Commonweal Institute Blog

At next week's Take Back America conference I will be doing a "self-organized" session, titled Reaching the Public.

Progressives need to promote the benefits of progressive values and ideas to the general public. This creates demand for progressive candidates and policy solutions.

The idea is simple - right-wingers are out there all day, every day, and through every possible channel, repeating various forms of the simple marketing message "Conservatives are good and liberals are bad." The conservatives get it: persuasion, marketing, talking to the public WORKS. Over time this has an effect.

Liberals and progressives are not responding by also talking to the general public and promoting the benefits of PROGRESSIVE values and issues. So after a few decades of this, the public has a negative view of liberals & progressives, and in surveys they say they are conservative - even though they line up with us on the facts and issues. All a conservative candidate has to do is point a finger and shout "liberal liberal" and this gives them a tremendous head start in a campaign.

Joining me will be Jeffery Feldman of Frameshop and Conor Kenny of SourceWatch.

If you are at Take Back America, please come to this session, at 4pm on Monday June 18.

On July 22nd the Commonweal Institute Board of Directors threw a big welcome party for new Executive Director Barry Kendall. Over a hundred committed progressives showed up to meet him and the rest of Commonweal's staff and hear about the exciting next steps in our growth. The party featured a belly dance troupe, Dancers for Democracy; Al Mite Te Dollar, the billionaire magician; and loads of great food catered by Chef Mirit Cohen of Google's Cafe 5IVE.

See photos and read about the party. My favorite part, captured in video (use link at party URL), was Barry leading the crowd in song to illustrate the relevance of a lesson from the 19th century evangelical Methodist movement to today's progressive movement.

Following are my opening remarks from the Thursday, August 2,2007 YearlyKos session titled, Connecting Major Donors to the Netroots:

Welcome to the opening of the 2007 YearlyKos. And welcome to this early morning session titled Connecting Major Donors to the Netroots.

I am Dave Johnson. I blog at Seeing the Forest and a few other places, and I am a Fellow at the Commonweal Institute.

Let me briefly introduce our topic this morning before we let loose and turn it over to our speakers.

We are all in this together. We all want to fix this country.

Progressive donors want to support political change and they have and have done it well. But in the last several years they have been frustrated to find themselves supporting an increasingly ineffective establishment of well-intentioned organizations eating up gobs of money while getting less and less done. And to make matters worse there is the dysfunctional political campaign system – with hundreds of millions of dollars literally going up in the air for commercials…

I am writing from the Netroots Nation convention in Austin. I saw this view of the capital building while crossing a street on the way to dinner the other night. I ran back to get the picture but you can figure out why it looks like it was taken in a hurry while running:

It is a very busy convention with multiple hour-long panel sessions -- up to thirteen -- on at the same time. I always want to be at three of the panels, of course.

Commonweal Institute has a "booth" in the exhibit hall. Here is a picture of the booth:

Left to right: Senior Fellow Patrick O'Heffernan, Executive Director Barry Kendall and Board member Andrew Byrnes. What's with the dark suits?

Some more pictures from Netroots Nation, many featuring my friends from the Commonweal Institute.

Commonweal Institute: Dave Johnson, Barry Kendall, Katherine Forrest	Commonweal Institute Conversation: Patrick O'Heffernan, Kay Lee, Kate Forrest, Mustafa (Vic) Uzumeri
Bloggers and the Green Economy: Dave Johnson, Susana Almanza, Larry Joe Doherty, Jeff Sharp, Adam Siegel	Space Panel: Andrew Hoppin, Chris Bowers, Patti Grace Smith, Lori Garver, George Whitesides
Gina Cooper, Jeffrey Feldman	Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Gina Cooper
Ask the Speaker: Nancy Pelosi	Congressman Lloyd Doggett introducing Nancy Pelosi
Virginia & Kay Lee	Kay Lee
Katherine Forrest, Patrick O'Heffernan, Virginia Lee	Meta Panel: Chris Bowers, Cheryl Contee, David Waldman (Kagro), Raf Noboa, Amanda Marcotte
Nancy Pelosi	Al Gore, Rep. Doggett (D-TX), Nancy Pelosi
Media Panel: Digby, Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman, Duncan Black	Recipe for Change: Natasha Chart and Margaret Krome