Recent media stories abound on the conservative advocacy and training group FreedomWorks--promoted by Glenn Beck--and the three bazillionaires behind the Tea Party movement, including Rupert Murdoch of Fox News and brothers David and Charles Koch.
What's particularly newsworthy are the massive resources FreedomWorks and other conservative groups are pouring into skill-based political trainings for conservative activists and candidates in this fall's key states and races.
Fifty Tea Party leaders have flown in from across the country...to learn how to take over the country, voter by voter.... This is a three day "boot camp" at FreedomWorks... - The New York Times, 8/25/10
Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. - The New Yorker, 8/30/10
Mr. Steinhauser [Chief FreedomWorks Trainer] has traveled 42 states to train local groups.... -The New York Times, 8/25/2010
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, which...received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. The New York Times, 8/28/10
The conservative movement is significantly upping its investment in building the skills of activists and candidates. This is a CLARION CALL to the progressive movement to MATCH the other side's commitment to building leaders for today and tomorrow!
We know that matching the right's resources is no small task. Wellstone Action's conservative counterpart-The Leadership Institute-has a whopping $10 million annual budget compared to our modest $2.5 million.
And far beyond the upcoming elections, our larger long-term task is to move a progressive agenda in our country over the next several years. For this election we should be fighting like hell for the values, the people, and the policies we believe in. For beyond election day, we must take stock of our capacity to make change happen, and pour far greater resources into equipping and igniting progressive activists to organize people, communicate our message, run effective issue and electoral campaigns, create and advance progressive public policy, and build our movement for the long-haul. We must continue to recruit and train OUR OWN CANDIDATES to run for Congress and other offices and win in 2012.
We can truly take on the conservative movement when we finally MATCH THE RIGHT'S COMMITMENT to training and leadership development and provide greater support for our own training organizations such as Wellstone Action, Center for Progressive Leadership, and Progressive Majority, to name a few.
Wellstone Action has trained over 40,000 activists, organizers, and public leaders since our founding in 2003. Yet so much remains to be done. We stand ready to expand this work on far greater and more impactful scale across the country. We just need the resources to make it happen.
Photo by Pablo Manriquez on flickr