(This is the first section of a three part TDS Strategy Memo that will appear this week. A PDF version of the complete Memo is available here)
Three of the critical mistakes that led to the setbacks in the campaign for health care reform this summer actually preceded the launch of the health care campaign itself and were not the direct result of the specific legislative and political strategies the administration employed. They were rooted in decisions made in the first month or two after Obama took office.
They were:

1. A failure to create a clearly defined “core” message expressing Obama’s basic agenda and general philosophy of government.
2. A failure to immediately begin organizing an effective mass mobilization for that agenda.
3. A failure to begin building ongoing social and cultural community institutions to support that agenda.

There were understandable reasons why these failures of strategy occurred and why they were in significant measure unavoidable – Obama took office in the most chaotic economic circumstances of any president since the Great Depression. The point is not to assign blame but rather to accurately identify the critical tasks that have still not been accomplished and to develop a strategy for achieving them
Introduction
On inauguration day, Obama began his term amid the most dramatic expression of grass roots enthusiasm for a president in living memory – an unprecedented groundswell of support not just from African-Americans but from an extremely broad coalition of the young, the urban, the educated and other groups. The masses of people who traveled to Washington on January 20th or who gathered in other places across the country to celebrate Obama’s inauguration reflected a popular energy and degree of identification with a political figure and a political campaign that had not been previously exhibited since the Roosevelt era.
Within a short time, however, the widely shared feeling that the Obama campaign had not just been a standard political campaign but rather the dramatic beginning of a dynamic mass social movement began to sharply decline. By the time the April 15th “tea parties” rolled around there was barely any sign of spontaneous and energetic grass roots activity among Democrats – there was no nationwide outpouring of local community social activities like “support Obama” rock concerts, street parties, theme evenings at restaurants and clubs or special events to draw people together on an ongoing informal basis. There was no wide viral promotion of new post-election symbols like buttons, tea shirts or bumper stickers carrying forward the “Yes We Can” spirit and linking it to an emerging social movement organized around an agenda for change. There were no tables at shopping centers, people handing out leaflets on street corners or new post-election pro-Obama signs on lawns or lampposts or bulletin boards.
As long time grass-roots organizer Marshall Gans and Peter Drier noted in a Washington post op-ed:

Once in office, the president moved quickly, announcing one ambitious legislative objective after another. But instead of launching a parallel strategy to mobilize supporters, most progressive organizations and Organizing for America — the group created to organize Obama’s former campaign volunteers — failed to keep up… Organizing for America, for example, encouraged Obama’s supporters to work on local community service projects, such as helping homeless shelters and tutoring children. That’s fine, but it’s not the way to pass reform legislation…
Meanwhile, as the president’s agenda emerged, his former campaign volunteers and the advocacy groups turned to politics as usual: the insider tactics of e-mails, phone calls and meetings with members of Congress. Some groups — hoping to go toe-to-toe with the well-funded business-backed opposition — launched expensive TV and radio ad campaigns in key states to pressure conservative Democrats. Lobbying and advertising are necessary, but they have never been sufficient to defeat powerful corporate interests.

The DNC did send out letters. Organizing for America did invite its members to meet in small groups and gatherings and reminded the people on its e-mail lists to visit the OFA website. But the energy and scale of these efforts were deliberately low-key. The DNC letters were in essence standard fundraising appeals and the OFA events were quite specifically designed as “insider” activities for loyal supporters and not as energetic outreach to the general public.
The conservative opposition to Obama’s agenda, on the other hand, created a unique public event in the April 15th Tea Parties, developed a new nationwide set of internet-based social networks and widely popularized a broad ideological framework and perspective with which to attack the entire Obama agenda and administration – the notion that the individual elements of the Obama agenda were actually part of a general movement toward “a government takeover ”, “socialism” or “fascism” and represented an aggressive attack on traditional American values and institutions.
Democrats responded to this threat with an uncoordinated mixture of sputtering outrage, bemused ridicule and point by point refutation of more specific accusations. The charge of “socialism” seemed so absurd that a thoughtful attempt to refute it seemed unnecessary. There was no serious national communications strategy devised to clearly answer the simple but vital question “OK, if the Democratic agenda is not socialism or “government takeover” then exactly what is it?”
This underlying Democratic weakness at the levels of both communications strategy and grass roots organizing led directly to the near-total breakdown during August. The opponents of health care reform were mobilized, organized, armed with basic talking points and backed by professional communications and PR firms. Grass-roots Democrats were looking around in vain for someone to offer leadership and direction.
By late in the third week of August the Democrats had cobbled together a sufficient response to meet the conservative offensive and slow the media narrative of massive public opposition to Democratic plans. But the substantial slide in Obama’s job approval left the campaign for health care reform substantially weaker than it had been in the spring.
At this point, the urgent need is not only for short-term organizing to regain the initiative on health care reform but also for longer range efforts to build a nationwide movement that that revives the “Yes We Can” spirit of Jan 20th and transforms it into a sustained and active social movement to support the overall Democratic agenda. To do this Dems need to do three things.

1. Develop one simple, standardized “core” message that clearly defines the basic goals—as well as the limits — of Obama’s agenda
2. Develop a deeply committed and highly organized group of volunteers specifically dedicated to advocating that core message in meetings and discussions wherever they occur.
3. Develop local activities that can mature into enduring local community social and cultural institutions – institutions that can support a renewed “Yes We Can” movement and allow it to grow.

Read more…

Back in 1970, my high school held an assembly to listen to pitches on behalf of the various people running for governor of Georgia (the Peach State allowed 18-year-olds to vote well before the enactment of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment). Most of the candidates recruited students from the school to recycle their talking points. But candidate Jimmy Carter was represented by a chubby, funny young man named Jody Powell.
That probably meant that Carter was somewhere close by, because he rarely went anywhere that year, or in his subsequent presidential campaign, without Powell, who started out as the candidate’s driver and soon became his press secretary. The driving gig was actually a step up for Powell, who had not long before been expelled from the Air Force Academy for cheating on an exam. But rarely has a politician enjoyed the services of a more unlikely (Powell liked to smoke and drink) and effective staffer. And Jody Powell soon went on a very wild ride that took Jimmy Carter through the governorship of Georgia to the White House.
It’s part of the institutional history of Washington that the Carter presidency failed because he insisted on bringing all these Georgia rubes to the White House with him, who didn’t know how to deal with the movers-and-shakers of “this town.” (I’d say inheriting an ongoing economic disaster might have been a somewhat larger factor). But Powell never lost a step, and in the most hidebound, boys-club segment of the Capitol, the press corps, this cracker who never went to journalism school or held a reporting job was soon rated one of the best press secretaries in memory. He was one of the few significant members of the Carter administration whose reputation was better going out than coming in, even though he started out pretty well.
On the news of Powell’s sudden death yesterday, ABC’s Jake Tapper made a very sad observation:

Powell and the late Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, were WH “whiz Kids” on a Rolling Stone cover in 1977. I doubt Carter thought he’d outlive both of them.

Jody Powell was a good ol’ boy who did very well in an unlikely life. May he rest in peace.

Those old enough to remember what the McCarthy Era felt like will recognize the re-emergence of an ugly meme in American politics: branding reforms and individuals as “Socialist.” Of course, red-baiting never really went completely away. But now it’s back in a big way. The idea here is to demonize their liberal adversaries as authoritarian, even those who are advocating the most moderately liberal of reforms.
Effective branding, as every experienced business person knows, requires repetition. And so here we go with conservative ideologues repeated demonizing of liberal supporters of health care reform as “Socialists.” Presumably the term “Communist” has been judged a little too harsh for modern meme-propagation, at least at this juncture. But the same twisted, fear-mongering psychology is at work, and if unchallenged, it could get worse.
I suspect that many, if not most of the latter-day red-baiters have no clue that there are many stable governments that have free speech, free elections and embrace what can be described as ‘Socialist’ policies. They merely parrot memes they have heard on Fox Network, Freedomworks or WorldnetDaily.Com, encouraged by GOP opinion leaders who know better.
The New York Times ‘Room for Debate’ blog is running a mini-forum on “What is Socialism 2009?,” with contributions by academics and journalists. A couple of their short essays, followed by some perceptive reader comments, illuminate the psychology behind latest round of neo-Mcarthyist Socialist-bashing.
In his essay, Andrew Hartman an assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, observes:

…The degree to which conservatives invoke the specter of socialism has always been more calibrated to domestic anxieties than to foreign threats…For many, the label serves as an effective, if cynical sledgehammer. In a nation with a long history of anti-socialist sentiments, if health care reform can be associated with “socialism,” that’s good strategy.

In her contribution, The Nation Editor Katrina Vanden Heuval explains:

America’s Glenn Beck-inspired mobs would consider social democracy one and the same as socialism or communism. But there is a difference; and it is one which our history textbooks and our media have for the most part failed to fill us in on. So, now we are in a vacuum, and misinformation and mendacity fills it. At our peril. Isn’t social democracy — or call it socialism with a human face — all about a healthy and thriving public sphere in education, health care, transportation, libraries, parks, childcare? Isn’t it about government programs that improve the conditions of people’s lives? If that is socialism, then Medicare is our America variant of socialism.
We are poorer today for the divisions unleashed by those who would lash the label “socialism” around the neck of a moderately liberal president in order to cripple efforts by government to play a smart and humane role.

A commenter, Bill Hoagland adds:

When a reactionary political party has nothing positive to offer, and they desire to maintain the status quo– they can only resort to negativity. Calling someone a “Liberal” doesn’t quite have the negative connotation that they were once able to attach to it. So they label someone a “Socialist” and attack the person, or the plan. But it is nothing except ‘name calling’…

But a few Republican leaders are getting a bit worried. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, quoted in Peter Wallsten’s L.A. Times article “Some fear GOP is being carried to the extreme,” has expressed concern about “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps…you have to be aware that there’s a line where legitimate concerns begin to collapse into paranoid fantasy.”
When the problem is ignorance, as always, the best approach is education. In her CNNPolitics.com commentary, Yale professor Jennifer Klein describes one couple’s stated fears of “a socialist takeover of their health care” voiced at one of the recent town hall meetings. Klein, co-author, with Eilene Boris of “For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State,” explains in interesting historical detail how the couple’s health care with the United Mineworkers’ union, has been government-subsidized from the outset.
But Klein concludes on a cautionary note and observes,

Health care reform will derail once more if we can’t learn to talk honestly about public benefits and public goods — how they protect us from the insecurities and inequities of the market and promote genuine economic security in the face of real imbalances of economic power and resources…The only moments when health security has been achieved in America are those founded on a partnership between empowered citizens and the federal government…It’s been the American way all along.

The “Socialist” accusation is being responded to across the country by progressives favoring an expanded role for government in health care reform. Although the climate of fear is not as intense as it was during the McCarthy era, Democrats should expect the attacks for a while longer, until even lazy reporters who can’t analyze policy get tired of writing about it. The thing is to be ready for it, to have some good soundbites and brief responses that put the accusations in proper perspective, such as:

“I think real socialists would laugh at the notion that the President’s plan is anything but a modest adjustment to capitalist health care.”

or,

“Name-calling is the signature of a failed argument. They are accusing us of being “Socialist” to distract people from the weakness of their position.”

or,

“If the President’s plan is so ‘Socialist”, why are physicians organizations and pharmaceutical companies supporting it?”

After that is accomplished, we can steer the discusssion away from name-calling and back toward the impressive benefits of health reforms being proposed by Democrats.

Think about what you’ve seen from Republicans in Congress this year. And then read this paragraph from RedState’s Erick Erickson, asking for contributions to four conservative Senate candidates:

Imagine a world where Marco Rubio, Chuck Devore, Pat Toomey, and Michael Williams work together in the Senate with Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn. Imagine a world where they push the GOP to the right in the Senate and stop the culture of capitulation.

“Cultural of capitulation,” eh? It’s always interesting to look at the world through the eyes of others.

The D.C. fire department has clarified that the estimate of 60,000-70,000 that one of their officers provided ABC news is not an “official” estimate, a clarification that many on the right have chosen to interpret as permission to add at least one zero to the numbers above and then argue about how many times to multiply the result.
Here are several things for Dems to keep in mind.

1. The reason that there are no “official” estimates of the attendance Saturday is because of Louis Farrakhan’s lawsuit back in the mid-90’s against The National Park Service over the estimates of the “million man march.” This is why the major papers are all sticking to the vague statement that “tens of thousands” marched. Any more precise estimate would be just asking for a blizzard of nutcase lawsuits that would probably involve issuing a subpoena for an original handwritten copy of the managing editor’s birth certificate as well as the basis for his estimate.
2. Anyone with a spreadsheet who looks at the time lapse photos and some of the close-up overhead shots of the crowd passing along Pennsylvania Ave. (the latter can be found at TPM, for example) can do a ballpark calculation of the maximum possible size of the crowd. For example, densely packed rows of 40 people marching shoulder to shoulder like Russian troops in a May Day parade and passing a fixed point every 3.5 seconds would cumulate to about 160,000 people in 4 hours. Take a look at photos and videos of the marchers showing the actual size of the gaps and spaces that existed, find out exactly how long the march really lasted, and make your own downward adjustments from there (In fact, it was methods similar to these – or else per square foot calculations – that were actually how the “unofficial” estimates of 60,000-70,000 were made)
3. Don’t be too annoyed at the wildly exaggerated numbers that Freedomworks and the bloggers are tossing around. They may temporarily boost the spirits of the marchers, but in the long run the manic delusions of grandeur they induce will create more problems than they are worth. As a general rule, neither commanders nor soldiers should go into battle thinking they have ten times more troops than they actually do – it doesn’t, to put it mildly, generally lead to tip-top strategic planning.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of the display of craziness by Rep. Joe Wilson during the president’s health care speech, and the rather notable reluctance of Republicans to criticize him on substantive (as opposed to protocol) grounds, a perennial question arises: Do these conservative eruptions of extremism actually tilt the national political debate to the Right?
This has long been a concern of progressives. Just last week Michelle Goldberg fretted:

The marginalization of the left has its costs. Political energy tends to concentrate around extremes, and while the Republican Party has been able to draw on the passion of their right flank, there’s a yawning gap between left-wing culture and the Democrats….
Politicians who try to separate themselves from right-wing madness by blaspheming Rush Limbaugh or evangelical leader James Dobson are quickly forced to repent. As a result, the center of the political conversation is pulled steadily rightward. In this sense, legitimatizing more left-wing voices, even those that make liberals uncomfortable, would be a tremendous help to progressivism.

The “energy” argument is a familiar one. But if ideological excess only encourages voters to show up at the polls once, it’s probably irrelevant—except in the closest elections. The discussion about how extremism “tilts the debate” is newer and more interesting.
There are generally two sets of villains in this revisionist take on “extremism.” The first are “centrist” Democratic politicians and pundits who legitimize the other side, however crazy, by their blind support for “bipartisanship” and “compromise.” And the second are the news media, who either (in the case of the openly partisan media like Fox News) create or echo crazy arguments, or (in the case of the mainstream media) adopt a position of presumptive equivalency, blandly reporting crazy talk as one side of a he-said, she-said story. Hence, the debate is “pushed to the Right”—the center-right suddenly seems so much more moderate relative to the loudly broadcast extreme positions.
The solution, this sort of analysis invariably suggests, is to counter right-wing “framing” of arguments with left-wing framing, pulling the debate back to something resembling the actual “center.”
If this approach sounds a bit too cute and cynical, that’s because it assigns roles to various players in politics based on their tactical positioning rather than the validity of what they actually believe. Iif this is a dubious moral proposition, it is also politically risky. Does it really help Barack Obama or the congressional Democratic leadership get anything practical done to perpetually mobilize an army of activists and ideologues who, say, want radical reductions in military spending or a socialist makeover of the economy? Will conservatives stop calling Obama a “socialist” if the genuine article is more visible? I doubt it, but in any event, if I were a Department of Peace enthusiast, I’d soon tire of being asked to shake my fist and howl in order to make regular Democrats look more “centrist” and to “push the debate” towards center-left positions I don’t actually share.
This is not to deny the problem that Goldberg and many others have highlighted. One quickly despairs each time some semi-educated newsreader stares at the camera and talks about “the debate” over “death panels” or the reality of climate change as though these are fully debatable propositions.
But perhaps there’s something to be said after all for truth-telling and reasonableness, not in the pursuit of compromises with the crazy people of the Right, but because a majority of people in this country will ultimately recognize and reject craziness, just as they’ve generally done in the past. Progressives shouldn’t have to cultivate their own cadre of “extremists,” or feign extremism in their own “positioning,” in order to show they are actually trying to solve the country’s many problems. Sometimes it’s best to say what you actually think, with emotional empathy and passion to be sure, but with a little more faith in democracy.

It’s now increasingly clear that big segments of the chattering classes will not rest until President Obama is somehow forced to stop talking about bipartisanship.
That’s been a standard theme for some progressives, going back to the early stages of the 2008 campaign, who have fretted that Obama will needlessly sacrifice progressive principles and constituencies in the vain pursuit of nonexistent Republican support. But now you can add a big MSM source: Politico‘s top honchos Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, who have published sort of a primal scream on the subject.
Even though VandeHei and Allen acknowledge that the destruction of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and the happiness of conservatives to remain “the party of No” are the most important factors contributing to polarization, they just can’t resist blaming Obama and Democrats at least as much as the opposition:

President Barack Obama is on the warpath over myths and distortions about health care reform, but he’s spreading one of his own: that there’s any chance of genuinely bipartisan health care legislation reaching his desk this fall.
In truth, Democratic offers to reach across the aisle — and Republican demands that they do so — are largely a charade, performed for the benefit of a huge bloc of practical-minded voters who hunger for the two parties to work together and are mystified that it never seems to happen.

And that’s the bulk of their analysis: independent voters want bipartisanship, so both parties, with equal dishonesty, are pretending to pursue it. He said, she said, and he and she are both lying.
Well, whatever. Allen and VandeHei may think that pursuing bipartisanship in the knowledge that it largely won’t materialize is just dishonest pandering by Obama, or an exercise in finger-pointing, but I beg to differ. Republicans have consciously chosen to systematically oppose health care reform–not just Obama’s version, but any version–and it actually is important for Americans to understand that in terms of what they can expect to happen next if Obama’s initiative is defeated. There is no Plan B for the GOP, or for the country. By “reaching out,” Obama is forcing Republicans to ever-more-explicitly make that choice, and as the latest polling shows, the public is beginning to “get it.”
Moreover, the “wedge” Obama is seeking to create between Republicans and independents is reflected in his formulation–generally ignored by Allen and VandeHei–that he’s trying to utilize “the best ideas of both parties” even when he’s not getting cooperation from the other side. His whole health care scheme relies on a competitive private-insurance-based system for universal coverage. Many of his proposals for “bending the curve” on health care spending and for Medicare reforms were once championed by Republicans. Yes, of course, Republicans quickly abandon and even repudiate these themes once Obama picks them up, but after a while, people begin to notice the pattern. And that’s both real and honest.
In reality, the biggest single problem with Obama’s rhetoric of bipartisanship isn’t that Republicans rise to the bait by refusing to cooperate. It is, instead, the media coverage of the issue which blames both sides equally, dismisses Obama’s outreach as cynical pandering, and recommends that the ignorant public forget about changing the culture of Washington, or either party.

President Obama’s speech on health reform last week ” went far toward dispelling confusion and promoting clarity,” according to TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira, who explains in his latest CAP ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ that conservatives,

…didn’t like President Barack Obama’s speech last Wednesday on health care reform….Recall these data from last week’s snapshot: At that point (before the speech) the public, by a 60 percent- to 31-percent margin, said the president had not clearly explained his plans for health care reform. But among those who watched the speech last Wednesday views are now quite different. According to a CNN post-speech poll, 72 percent now believe he has clearly stated his goals for a health care bill, compared to just 26 percent who thought he could have been clearer in his speech.

Teixeira cautions that a need to be cautious in interpreting the data because “those interested enough to watch the speech—compared to the public as a whole—are a group relatively sympathetic to the president.” Still, Teixeira explains, it’s “striking how successful Obama was in clearly communicating his goals,” and he adds:

Moreover, a dial testing study conducted by Democracy Corps among independent and weak partisan voters in Colorado suggests that he did not just succeed among those sympathetic to him to begin with. Among the group studied by Democracy Corps—about evenly split between initial supporters and initial opponents of Obama’s health care approach and between Obama and McCain voters in last year’s election—support for Obama’s health care plan went up from 46 percent to 66 percent over the course of the speech.

Even better, Obama appears to have smashed Republican myth-mongering in key issue areas of health reform:

…Those who thought “will get health care costs under control” described health care reform well went up from 42 to 64 percent; those who thought health care reform will allow you to keep your current insurer and doctor if you choose increased from 54 to 80 percent; those who thought health care reform meant increasing competition and lowering prices for health coverage went up from 44 to 74 percent; and those who thought health care reform will give individuals and families more choice and control increased from 36 to 60 percent.

The President’s speech had it’s critics among Democrats who felt it didn’t adequately support key progressive priorities. But Teixeira makes it clear that, in terms of changing public views on the Democratic reform package, it appears to have been a solid success.

In order to judge the significance of the conservative-led demonstration that took place in Washington D.C. this weekend, it is important to begin with a realistic estimate of the number of people who actually participated. This is unusually difficult in this particular case because Matt Kibbe, the President of the organizing group Freedomworks — understandably concerned as he was about the danger of liberal media bias — came up with the innovative solution of simply claiming that ABC news had estimated that1.2 to1.5 million people had participated – something the network itself most emphatically denied ever having done. Several conservative blog posts and tweets later this number had been carefully and judiciously narrowed to an even two million participants, making the demonstration larger not only than Obama’s inauguration – which shut down the entire transportation grid of Washington D.C. — but also the entire population – every man woman and child — of both Delaware and the District of Colombia. Say what you will about chairman Kibbe, whatever he may lack in empirical rigor, he certainly compensates for in audacity.
The only official estimate that was provided – by the Washington D.C. fire department – was that about 60,000-70,000 people participated, a number that was generally in line with standard crowd estimation techniques ( As it happened, because all the marchers were funneled through the narrow rectangle formed by Pennsylvania avenue between the white house and the capitol and time lapse photographs were taken, it was possible to use a number of standard “per square foot” and “flow per minute” crowd estimation formulas to roughly gauge the number of demonstrators. Both methods indicated a crowd size clearly below 100,000).
On the one hand, bringing 60,000-70,000 protestors to Washington is undeniably a substantial achievement, one that firmly establishes the existence of a new kind of conservative political organization – a composite organization that is a fusion of (1) a major TV network that provides popular political commentators and massive free advertising for a demonstration (2) a professionally managed coordinating organization (Freedomworks) that in this case provided $600,000 in direct funds, 14 full-time staff workers for logistics and planning and a robust, technically sophisticated web and social network infrastructure and (3) a set of decentralized social networks that enabled communication among the grass-roots protesters.
Although Freedomworks as an organization is as completely “Astroturf” as any firm in Washington, the large majority of the participants in the demonstration were undeniably “authentic” grass-roots conservatives – they were neither full-time Republican operatives nor members of traditional right-wing organizations. They generally paid their own way to participate in the demonstration and the vast creative and artistic panoply of their hand-made signs – which generally ranged from the histrionic and lurid to the clinically delusional – bespoke a perspective and sensibility that — whatever else it might be — could not seriously be described as regimented and obedient to any organization.
The demonstration apparently left most of the participants feeling optimistic and energized. “We are the real America” they confidently asserted to each other, and “the vast majority of Americans are now waking up” and joining the struggle to “take back our country”
The demonstrators’ sense of having reached an important milestone was not necessarily wrong, but among the organizers and strategists of the protest there was a different perception – that the critical objective of bringing a sufficient mass of protesters to Washington to actually intimidate wavering, “on the fence” members of congress had clearly failed. For this purpose the demonstration would have had to be at least in the 250,000-300,000 range, and preferably around a half a million. The demonstration needed to convince wavering members of congress that the protesters represented more than just the well-known conservative/Republican base and in this critical regard it simply did not succeed.
The consequences for the “Tea Party” (or, as Glen Beck has for some obscure reason renamed it, the “9/12 Movement”) are substantial. Mass demonstrations in Washington D.C that do not achieve their key objectives are subject to a form of diminishing returns. It becomes harder and harder to convince the same number of people to return to Washington for subsequent events. This is particularly the case with a new social movement like the Tea Party protests whose participants can become deeply demoralized when they begin to perceive that their efforts are actually having very little effect on the steady progress of health care reform and other Obama initiatives.
As a consequence, it is likely that by this November or December if not before the Tea Party/9-12 movement will begin to experience a major schism over strategy and tactics.
On the one hand, the more establishment elements of the movement will begin to focus on the 2010 elections. Freedomworks, for example, has already said that the next phase of its work will focus on organizing conservative activists at the level of congressional districts. But the choice of specific candidates will quickly create divisions between the “sensible” Republicans who want to win elections and the Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh ideologues who will insist on doctrinal purity. Freedomworks will quickly find itself unable to straddle this divide and will be caught in the middle of bitter debates.
At the same time, however, a major sector of the Tea Party/9-12 movement – particularly those who see the conflict in stark Manichean terms – will reject any return to politics as usual. This group will divide into three overlapping but also competing sectors.

1. Groups proposing forms of civil disobedience. Schooled in protests at abortion clinics, these protesters will organize protests at IRS centers or government facilities of various kinds. They will propose that parents withdraw their children from schools or boycott civic activities that they perceive as partisan or ideological.
2. Groups threatening violence or intimidation. Various “skinhead” or other neo-Nazi/Klan oriented groups are already chomping at the bit to join protests under their own banners and wearing their own “macho” regalia (military-style boots, quasi-military dress). At the same time, an increasing number of “militia” types will seek to ostentatiously carry guns and assault rifles at protest demonstrations and “lone wolf” patriotic terrorists will increase the assassination of symbolic individuals and the bombing of “soft” symbolic targets.
3. Groups proposing withdrawal from mainstream society. As in the 1990’s, there will be an increasing number of “survivalist” communities sprouting up in remote areas, religious communities seeking to separate from the local governments and towns in their areas and a growth of “secessionist” ideologies proposing state or local withdrawal from federal jurisdiction – initiatives such as have been proposed in Alaska, Texas and — with Tim Paulenty’s recent effusions — Minnesota.

The likelihood of this kind of fragmentation is so high that conservative activists will likely look back on this summer as the high point of their movement – a time when there was a widespread sense of optimism and general agreement over a broad set of issues, tactics and goals.
To be sure, Republicans will desperately try to deny, conceal or ignore the tensions that will emerge. They will seek to convince Democrats that Republicans and the Republican Party should not be blamed for the opinions and activities of the conservative “fringe” even as they blow ideological “dog whistles” signaling the fringe so loudly that vast numbers of unfortunate household pets howl, bay and whimper in heart-wrenching paroxysms of aural pain and dismay.
Democrats should not let Republicans get away with this. They should insistently ask “Do you agree with Glen Beck about this?”, “Do you think Obama is really a socialist? “Or a Fascist?”, “Or born in Kenya?”, or “is it really OK to call the president a liar?’, “To keep children out of school when the president speaks?”, “To carry guns to town halls?”
There will be a constant succession of wedge issues along these lines – issues that become critical litmus tests of “toughness” for the movement right but which are embarrassing distractions for Republican candidates seeking moderate votes. Democrats should be absolutely dedicated to keeping these wedge issues on the front burner. The operational criterion is simple – Republicans seeking support from moderate voters should be on the defensive literally all the time.
Many Dems find this kind of politics distasteful. They prefer reasoned debates about the “real issues” to shouting matches with the Becks, Limbaugh’s and O’Reilly’s of the world.
Such delicate flowers have full permission to step away. There are now more than enough Dems who are sick and tired of being accused of planning to murder their elderly parents and set up concentration camps for people they disagree with to happily step up and slug it out toe to toe with the political representatives of the Republican slander machine.