Puget Sound Liberals

Several weeks ago, we published Time for a Change #7 - A Liberal Manifesto, in which we presented the recommendations in several books concerning strategies that Liberals must adopt to win: (Matthew Kerbel (ed.), Get This Party Started, How Progressives Can Fight Back and Win, James Carville and Paul Begala, Take It Back, Our Party, Our Country, Our Future), and Paul Waldman, Being Right Is Not Enough, What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success. Another relevant book is Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Crashing the Gate, Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Centered Politics.

This commentary summarizes these recommendations and indicates how our Lake Hills Liberals contributes to their implementation.

1. Clearly express our liberal values and a narrative which distinguishes our values from those of our conservative opposition. We define ourselves by our liberal values which are clearly stated in four sentences. Each of our members has been recruited only after agreeing with these values. Two of these values are the same as our American Dream. We attempt to realize and expand our American Dream in opposition to conservatives who are wrecking it.
   
   
2. Devote ourselves to both creating a strong majority liberal climate of opinion in the long-term and winning elections in the short-term. Our Lake Hills Liberals now has 504 members in our neighborhood, an average of 40 members in each of our 12 precincts, perhaps 30% of the liberal voters. We continue to recruit more members.
   
   Through our yard signs, bumper stickers, newsletter and website, we are enabling once lonely liberals to realize they are a majority, understand our liberal values, victorious historic struggles, creation of policies and winning political strategies for realizing our values. We are now initiating a blog site. We are conducting a nearly unprecedented comprehensive canvas of all unidentified voters to identify the estimated average of 150 liberal voters in each precinct and stimulate them to vote this fall.
   
   
3. Realistically promote winning liberal policies, without being sidetracked by special interests of groups within and without our Democratic Party. We estimate that 60% of our members consider themselves to be Democrats and 40% Independents. We are working closely with our Democratic Party to elect Democratic candidates in opposition to Republican candidates.
   
   We are also actively promoting changes in the Democratic Party to make it more effective - for example, our suggestion for an alternative caucus agenda. We have published commentaries about our Culture of Corruption that reveal that even generally liberal groups often seek to obtain opportunities and freedoms not available to all and detrimental to the freedoms and opportunities of others. We promote principled policies with which our members agree and for which we think the climate of public opinion is ready. We also attempt to liberalize our climate of public opinion. We are clear that our policies must be presented as value-based narratives instead of laundry lists.
   
   
4. Our political strategy must include both offense and defense. We are happy warriors who eagerly attack conservatives for wrecking our American Dream of unity, morality, security and prosperity. We deride their whiney claims to be victims of our people with fewer freedoms and opportunities and our compassionate supporters of these people. We do not soften our attacks for fear of offending conservatives or their supporting media.
   
   We strongly refute deceptive conservative framing, while creating evidence-based frames for presenting our own arguments. We attack conservative deception, incompetence and corruption.
   
   Yet we also attempt to convert conservatives by broadening their understanding of our American community and their compassion for those with fewer freedoms and opportunities. We particularly sympathize with and seek to convert our disgruntled conservatives, who have seen their Republican Party forsake traditional conservative values to become deceptive, incompetent and corrupt. We also strongly defend ourselves from conservative attacks that we are extremist, elitist, represent special interests, socialistic, and weak in defending our nation from violence. We easily prove that we are mainstream, broad based, defenders of our American Dream, including both public and private enterprises which serve our public interest. We strongly defend all Americans against violence, especially through cooperation with other nations.
   
   
5. Mobilize liberals, using the internet and other means. MoveOn and similar list serve groups and Blog Sites have excited millions of previously lonely liberals, but unfortunately these are at most 5% of voters and 10% of liberal voters. To win elections, we must stimulate the other 90% of liberal voters to vote. This requires grassroots groups with sufficient strength to comprehensively identify and monitor potential liberal voters. Liberal grassroots groups are even more important for creating a liberal climate of opinion, in which liberals thrive and multiply. Internet groups and our Democratic Party have usually not been able to organize at the necessary neighborhood level, especially on a continuing 12 month a year, every year basis.
   
   

Our Lake Hills Liberals is virtually unique in our ability to organize locally, although we have much to learn. We hope that our demonstration project will stimulate the formation of liberals groups in other neighborhoods and that through sharing our experiences; our neighborhood groups can improve our effectiveness. Such neighborhood groups are essential to countering the conservative Christian churches, with their proven ability to get out the vote.