Posted on 10/31/2010 9:42:03 PM PDT by Libloather
Dean 3.0: What the Tea Party Can Learn from Democrats in 2010 and Beyond
Ari Berman
Oct 27 2010, 11:54 AM ET
"The first rule of change is controversy," famed community organizer Saul Alinsky once said. "You can't get away from it, for the simple reason of, all issues are controversial. Change means movement, movement means friction, friction means heat, and heat means controversy." Alinsky is not the only liberal icon Tea Party Republicans now admire. They've also belatedly fallen in love with Howard Dean, who they generously mocked for the better part of a decade until Democrats picked up six governorships, 14 Senate seats, 50 House seats and 15 state legislative chambers under his tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Tea Partiers have now appropriated the insurgent language of Dean's presidential campaign, including its slogan, "Take Back America," and have begun to take over local Republican parties at the grassroots level--just as Dean urged Democrats to do after his campaign ended in flames. They've also emulated Dean's 50-state strategy, which unexpectedly helped elect Democrats across the map, particularly in long-ignored red states, by boosting local parties in 2006 and 2008. This year, for example, Republicans are running more candidates for Congress than ever before. "President Obama and Speaker Pelosi can thank Howard Dean's '50-state strategy' for laying the ground work for the Democrat landslide in 2008," Tea Party strategist and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, chairman of FreedomWorks, said earlier this year. "The Tea Party movement is much the same, and Tea Party groups exist in every state and city across the country." If Barack Obama was "Dean 2.0," then the Tea Partiers are the third manifestation. In 2010, they've out-innovated the Democrats.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Good call
“Alinsky is not the only liberal icon Tea Party Republicans now admire.”
Where’s the “BARF”?
We don’t “admire” the sonofabitch........
We’re just using his strategy AGAINST his ilk.
“Alinsky is not the only liberal icon Tea Party Republicans now admire.”
oh gag me.
Yep! All it takes if enough good people to change the direction of the Country. The only problem is that way too many people go about their lives ignoring politics but that just might change when things get too bad to ignore.
That is when change happens!
Don’t make me ill. We have not fallen in love with Dean or Alinsky. We’ve studied them, learned their tactics and used those tactics against them to defeat them.
I’m not sure why I’m reading the atlantic. Lying about it being a corporate underwritten venture while Dean was all grassroots is the least of what this publication does.
Exactly. Tactics are tactics, they’ll work for whoever wants to learn and apply them.
NEXT...... do the same to State government..
NEXT...... do the same to City government...
The writer’s thesis seems to be that the Tea Party movement is just copying Howard Dean’s stunningly original idea of voting against the sitting party in power.
I’m betting if that’s the Twister contortions it has to go through to make THAT moronic idea work, it ain’t gonna get much better, so I bailed.
A whole lot of that is happening in this election.
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