Battling Bush A national recovery plan for Blue America: Start small, rebuild the organization, and hone the message BY BRIAN C. JONES

TO THOSE VOTERS who are devastated by the election, who feel discredited, marginalized, ostracized, and humiliated by what their fellow Americans did to them on November 2, US Representative Barney Frank has this Republican-style suggestion: "Get over it!"

"I’m sorry that they are devastated," Frank says, in the tone of a parent whose kid has just fallen off her new bike. "I’m sorry that I can’t eat more without gaining weight; I’m sorry that at 64 I don’t have the energy I had at 40. So what?"

His tough-love approach notwithstanding, the Massachusetts Democrat hardly means to minimize the problems facing liberals in the election’s wake. Not only did President George W. Bush win by a robust margin, but the Republicans got a much stronger grip on Congress. "This is the greatest control of the federal government by conservatives since Calvin Coolidge, and they are going to be able to put a lot of stuff through that they want," Frank says. "We don’t have the initiative — they do."

That’s why Frank is not alone in urging the losers of the 2004 election not to waste time sulking, escaping to Canada, or running into their cellars to pursue hobbies that will take their minds off politics. Grunts and generals alike from the liberal left’s tattered army say they have no choice but to stay in the game, and are optimistic enough to suggest that prospects aren’t as insurmountable as they seem in the aftermath of the election.

"I don’t interpret the results anything like a landslide — it was actually one of the narrowest victories of the last 100 years, both in the Electoral College and the popular vote," says Alan Wolfe, a Boston College political scientist. "So the country has not repudiated liberalism."

A cross-section of Democratic loser John Kerry’s supporters — academic theorists like Wolfe, politicians like Frank, gray-bearded peace-movement veterans, union organizers, and political young Turks — believe they can nudge the country back to their side of the road. Their multi-pronged attack on the national consciousness includes the following strategies.

• Start small, at the local and state levels. Many think the states, particularly, are places where liberals have produced results that can be transferred to a national agenda. For example, Florida voters approved a progressive-sponsored permanent hike in the state minimum wage even though they also backed George W. Bush.

• Organize. Liberal leaders admire the work that their conservative adversaries have done over the past two or three decades at the grassroots level — making inroads into churches, town councils, and school boards in a slow-moving, long-term, ward-by-ward campaign. They say they can to the same thing. Indeed, most progressives are convinced that the debate over liberal-versus-conservative will be won not only with national media blitzes, but through one-on-one conversations over the back fence and next to the water cooler.

• Leverage the bad news. Progressives feel that public outrage will grow as the practical results of the Republican agenda — possible changes in Social Security, health-care hardships, a growing deÞcit, and the continuing Iraq war — are felt at kitchen tables and in living rooms across the country.

• Watch for changing demographics. The America of the next election may comprise proportionately fewer whites. It will also lack an incumbent whom many voters found personally appealing, which could mean a more favorable playing Þeld.

• Talk like a bumper sticker. Liberals fear that Republicans have not only turned them into a dirty name, but won the battle of words. They feel they must Þnd a more succinct and direct expression of their message, particularly since their central beliefs — populist economics, access to medical insurance, alarm about the Iraq war, concern for civil liberties — align them with the mainstream.

"There is a basis for a majority on a progressive agenda in this country on jobs, on health care, on foreign policy, on Social Security," says Russ Davis, of the Eastern Massachusetts ofÞce of Jobs with Justice, a coalition of 80 union, community, and student groups. "That is a solid majority of people. Yet, somehow, people were convinced to put aside their core issues."

"We need to have a broader message that really excites people," concurs Northeastern University professor Barry Bluestone. But when asked what the bumper sticker might be, he confesses that he doesn’t know. "I guess if I had that answer I would be e-mailing it to the DNC," Bluestone says. "I don’t know if we can Þt it on a bumper sticker, but we’ve got to get close to it. I think it is about taking over a rhetoric that the Republicans have stolen."

• Come together. The slogan-challenged liberal-left is hardly a uniÞed movement. Before it can unite the country, some advocates say, liberals, progressives, and those further to the left have some distance to go in shaping a political force akin to the conservative coalition that defeated Kerry.

"There is kind of a core structural problem," says Alexander Keyssar, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. "Progressive organizations in the current world tend to be single-issue organizations, or to be focused on single issues." Groups promoting civil rights, reproductive rights, the environment, and care for the elderly must be able to agree on a common agenda, in which their own issues always may not get top billing. Within the Democratic Party there are "overlapping" but not identical interests, says Keyssar: traditional liberals who emphasize economic issues; progressives committed to the environment, individual liberties, and other causes; and newer Democrats not committed to doctrinaire liberalism.

Irwin Becker is a Rhode Island community activist and writer who has run reform groups such as the Coalition for Consumer Justice and a nonproÞt affordable-housing agency in Providence’s Elmwood neighborhood. He agrees that the liberal left must harness its disparate constituencies. "Not everybody gets what they want, but you move the agenda forward," says Becker, who points to recent successes of One Rhode Island, the coalition of progressive groups that lobbies the Rhode Island General Assembly with a uniÞed agenda.

Their failure to unify and organize is one of the most difÞcult psychological problems for liberals, whose issue-oriented stalwarts have always felt that their policies are populist and in tune with the dollars-and-cents, practical aspects of American life. That a majority didn’t agree this fall came as a shock.

"This election has told us a great deal about the American people, and what it has told us is not very encouraging," says Richard Walton, a 76-year-old peace and political activist in Rhode Island who ran in 1984 as the vice-presidential candidate for the Citizens Party. "This was, among other things, a referendum on the war — and the war guys won." Progressives can no longer argue, as they had throughout the previous four years, that policies on the Iraq war and the economy are those of a president who didn’t get the majority of votes.

"You just can’t blame the leaders," Walton says. "The people share the blame."