offensive to other groups in their coalition.

Power does tend to corrupt, and success stimulates hubris — as Republicans found to their sorrow in the past decade.

Conservatives now have it in their power to use the Republican Party to build a stable, governing majority.

Content-free Republicans will not be persuaded by sweet reason to change their ways.  Nor will many of them change for fear of future defeats by conservatives.

Many of the content-free Republican elected public officials and party officials will have to be replaced before that party can be reliable for conservative principles.

Republicans made big mistakes in the last decade, particularly regarding big spending and government growth.  They’d better not look like Obama-lite after the 2010 elections.  If they do, grassroots conservatives will promptly turn against them, producing devastating effects in the 2012 elections.

Using the Republican Party as their principal vehicle, resurgent conservatives in 2010 will break the statist consensus in America only if they nominate and elect people who could not have been elected in recent times.

That can be achieved only by focused, hard work, as I described in my December 17 RedState posting, “Conservative Republican Participation.”

A Renewed Conservative Republican Majority

By Morton C. Blackwell

History never repeats itself exactly, but there are patterns in history which repeat themselves.

For instance, the recent election results in Virginia, in New Jersey, and, most spectacularly, in Massachusetts, lead me to believe that the November 2010 elections may produce results for Republicans similar to the 1994 elections.

The landslide elections of 2008 may be followed in 2010 by a landslide in the opposite direction.  I certainly hope so and will do all I can to make that happen.

Something big is happening in America.  We saw the first evidence of a grassroots conservative uprising last year at the townhall meetings and the spontaneous proliferation of tea party events.

The Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey were dismissed by the Obama White House, Democratic Party leaders, and the mainstream media as anomalies caused by local circumstances.

Then came a thunderbolt in, of all places, Massachusetts: Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown.  The old explanations don’t work anymore.  No one can credibly deny that the left and the Democratic Party, which are pretty much the same thing these days, are in deep, national trouble now.

President Obama, who promised change, may cause more change than he likes this year.

It took our Republican Party more than a decade after the 1994 elections to lose the confidence of the American electorate.  Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have accomplished that in a single year.

Other than the important task of uniting ourselves almost unanimously against the Obama Administration and the Democrat majorities in the Congress, the Republican Party has done very little to cause or deserve the sudden change in the national political climate.

No, the Democrats have brought their problems upon themselves.

They have not merely caused the tide of politics to turn against them; they have generated a tsunami which may sweep them away.  I hope so.

Driven irresistibly by their extreme ideology and an unquenchable thirst for power, they basked in the approval of the only media they see.  They never stopped to consider the possibility that their behavior might offend and alienate the majority of Americans.  It did.

Moral indignation is one of the most powerful human instincts.  It seldom dominates politics, but when it does it tends to sweep everything before it.

It’s not easy to rouse the national electorate into a state of moral outrage, but President Obama and the Democrats have arrogantly managed to do it.  Their politics stink almost palpably.

Unprecedented spending.  Unprecedented deficits.  Unprecedented increases in national debt.  Major tax increases in the midst of a recession.  Gross favoritism to political allies.  Demagogic attacks on all perceived opponents.  Grabs in all directions for more power in government and the private sector.  Bragging about not letting any crisis go to waste.  Shamelessly corrupt bargains to buy votes in Congress.  Appointments of avowed socialists, Marxists, and even an admitted communist to government positions.  Government control of health care.  Cap and tax.  Card check.  Government monopoly of student loans.  Change the law to keep a Republican governor from appointing to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy; change the law again to allow a Democrat governor to appoint a U.S. Senator.  Class warfare.  Famously broken promises from government transparency to the unemployment rate.  Endless apologies to the rest of the world for being the United States of America.

A full list would be much longer.

These people are far, far from the mainstream of America.  They are not ready for prime time.  The emperor has no clothes, his pants are on the ground, and a great many people now are outraged to see that he fooled them.

Barring some extraordinary event, Republicans will certainly make a major comeback in the November 2010 elections.

But are we ready for that?

Power does tend to corrupt, and no party is immune to the temptations of power.

Must we repeat the costly mistakes of our recent past?  How can we avoid the future abandonment of the conservative principles on which we built a majority coalition?  That’s what caused so many American voters to throw so many Republicans out of office.

I outlined a plan of action in my December 17 posting on RedState, “Conservative Republican Participation.”

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For those of you not familiar with Morton Blackwell, he runs the Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C. and has served as the Virginia Republican National Committeeman since 1988. He was President Ronald Reagan’s White House liaison (1981-84) to all U.S. conservative organizations. This is a speech Mr. Blackwell gave at the Louisa County Republican Committee luncheon November 12, 2008. — Erick

Thank you for your kind invitation to address you today. When your chairman, Pat Mullins, invited me, of course I accepted. You have probably found out, as I have, that it’s a good idea to do what Pat asks you to do.

I’ve known him for many years, since before he served as Fairfax County Republican Committee chairman. Pat was highly successful there, and I’m not surprised that he’s doing so well with you now in Louisa County.

The first part of what I shall say to you today is word-for-word what I said October 25 at a Republican meeting in Lake of the Woods. My talk there was entitled “Predicting Obama’s Changes.” The only difference is that then I talked about what a President Obama would do. Now those same predictions apply to what I think he will do.

Today I shall not discuss his many questionable associates, his undistinguished record in the Illinois state Senate and in the United States Senate, his record for breaking commitments, or anything he has said during his presidential campaign.

Any reasonably alert person has already heard a lot about those matters.

Instead, I shall make a number of fairly short predictions of what Barack Obama will do to our country.

He has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars promising to bring change to America, but very few people took the time and trouble to consider just what changes Barack Obama would make.

That’s unfortunate, because changes can be good or bad. A person who jumps out of the frying pan into the fire certainly experiences a change for the worse.

In fact, every disaster is a change. By definition, every disaster is a change. I think well-informed people, if they think about it, can predict with accuracy many of the most important changes Barack Obama will bring to America.

I do not make these predictions casually. They are the result of careful observation and serious thought. I offer them to you in the belief that every one of them will be proved right.

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