Prometheus 6   

Copycat

One of the reasons for GOPAC's success was that it flew under everyone's political radar. Back in the good old days when rational discource trumped marketing techniques, the weak rationales trumpeted by GOPAC grads could have been easily banished in the agora. Now that they've taken root, you have to come up with something that makes the True Believers in Conservative Rhetoric feel better about themselves than their current beliefs.

By Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 11/18/2003

WASHINGTON -- If you can't beat 'em, copy 'em.

With hopes of liberals winning back Congress someday, a new liberal political action committee has been studying the war plans of legendary conservative field marshal Newt Gingrich. PROPAC, as the group is called, aims to pour $2.6 million over the next year into recruiting and training left-leaning candidates at the grass-roots level -- the first step in a long-range project to fill the pipeline with a fresh supply of future winners.

According to executive director Gloria Totten, the name and idea are conscious echoes of Gingrich's GOPAC, the vehicle by which the Georgia Republican rose from congressional backbencher to speaker of the US House in 14 carefully plotted years leading up to 1994.

"We didn't take their entire playbook," Totten said last week. "But we did look at a myriad of things they did."

Totten, a former abortion rights activist, acknowledged that most liberals, including her, prefer to champion issues than to hatch campaign strategy. And rounding up candidates is often a last-minute chore performed one-handed, with the other hand daintily holding one's nose. Liberals have a distrust of politics and a fear that they might be pressured into unseemly compromises.

Laying the groundwork for PROPAC, "I spent the first six months giving my `get over it' speech," Totten said.

The effort will start this year in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington, Arizona, and either Michigan or Florida -- "presidential battleground states," Totten said. The group will target five additional states in the 2006 cycle and five more in 2008. Ultimately, it aims to elect enough local and statewide candidates to have a leftward impact on the redistricting battles of 2011.