Words of wisdom from Mike McCloskey

I just got back from hearing the venerable Michael McCloskey give a brief talk promoting his recently published memoirs, In the Thick of It. McCloskey was our second Executive Director and, in one capacity or another, has basically spent four decades at the forefront of the movement. He is the only person I can think for whom "venerable" seems the most appropriate adjective. A real class act...

During question and answer time, he was asked what advice he had for the next generation of activists. In response, he said that, when he was getting involved, he was taught the following three rules of lobbying:

1. Know what it is exactly that you want

2. Identify where the power to give it to you resides

3. Tailor-make your strategy to each case

McCloskey feels that this third rule, in particular, has been lost in recent years. We have a tendency, he suggested, to focus a lot on numbers now -- how many doors did you knock on, how many tabling events, how many media hits, etc. In his time, they measured themselves by one standard: did we win?

In contrast to this, another famous enviro was arguing on a listserv yesterday that the Sierra Club should maintain a strict policy stance that we aren't going to make headway on and is actually hurting some of our other efforts because "lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for."

That sounds great and all, but I think it has a lot to do with the numbers game that McCloskey objects to. Think about the radical socialist groups from the college you went to. What did they spend all their time doing? Handing out newspapers, right? It doesn't really matter when you went to college. ALL radical socialist groups hand out newspapers, because the revolution isn't coming any time soon, but at least they can educate people. There is something to be said for this. In the long-term, educating people IS important, and having short-term indicators of success is a good way of getting some grasp of your impact.

But, the thing is, if the newspapers didn't work in 1998, and they didn't work in 2002, why are they going to work in 2006? This, in my view, is a crucial reason why the American Right keeps winning over the American Left. Karl Rove may be evil, but he's VERY GOOD at what he does. And that third lesson is what he does. He tailor-makes strategies to win victories. Meanwhile, we hold mostly the same tabling events and press conferences we always have. "Hey, let's have another march, that worked once."

Hearing from McCloskey was inspirational, and I heartily recommend his book to any of the progressive-types who read this. He is one of the true elder statesmen of the movement, and it seems that his greatest message to us is, "know what you're trying to get, then be creative in figuring out how to get it." Words to live by...