“Obama’s inauguration proves that packaging is effective and even if we disdain the messenger we can still profit from his example.” – I agree
“The right must not conduct guerrilla war from red state enclaves” – I disagree
Conservatives should learn from Obama’s example, and the tactics he used were straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
- Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
- Second: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
- Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
- The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
- The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
- Sixth rule: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
- A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment.
- Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
- The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
- The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
- If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.
- The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his suddenly agreeing with your demand and saying “You’re right – we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”
- Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Understand these rules – knowing how the enemy attacks will give you the ability to defend against those attacks as well as knowing when, where and how to counter punch.
Also, your statement “Our proposals are rooted in reality as opposed to faith” is not on the mark. Liberal proposals are not rooted in faith but in fantasy and the illusion of a world without natural or divinely ordained moral consequences – and are therefore doomed to failure. This should be the very crux of conservative defense and counter attack.
