It’s been a curse to live here in union country, and a boon as well. The blessing is learning from the folks who see from a 50,000 foot perspective. The wisest of the union folks point out that the unions organized in the early days, one-to-one, mano-a-mano, over the kitchen table. They went to each and every worker’s house and sat down with them and talked. And talked a LOT. They didn’t take any one worker for granted; they worked to persuade every single one of them to join the union. It worked.

And there’s part of the answer; CtG isn’t quite as prescriptive about this as you might like, but it’s between the lines. We need to make contact with each and every voter at least three times between now and election day to increase our turn out. We need to see each of these voters as individuals, not just aggregates — although the aggregates do offer guidance on where to start a conversation. The DNC’s 50-State Strategy will make a difference since it moves us down the road with door-to-door contact, but much of the winning effort can only be assured by your local party and progressive organizations putting people out there to ask for the vote.

People skils – thats an idea but scorned in this day and age of aggreesively intolerant nationalism as being too namby pamby …………

As I said before, CTG is very incisive re the problems but does not provide the answers …………

Its no good finding supporting evidence of the issues already identified in the book but to propose strategies to overcome the bottlenecks.

K folks, the cheese eating (I love cheese) frogs stormed the proverbial Bastille, the Brits delivered a kick, not really de grace, what do we do? Do we wait till fall to ‘decider’ WMDs on Iran?

None of the above proposes a strategy at all and I wish I had a strategy to propose but Bush proclaimed once upon a time that “the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East” – and that sonorous voice of freedom produced this: http://www.informationclearing…..e12969.htm

I don’t have a strategy to overcome political machinations, however important they are, because I am lost and I cannot keep from crying.

I can define this problem, but I’m not sure what the cure is. Maybe someone with people skills can offer a suggestion.

Tenessean (#203), you ignore the fact that when the stink gets too overpowering, people are no longer prepared to hold their collective nose. UK local elections showed that – people want Blair out and rendered him a burnt toast. The party executive will have to force the issue not to self implode. There as here, the electorate is crying out for an articulate vision of leadership rather than fence sitters. Netroots notwithstanding, Democrat candidates ignore this at their peril.

Penn has the luxury of counseling a candidate to whom a lot of money will gravitate for many reasons; that’s all the more reason to completely ignore what he says and concentrate on the races in our own backyard. If a candidate has a crappy consultant, we need to be in the face of the candidate and the consultant both RIGHT NOW and telling them they have passed the buffer zone and must now produce results.

There is an important point about the nature of small money today that is not made; email messages work on a segment of the population that is not the same as the highly-wired netroots. Clinton may be drawing heavily on this group; they are typically older, more conservative folks versus the netroots. Certainly makes it easier for Penn to counsel Clinton as he did, knowing the market segmentation as he does.

There is one best practice for most candidates. Hire marketing folks locally: they know their constituents, their market.

Look at how the Republicans approach campaigns. They play to WIN, even to the point of breaking the rules, risking career and reputation. As much as we may hate people like Delay and Rove, you have to give them some credit for having something in them that makes them want to win more than to just show up for work and get paid and protect their positions within the party.

I remember that scene from The Last Emperor: the young emperor orders the eunuchs out of the Forbidden City because they’ve been stealing. As they leave, they all carry a small urn. When the emperor protests them taking things with him, he is reminded that what they are carrying is their own testicles.

I say kick out the consultants out. Let them keep their dessicated testicles. Souvenirs for their corrupt and fruitless administration.