It's not just preaching, it's also teaching.

Your points are spot on. My experience as a MeetUp host, recently energized local (MD) political student, member of book clubs, etc. is that there is a huge community of like-minded "progressives" who feel estranged from the National Democratic Establishment, who lack positive feedback for their political beliefs, and (like me) are largely ignorant of local and state politics. I was amazed, for example, how relatively easy it is for a small group of citizens to get an audience with our elected officials. Candidates are eager to appear before groups of 25 to tell their stories and to answer questions. By getting a little more involved I found out that in MD the Secretary of State is appointed, not elected, and that the Board of Elections also is appointed with a majority going to the Governor's party. So, even in "blue" states and communities there is an enormous way to go, and there is lots more to community than elections. Air America is growing here, I think, by word of mouth. I beleive that there is a marketplace for a national progressive newspaper a la USA Today, and I and many many others would send in $100 as advance subscriptions.  Keep up the great blog.  TMA

I dont see progressive blogs, from this huge one to my tiny one, a simply a place to learn how to frame issues, educate ourselves, etc.  I see them as communities that we can make ever more inviting to an ever greater audience, including many that may not be poltical junkies like so many of us.  Groups like Music for America, Drinking Liberally, etc, help us to get more of "progressive people" to turn into progressive politcos.  And, if we can do that, we truly kick some ass.

Message.

Winning elections is not some circular mathematical strategy.  There are actual human beings involved.  It is this Karl-Rove-evil-genius theory, that there is some cauldron of magic potions that if we just unlock...voila!!  We win!!  See George Lakoff's framing nonsense...magic words and phrases!

Perhaps Chris forgets message because the message that this preaching to the choir sends to voters is hugely un-voter friendly.  All that swing voters know about Democrats right now is that Democrats are weak on national security.  End of story.  That's what all this preaching to the choir has produced.

That's why I try to speak a little louder, and say no, not all Democrats are roll over and play dead George Galloway/Ward Churchill/Noam Chomsky worshippers.  Some of us Democrats are not interested in preaching this topic to any choir.  Period.  

(It might also be why my comments get banned.  Regularly.)

On the other hand, my prior suggestions that you are including Libertarian sites with Republicans are wrong: major libertarian sites are not attached to blogads.

This is not to contradict the premise of this posting, but just to point out that a literate, political forum may not be the best way to reach them.

There also seems to be much more interest in discussing events and strategy on blogs rather than policies or long-range planning.
The essays on these topics on my web site don't get much "traction".

I'm a blog zealot. I read many blogs daily. TV just sucks that bad. So I put together a sort of 'daily pulse' to borrow the title of what strikes me in the blogs, put my sarcastic spin on it, and send it out to my mailing list. Most on the list don't read the blogs much, if at all. Yet they are supportive. They read my blog and gain knowledge and facts quicker than if they continued singing in their showers.

Then they add their friends to my mailing list. The choir gets bigger. It's not like I have any readership of substance yet. But where I had 3 to 5 visitors a day six months ago, now I have 30 to 50. And many are local and now involved more than when they began reading. Be it only forwarding my posts to friends or donating a little to a candidate. My choir is bigger, and I'm just one blogger. Imagine if more bloggers started doing this for their neighbors and friends.

I think Chris is right on here. Expanding the choir should be our focus right now.

When you post comments like this, which are so damn "on the money", it makes we want to jump for joy that there are people out there that are getting what we have to do.  

This is great stuff.  

    * 1- Preach to the choir
    * 2- Activate the choir and generate revenue
    * 3- Use that revenue to target swingers and the unconverted
    * 4- Return to step one with an expanded choir

Makes a lot of sense (although swing voters has less, um, indelicate connotations than swingers.  

Beyond that, I would modify it just a little:

    * 1- Preach to the choir
    * 2- Activate the choir
             A)generate revenue
             B)promote volunteer activeties
    * 3- Use revenue/activeties:
             A)to target swing voters and the unconverted    
             B)fund party infrastructure including staffing,issue/message research, polling/focus groups, and equipment purchases

    * 4- Return to step one with an expanded choir

I add this because, for the first time, a major portion of funds for Democrats are coming from the same people willing to volunteer.  We should continue to encourage this trend.  A volunteer strapped for cash (believe me, I've been there) won't always be, and a donor who is maxed out will often want to do more.   The key to activation is always keep people active.

I included infrastructure here because, as Bill Bradley pointed out recently, in "A Party Inverted", the Republicans have a pyramidal infrastructure in place all the time, all they have to do each election is change the candidate on top.  The Democrates have the reverse: candiates who have to build a new pyramid each time. I've included the full article below.

Check out Grassroots Democrtats for an organization devoted to building up our infrastructure: www.grassrootsdemocrats.com

Here's the article:

Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 by the New York Times
A Party Inverted
by Bill Bradley

Five months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.

In such a system tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. In the worst case, they embrace "Republican lite" platforms - never realizing that in doing so they're allowing the Republicans to define the terms of the debate.

A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

Bill Bradley, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey, is a managing director of Allen & Company.

© 2005 New York Times, Co.

###

Was gay marriage a choir issue?
Was anti war a choir issue?
Is White Christian Lazy GOP a choir issue?
Is Howard I came in third but somehow I lead the choir a choir issue?

All of these issues move us away from a realistic chance at winning.

Sorry but someone needs to tell the choir to shut the hell up and move to where the people are not where the political insiders aka the choir is.

Either we get wtih the democracy in setting our agenda or we lose lose lose.  Money has a lot less to do with it than most people project.