Patrick Ruffini's blog

This morning I awoke to a "public flogging of Patrick Ruffini" from Ralph Benko, an enthusiastic proponent of new media in the conservative movement in D.C. He was responding to my recent piece on the "Obama Disconnect" -- the lively debate surrounding Organizing for America and Obama's loss of grassroots mojo from the campaign.

Ralph attempts to connect my skeptical view of Organizing for America (and indeed the Obama campaign) to disdain for the tea party movement. It's a pretty big leap, and one superseded by my numerous posts on the actual tea party movement (here, here, and here). 

Erick Erickson has come out in my defense but highlights this quote he says is "rubbing people the wrong way:" 

Now, what happens when the campaign goes away? What happens when the enthusiasm inevitably ebbs and the hard work of governing begins? The immediate benefits of a bottom-up strategy become less clear. You revert to traditional instincts, where powerful obstacles stand in the way of getting things done — even amongst your base, and the wielding of massive political machinery cannot be left to amateurs.

This would be damning if it were actually about the conservative movement, but it's not. It's about Obama, and the shift from the faux-bottom up ethos of the campaign to the top-down work of governance. Actively throughout the post, I was putting myself in the shoes of a David Axelrod, first (some might say cynically) embracing the "bottom-up" energy of supporters in the campaign because of their financial and organizational strength, then jettisoning them when that enthusiasm invariably ebbed when they came into power. Isn't the story of Massachusetts right now the extremely fired up Republican base versus the listless, moribund Democratic base? The quote is a commentary on the reality of Democratic politics right now, not the very opposite phenomenon that is the dominant reality in the Republican party. 

There is a legitimate question of what happens when a party comes to power, and the role of the grassroots in that shift.

There is no question that grassroots politics is harder when you are in power. That is just a fact that I think requires no further explanation. The MoveOn.org / OFA base is not in the room when Obama horsetrades on health care with Harry Reid, the unions, or the Blue Dogs. This invariably leads to compromises the left doesn't like. But, news flash: there were lots of things the right didn't like about the Bush Administration, from Medicare Part D to the bailouts. And I would remind Ralph that I advised a party-line Republican vote against the bailout.

Does the base tend to get sold down the river more when one is actually in power? Yes. Do I like that, as Ralph suggests I do? No. But I am also realistic enough to recognize that it's a distasteful reality and the price of actually being in office. And that's ultimately why you have a movement: to minimize deviation from principle as much as possible and to set standards for those pesky professional power-wielders. 

Right now, the right is in a different moment. The role of the movement is not to serve as a check on the elected officials because the elected officials are largely irrelevant. The role of the movement is to expand the opportunities for capturing ground as much as possible. Massachusetts would not have been possible without the grassroots deciding to make this the cause it did. If we win, it will be their victory. And the fact that a victory will have a profound and lasting effect on the policy of the United States is the ultimate testament to things the grassroots can do that the establishment can't. 

Before the new year, Micah Sifry came out with a provocative, much-discussed piece on the failures of the Obama organizing model in government. At once, the piece is a surprising indictment of the Administration's modus operandi from one of its supporters, but the reasons the indictment came about are not surprising at all. Like 43 similar outfits before it, the Obama White House is essentially a top-down operation.

Indeed, it's easy to dismiss Sifry's ideal of autonomous, almost leaderless political movements as essentially incompatible with the work of government. The contrast between the populism of the Obama campaign and the unmet promises of the Obama Administration is an easy one to make, but I suspect there's a tad of inflated expectations at work, borne of a misunderstanding of the fundamental motives of Obama for America and the community organizing spirit that seem to lay behind it. Sifry is disappointed that the fervor and "bottom up" organizing of the campaign hasn't translated to the White House, but when has the excitement and lofty goals of a campaign ever translated fully into the drudgery of running the federal government? Is such a transference even possible?

Probably not. The job of a campaign is not to transform the ethos of governance. The job of the campaign is to win the campaign. The job of the Administration is to transform the ethos of governance. Whether one leads to the other is entirely extrinsic to the campaign since the White House involves a totally different set of actors, more likely to be experienced government hands like Rahm Emanuel than Alinskyite field organizers. We can discuss what is and is not personally important to Obama as a community organizer all we want. But the imperatives of governance are completely different than those of a campaign, as Obama learned taking office in an economic crisis and George Bush learned after 9/11. 

Rather than buck the tide of conventional "top-down" politics, the campaign's "bottom up" grassroots emphasis was actually top-down perfected for the Internet era -- a logical and sensible response by the campaign to Obama's celebrity. 

In the end, the campaign did not have to make any hard decisions that allowed supporters to organize in new ways. Rather, I would argue, the supporters made the decision on their own, as expressed in the tremendous and early self-organized action for Obama early on, and the campaign would have been brain dead not to play along. (Many campaigns are still blind to this, even today, but the default baseline position for a campaign at the national level is to play along when supporters start doing massive amounts of stuff on their own.) 

The campaign's decision to default to open is expressed in Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's book, The Audacity to Win. At the outset, it wasn't clear that Obama's campaign would be anything other than a traditional exercise. As Plouffe writes early on, 

We raised $4 million online, a significant amount but far less than our fund-raisers wanted. Our new media team were very careful about how often we asked people for money by e-mail. We wanted our online contributors to have a balanced experience with us, thinking that if they felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time. The fund-raisers, who felt the pressure I was putting on them to post a big number, wanted to ask for as much as possible, as often as possible, starting right away. These were some of the tensest disputes I had to navigate throughout the whole campaign, and they left a lingering sore spot that did not heal for over a year. The finance team really believed that the new media team was underperforming financially, and the new media team thought the finance team viewed them and our supporters as an ATM.

Though it's ultimately clear where the campaign came down at the end of the day, Plouffe doesn't really evince bold conviction that the new media guys were right from day one. Here we see the traditional top-down playbook lingering on within the Obama campaign. Now, if Obama the community organizer started out running a fairly traditional campaign catering to the donor class, and in fact, ran a fairly textbook Senate campaign in 2004, what changed in the heat of the campaign? Plouffe doesn't seem to indicate that there was any altruistic, philosophical instinct to buck the finance team's approach, beyond a general sense that what the online people were doing seemed to be working. If there was a sudden epiphany by Axelrod or Plouffe to buy into bottom up, community organizing methods, it was probably a transactional, reflex response to the 20,000 person crowds, the e-mail signups, and the online fundraising. When you have a candidate like Obama, "letting go" and being bottom up is not simply a noble, unconventional, damn-the-consequences move. It's pretty darn profitable, generating more signups, more activity, and more money to feed the top-down parts of the campaign.

Now, what happens when the campaign goes away? What happens when the enthusiasm inevitably ebbs and the hard work of governing begins? The immediate benefits of a bottom-up strategy become less clear. You revert to traditional instincts, where powerful obstacles stand in the way of getting things done -- even amongst your base, and the wielding of massive political machinery cannot be left to amateurs. Either way, the decision to go "bottom up" is a traditional reflex response by smart people who realize they can get more done with bottom-up than with top-down in a campaign. And the reversion to "top-down" is a similarly calculated response to the fact that the financial and organizational benefits of bottom-up do not seem to apply to an Administration. Plouffe admitted this much in his interview with Ari Melber in defending the decision to downgrade New Media in the White House. Now, this may be wrong, short-sighted, or ignoble, but BOTH the bottom-up Obama campaign and the top-down Obama Administration were calculated strategic decisions made in response to specific situations of the moment. Let's not kid ourselves that the community organizing rhetoric was how they actually intended to govern.

My initial post on Scott Brown drew a pretty good reaction, and this response from Michael Barone is a must-read. Barone argues if Republicans are able to seriously contest Massachusetts, and in a race where Democrats are the heavy sentimental favorites after the passing of Ted Kennedy, that could have a kind of terrorism effect on wobbly House Democrats that will force many more to retire, and inspire strong Republican candidates to jump into the race in blue districts. This could set the stage in a very nice way for November. 

Absent a scientific poll of the race, two recent bits of analysis suggest we may be headed for a close race on January 19th. 

The first is the "citizens' poll" being undertaken by Republican activists frustrated by the lack of recent polling. This shows Scott Brown ahead, and the methodology consists of randomly scouring the phone book in select areas. From the photo below, it's a hearty effort, but definitely homegrown: 

The results through New Year's Eve were Brown 241, Coakley 216, Undecided 63. A further 201 refused and 213 were left pro-Brown phone messages. That works out to a slight Brown lead of 44.6 to 41.5 percent among those who responded. 

But that comes with a big caveat: the areas polled were limited to Worchester and Cape Cod, with a little Quincy thrown in. These areas do not look like the rest of Massachusetts. In both Worchester and Barnstable (Cape Cod) counties, Obama defeated McCain by a margin of 56 to 42, or a margin 12 points lower than his statewide performance.  

Adjust the margin, and this would put Coakley 9 points ahead statewide. 

As a point in Brown's favor, there's no attempt made to screen voters in the survey. Essentially, it's a poll of adults, not registered voters, or even likely voters. In this environment, I imagine a likely voter screen would help Brown to the tune of about 5 points. Anecdotal information from their responses also suggests Brown voters are way more fired up about turning out: 

Many Brown supporters were enthusiastic and upbeat. Statements included: "What other choice is there 'but' Scott Brown?; "There's a lot riding on this"; "Our country is at stake."; and "God help us if we don't get Scott Brown elected."

To the contrary, Coakley voters seemed down, dull, and disenganged. Is it any wonder not one Coakley voter expressed optimism.

 This is valuable information. I wonder what such a poll done of 3-of-5 or better voters on the statewide voter file would yield. 

A second attempt to fill the void comes from RCP's Sean Trende, who looks at the composition of the electorate in Virginia and New Jersey compared to 2008, as well as the vote swing from Obama to McDonnell and Christie. If Democrats, Republicans, and Independents swing to the Republican Brown as they swung to Republican gubernatorial candidates in both states, that would make for an exceedingly narrow Coakley win of 51.1 to 48.9 percent. Though we are accustomed to thinking of Virginia and New Jersey as two distinct races, interestingly the final numbers suggest a rising tide lifting all Republican boats. In terms of vote spread, McDonnell performed 24 points better than McCain, and Christie performed 22 points better. A similar swing in Massachusetts would get Brown to within 2 to 4. 

I don't know that there is a scenario that would show Scott Brown ahead right now, but there are plenty of scenarios I could see that would show this within the margin. And conditions right now seem optimal: a fired up Republican / Tea Party base that is stirring beneath the surface, and a complacent Democratic Party. The question is what happens if a poll does show the race close? The campaign would then take on a whole new dimension. Will the entire electorate expand in a way that would likely benefit Coakley? Democrats will pull out the stops to nationalize the race, and would play the Kennedy card as they have so many times before. But without a Presidential race on the ballot, which is typically the only thing that can create downballot coattails, will it work? Is there a way that a close race could pull in more marginal Republican voters excited about the possibility about picking up a seat in Massachusetts without bringing out more Democrats, enough to close a 3 point gap? We'll know in 18 days. 

Full disclosure: As discussed in my previous post, my company provides some online services to the Brown campaign, but we're not involved in the campaign day to day. 

In the past 48 hours, the blogosphere has awakened to the cause of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. There hasn't been any recent public polling, but my sense is that a poll of likely voters would show Scott Brown within single digits of Martha Coakley, with those most likely to vote opting strongly for Brown. Perhaps the lack of polling betrays the conventional wisdom that Coakley would win in a rout, but maybe one of the more forward-looking public pollsters like Rasmussen or PPP will prove me wrong and poll this thing. 

The case for a Brown upset can be summed up as follows: A January 19th special election would likely skew the turnout universe more Republican than it ever would be in the Bay State. The race has received comparably little attention, so turnout is likely to be low, and a minor surge in Republican turnout could go a long way. 

Then there's the enthusiasm gap: we're already seeing Republicans far more likely to vote in 2010, even beyond the waning of the Obama-only 2008 young voter base. Republican enthusiasm is white hot right now, possibly hotter than it will be in November 2010, because of health care. 

And here's where the mammoth significance of playing in MA-SEN comes into the discussion: if Brown wins, Obamacare is dead. 60 becomes 59. Because Democrats will have lost the Liberal Lion's seat, whose photo stands in the Democratic Cloakroom with the words "Let's get this done." Any chance we have to take out the Obamacare abomination, however remote, is a fight worth fighting. The Senate is currently scheduled to come back into session on January 19th, the day of the Massachusetts special election. Harry Reid could move this up if it looked like Brown could win, but he'd have to get a conference done, pass it through the House, and then get it through the Senate. Not likely. And not before Republicans would scream bloody murder. 

Then there is a bit of recent electoral history. It's true that Massachusetts has deserved the mantle of the most Democratic state in its recent history. But that Democratic loyalty is not quite as strong as it was. Massachusetts is now within two points of California in Presidential partisanship, handing Obama a 26-point win to California's 24 points. In California, a larger and more diverse state, we are talking about a possibly competitive Senate race with a recent history of electing Republican governors. Let's also remember that Massachusetts Democrats are not Obama Democrats. Despite the blessing of Kennedy and Kerry, Obama lost the state by 10 points on Super Tuesday. In October 2007, Republican Jim Ogonowski came within 6 points of beating Niki Tsongas in the MA-5 special, and that was in a bad political climate for Republicans. And a final point that bears remembering: Massachusetts has a Cook PVI of D+12. In a strange low-turnout election scheduled during the winter months, Joseph Cao won LA-2 in a D+25 district. Martha Coakley may not be stashing cash in the freezer, but weird things happen in special elections (as NY-23 also showed us). And an extra, final point: in a sleepy, low-turnout special election in CA-10, that no one believed Republican David Harmer could win and which attracted minimal support from national Republicans and the blogosphere as everyone was focused on Doug Hoffman, we came within 10 points. The Cook PVI rating of that district was D+11. That could have been a lot closer with extra resources and political capital spent. 

All in all, taking a calculated risk in MA-SEN is worth it. Nobody doubts this is an uphill fight, but I don't want to be the guy who decided not to take a stand only to find out that we lost by 6 on election night when everyone assumed the Democrat would win running away and didn't fight. 

In full disclosure, my company provides some online services to the Brown campaign, but I'm not privy to their decision making process nor did I consult them about this post. I do know that people are uncharacteristically fired up about this race and that enthusiasm has followed a hockey stick trajectory in the last 48 hours. It's not out of the question that Brown could raise another half a million dollars online between now and election day, with a moneybomb planned for January 11th. But it's up to us to get the job done.

 Delete this post after this gets posted to my Twitter account.

The brewing conservative war on the Republican establishment has gotten a lot of ink lately, and we can only expect more of it with the rise and rise of Marco Rubio. 

This means kick starting a generational transition to the new fundraising model. Right now, we cannot compete with the Democrats' scalable online fundraising machine and if this is not corrected our party will face a long-term financial deficit. A big part of this will be growing a millions-strong network of supporters and giving them something to rally around. Moreover, our candidate recruitment should focus less on a candidate's ability to collect $2,300 checks or to self-fund than on the strength of their message -- which will ultimately attract more small and high dollar donors online and off. Traditional fundraising is still important, but in modern campaigns, it's more like startup venture capital money than a long-term cash cow. 

In February, when the GOP was still in a fetal position after the drubbing they received at the hands of Obama's half-billion dollar online juggernaut, I expanded on this point: 

Why are we so shocked that a generic conservative third party called the "Tea Party" would come out ahead of the Republican Party in a poll?

The notion that there are lots of people on the right who consider themselves conservatives first and Republicans second is not new (though a national reporter once e-mailed me professing shock at hearing someone say this for the first time). What is different this time is that the tea parties lend some modicum of organization to the right's rabblerousing opposition, and the D.C. mandarins are busy trying to figure out if this power can be wielded electorally and whether that helps or hurts Republicans.

Rasmussen's question actually explains a lot. Like the fact that the national GOP is poised to pick up a bunch of seats while their numbers remain in the toilet.

Depending on the poll, approval of Congressional Republicans (and their leaders) is in the high teens or low twenties, close to the GOP number in today's survey. In the progressive blogosphere, this is the most common talking point against the notion that Republicans might win in 2010.

Though a curiosity, Congressional GOP approval is actually irrelevant to next year's election results. That's because a big chunk of the disapproval comes from the "Tea Party" that thinks the GOP is not doing enough fast enough. Combined, the Teapublicans get 41 percent of the vote to the Democrats' 36 percent. If I'm solely concerned with electoral strategy, I want people to be highly motivated to vote, because turnout is everything in a midterm. And the more Tea'd off these voters are, the better for Republicans. The good news for Democrats is that a mythical right-wing splinter party splits the base down the middle. The bad news is that they still vote Republican in a two-way, and the Tea Partiers are singlehandedly driving a massive enthusiasm gap over the left that renders a Republican victory even more likely. As we saw in 2006 and 2008, enthusiasm gaps matter.

The prevalence of the Tea Party movement does hold a cautionary note for the GOP -- if they win. The danger is that Republicans will interpret a victory as a sign that all is well in the party, and that they can go back to their old ways pre-2008. In other words, they'll confuse a Teapublican victory for an old-school Republican mandate.

However, the reason that Republicans are now at the mercy of the tea parties to drive their GOTV is because they drove spending through the roof (at least in pre-Obama terms) and agreed to the bailouts. The protests were as much a reaction to Republicans selling out as they were to the incipient Obama administration, though the passage of time has shifted the focus to the present Administration. The notion that the Tea Party  -- of all people -- will be unenthused about voting in November 2010 is wishful thinking, particularly when a clear opportunity exists to do damage to the left. The question is whether they'll abide the same Republican Party that set the bailouts in motion to begin with -- after the election.

Right now, the fact that the Tea Party is willing to hate on the GOP Congressional leadership but ultimately be their most enthusiastic foot soldiers is testament to the fact of the Republican Party's powerlessness on Capitol Hill. The party may suck, the reasoning goes, but that's irrelevant now because it can't actually shape policy. There is only one question in this election, and that is whether Congress can put the breaks on the left's unfettered rule. And if the GOP gets some measure of influence back, will it change?

What Ramesh Ponnuru has written about Tuesday's wins is right in so many ways:

More important, a few Republican candidates have demonstrated that it is possible to transcend the party's conservative-moderate divide. In Virginia, Robert McDonnell won a landslide — the first Republican win in a governor's race there in 12 years — by running as a problem solver. Social conservatives know he is one of them. But independent voters strongly backed him too. Voters as a whole trusted him more than his Democratic opponent on everything from fixing the roads to strengthening the economy. Once he had that trust, Democrats were unable to get voters to see him as frighteningly conservative, although they tried to make hay out of a hard-right master's thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989.

[Disclosure: I consulted for the McDonnell campaign, and these are my personal views on why he won.]

In the wake of McDonnell's landslide, many observers have pointed to his brand of "pragmatism" to make the case that McDonnell -- and not Hoffman in NY-23 -- is the way forward for conservatives in 2010.

But to point to McDonnell as a subrosa moderate profoundly misses the point. McDonnell is a strong conservative who early in the campaign put Deeds on the defensive by running against Obama and Pelosi's policies, most notably card check and cap-and-trade. There was never any doubt as to McDonnell's conservative bona fides.

But even though McDonnell was in fact a true conservative, there was no need to make the election about those credentials. McDonnell's conservatism spoke for itself.

What the campaign keyed in on very early is that most voters aren't ideological. In a time of crisis, they first and foremost want problems solved -- and specifically, the problems created by too much government meddling and taxes to go away.

Wait, not ideological? So Ruffini's saying we need to run moderates? No. That is precisely the opposite of what I am saying.

Because very few independents care about ideological name-checks, they won't be swayed by scare tactics trying to persuade them that Candidate X is the ideological second-coming of Attila the Hun. We saw this with the thesis attacks. Candidates have wide latitude to run as who they actually are, so long as they can persuade voters they'll deal with the bread and butter issues (which was McDonnell's calling card).

In a purple state like Virginia, you can win by running as a liberal and a problem-solver (Kaine), as a moderate and a problem-solver (Warner), and as a strong conservative and a problem-solver (McDonnell).

Faced with that choice, why wouldn't we choose to run the conservative every time? A non-ideological electorate gives us more leeway to run conservatives in blueish/purple states, not less. To get a flavor of this in action, just look at the closing slide of McDonnell's ads:

The ubiquitous "Jobs Governor" branding and the spinning icons highlighting different issues is evocative of the desire for practical, clickable solutions to everyday problems shown in another recent marketing campaign.

Fixing Northern Virginia traffic? There's an app for that.

Jobs? There's an app for that.

Education? There's an app for that.

Essentially, whatever the issue was, Bob McDonnell wanted you he had the proverbial "app for that" -- a set of practical solutions not overtly branded as left, center, or right.

Considering the issue void that was the Creigh Deeds campaign, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Republicans in Virginia have struggled to make their prescriptions relevant to swing voters. Our issues in local elections have traditionally been issues like taxes and immigration that don't always lend themselves to policy heft. And a lack of policy heft has translated into an intangible sense that there's not enough "there there."

This was the central challenge facing the McDonnell campaign at its outset, and so it systematically sought to dismantle this critique by branding McDonnell as a practical problem solver without compromising his conservative principles.

Republicans can be specific, detailed, and confident in putting forward solutions relevant to the middle class, while also being more conservative than we have been in recent years (especially with the Bush era spending binge). There's not an either/or tradeoff between conservatism and a policy focus, something the McDonnell campaign proved in Virginia this year.

The lesson of the McDonnell campaign: Maintain your conservative principles, but make the election about policy. And whatever the issue, make sure you've got an app for that.

What follows may be akin to one of those crazy ideas Dick Morris used to come up with in the Clinton White House, only one in ten of which turned out to be workable -- but when they worked, oh man, did they work.

The key fact that sticks out in my mind about Doug Hoffman's incredible momentum in NY-23 is that his election would not have been possible had he been the Republican nominee. The fact that we may be about to elect a non-squish from New York has everything to do with the fact that he is running as a third-party independent, and not a Republican (even if the Conservative Party is an auxiliary of the Republicans in most elections).

Hoffman as a Republican would have been too obvious a target and the subject of a relentless barrage of negative TV, websites, mail, and phones branding him as outside the mainstream, anti-choice, anti-worker, etc. But politically, Hoffman has managed to avoid all that until five days out, when it's now clear he's the frontrunner. And as Chris Cillizza points out this morning, Hoffman's success in the polls is built on the back among strong support among independents and (primarily) not Republican regulars disgusted at Scozzafava.

This got me thinking: How many points is an Independent party label worth, assuming you're able to vie for Republican votes in a general election? 5? 10? We know that in races with a plausible third party, that candidate automatically tends to earn more independent and moderate support even if they are ideologically indistinguishable from a Republican (Hoffman) or a Democrat (Chris Daggett in New Jersey).

We also know from Daggett's run in a strong-party, machine state that American politics is entering a phase of third party strength which we last saw in the early '90s with Ross Perot and culminating in the Republican Revolution of '94.

This led me to tweet the following this morning:

Brainstorm: what if Republicans were to withdraw from a series of hot Congressional races and run as conservative independents a la #ny23?

I am not one to believe that a situation exactly like Hoffman's is recreatable across the spectrum. Certainly, we would not want to have to take out every slightly wobbly Republican nominee (Scozzafava's problem was that she was very wobbly) with a third party conservative. With 435 House races on the ballot in 2010, the conservative movement won't have the energy to concentrate its Death Star gamma ray on hapless local establishments in every district.

But what if it were to happen peacefully? Or as a concerted strategy to gain votes?

What if you were to have promising Republican candidates running in Democratic-lean seats say, a few months out from the election, "Let me tell you something. I'm just as sick and tired of the Republicans as I am of the Democrats. So, from this moment forward, I'm running as a common-sense, Independent conservative for Congress."

From one perspective, this would not be helpful to efforts to tie the Republican brand to a broader sense of popular disgust at the Obama/Pelosi overreach. On the other hand, it might be a way for conservatives to invade the center, and thus control the high ground politically.

If you're a party person, don't dismiss this just yet. Say you're the NRCC and you haven't found a good recruit against a vulnerable House Democrat. Say the Republican nominee is a joke, or the incumbent is unopposed. Three months out, you go to your star recruit who turned you down a year ago and ask him to run as an independent. It's a three month campaign as opposed to an 18-month campaign. They don't have to quit their law practice or small business. They enter in the last few miles of the race, and you put serious pressure on the joke nominee to step aside, or put out word through local media and talk radio that this is the guy.

Now, I know one could raise myriad issues here. Ballot access for one. The reflexive aversion to third parties. The relative infrequency of unchallenged vulnerable Democrats, especially because 2010 won't be 2008 or 2006. And the prospect of bloody intra-party battles after the nomination has been settled.

All of these risks are arrayed against a few salient facts. First, the rising disgust at incumbent politicians that will play out over the next couple of years, accompanied by a "pox on both your houses" sentiment. Second, a proven history of entire party blocs picking up and moving to third parties when they need to (NY-23, or Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election). There are two possibilities for an ideological third party candidate -- they can either flop and pose no serious threat (which happens the vast majority of the time because the candidates are nobodies) or dominate (if they are credible).

In a handful of races, perhaps in places where we can't win with the Republican label alone, it might be more useful for the general election to be a strong Independent versus a Democrat rather than a Republican versus a Democrat. At one extreme of the Cook PVI, let's stipulate that the general election against Charlie Rangel was waged with a Puerto Rican small business owner running on the No More Corrupt Politicians Party line with behind the scenes, logistical support from the GOP. At a minimum, that person would stand a better chance than a Republican in that district.

I'm a strong party guy, but I also believe in Sun Tzu's maxim that you do the unexpected to throw your opponent off balance. Strategically unleashing a swarm of conservative independents may be one such strategy for 2010.

If the public option passes in some form, thank the liberal blogosphere who put pressure on Democratic members of Congress to publicly threaten to derail health care reform if it wasn't included in the final bill.

The specter of Democrats reverse-filibustering their own President's plan is what has kept the public option alive, even if one could argue that "alive" is akin to a persistent vegetative state.

Contrast this to yes-man approach of the Congressional GOP in the early Bush years, and I personally find a lot to like about the Democratic model of the Congressional party serving as a sort of whip against the political expediency that will be the norm in any White House.

In 2005, I thought it would have been a good idea for conservative Republican members to publicly threaten to oppose any Social Security bill that did not include private accounts. There were multiple problems with this, not the least of which that the Congressional leadership was too spineless to bring a bill out of committee. But another was that conservatives in the House and Senate, with no strategic prodding or muscle in the blogosphere and the activist groups, never made the threat that would have rendered a "compromise" bill dead on arrival.

How groups like Open Left and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are taking on the role of legislative strategy is very smart, and something we can learn from. How the right has fueled the tea party movement to feed into a sense of backlash in the country about the left's total control of government is also very smart, and may have the last laugh in 2010, but will it be enough to deal with the immediate task at hand, derailing a government takeover of health care? I'm not so sure.

Of course, this could all blow up in their faces. Having destroyed any possiblity of compromise, or at least defined "compromise" as something very, very close to an absolutist-left position on health care, the left-blogosphere has ensured that the only alternative to doing nothing at all is a very leftist final bill. And if that's the choice, doing nothing becomes a much, much more palatable option for the Blue Dogs. I'm personally unsure as to how they thread the needle of getting a public option passed with 60 votes.  

Still, it's valuable to understand what the left is doing and how it differs from the Congressional GOP "roll over" strategy on White House initiatives in the Bush years, in which we either actively collaborated on bad bills (Medicare Part D) or didn't make a serious push to make the good bills (tax cuts, Social Security) even stronger.