My good friend thereisnospoon has been getting a lot of attention, deservedly so, for his brilliant diary No One Is Going To Save You Fools. In it, he makes the point that progressives need to learn to do the hard work of getting our message out there, to challenge the marketing dominance of the right-wing.
Well, that's exactly what the Courage Campaign is doing. Earlier this week I told you that we were going to produce and air an ad about Meg Whitman, a Republican who wants to be governor of California, and how her views on the climate crisis are exactly the same as Sarah Palin's.
The ad is now ready to air. Click here, or click the image at the right, to hear our ad. It's going up on stations in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Silicon Valley.
Let me give you a brief background here, in case you missed the Tuesday diary.
Sarah Palin, WaPo op-ed, December 9, 2009:
Meeting [carbon reduction] targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax plans, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs... The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs.
Meg Whitman, San Jose Mercury News op-ed, September 16, 2009:
In January, the first AB 32 mandates take effect and will lead to higher energy costs at a time when we can least afford them. They will discourage job creation and could kill any recovery.
Notice the similar phrasing here: "higher energy costs," "cost jobs/discourage job creation."
It's not just similar phrasing that Whitman and Palin share: it's similar policies. Palin's op-ed was written to attack the Copenhagen climate summit and to oppose the Congressional cap-and-trade bill. Whitman's op-ed was written to attack AB 32, which she said she would order suspended indefinitely as her very first act as governor.
Earlier this week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger slammed Sarah Palin's climate stance:
"You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?" he told the Financial Times. "Is she really interested in this subject or is she interested in her career and in winning the [Republican] nomination [for president]? You have to take all these things with a grain of salt."...
"I think there are people that just don't believe in fixing and working on the environment. They don't believe there is such a thing as global warming, they're still living in the Stone Age, which is OK, we need people like that, too," he said.
But will Arnold say similar things about Meg Whitman, who shares Sarah Palin's attitude about global warming legislation? He hasn't so far. That's why the Courage Campaign is going to do it ourselves with this radio ad.
We've already gotten some earned media out of this. Candy Crowley mentioned our ad on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° last night. And on Tuesday, Carla Marinucci covered it at the SF Chronicle blog.
We'd love it if you could help us expand the buy. Meg Whitman is blanketing the state with her ads. The Courage Campaign doesn't have those kind of resources, but with your help we can get this ad on more radio stations and hold Whitman accountable.
And this is how we fools can save ourselves. The Courage Campaign is a netroots operation. We exist to help make California more progressive. And if you know anything about the clusterfuck that is California economics and politics, you know that making this state more progressive requires a lot of organizing and messaging work.
It's work we've been doing for a while now. But 2010 is when that work is most desperately needed. We have to hold Meg Whitman and others accountable when they say things that aren't progressive and that run counter to what the majority of Californians believe. If you can help us get this ad a wider airing across California, then you're going to show that progressives really will support left-wing framing, that we really will stand up in defense of the policies we champion.
Note: I'm the Public Policy Director for the Courage Campaign