This is part one in a two part series of lessons that need to be learned from the economic recovery fight. This first post concentrates on what non-elected progressives and progressive institutions not connected with the Democratic party should learn. The next post will focus on what Members of Congress, the President, and other party apparatus should learn.

The debate and resulting political fight around passing President Obama’s economic recovery package is a model. It gives us many clues as to how Congress and the President will maneuver around contentious legislation, and how the public can react and respond. (Though I do think the right took this fight a little easy. There was no big paid media campaigns against the recovery package, for example.) Looking forward towards other big and controversial issues on Obama’s agenda - health care, energy, education - progressives need to learn the right lessons from this fight so we’ll be better prepared for the next one.

1. We must be proactive, not reactive

Progressives, especially my colleagues in the blogosphere, were late to the fight. By the time blogs (and a lot of outside progressive groups, though not nearly all) really started concentrating on this issue, the initial round of legislation had been drafted. When word came down that the bill introduced in Congress would have $300 billion in tax cuts included at the outset, progressives were rightly incensed. But they were too late.

It’s much easier to get your ideas heard when legislation is still forming, rather than trying to move the ball once the legislation has been finalized. If we want to make sure bills introduced in Congress are as progressive as they can be from the outset, then we need to clamor for a seat at the table early on. This means reading the tea leaves, working connections on the Hill and in the White House, and generally seeing two moves ahead. By the time the media starts covering the issue heavily, you’ve already lost your chance.

Projects like Chris Bowers’ progressive legislation monitoring and what Kagro X is doing over at Congress Matters are pieces of that puzzle. I’m still looking for a bit of groundwork, though. Once bills are moving their way through Congress, while there is significant leverage to change them in the early stages, you’re still coming in a bit late. Projects like Energize America get in even earlier, lobbying and working with legislators to write bills from the very beginning.

We need more projects like these around the big upcoming issues. Organizing now will mean we’ll have a claim to a seat at the table when the bill writing starts. We’ll need to be way out in front if we want any hope of getting progressive legislation introduced from the get go.

2. Support loudly, but support from the left

A lot of people I know were disappointed with the economic recovery legislation. As explained above, because we were late to the fight, there wasn’t much we could do to change the package fundamentally. This disappointment and feeling of powerlessness led many of my colleagues to refrain from supporting the legislation or asking their readers to actively support it with emails, phone calls, letters, or other advocacy tactics.

I can sympathize with their situation. Sometimes you feel all you have is your credibility, and if the bill proposed truly is a bad one (which I don’t think the economic recovery package was, but there are some who did), then it’s hard to support it anyway. I understand this feeling, but honestly, none of that matters. It almost doesn’t matter what tactic you choose to use, more that you choose to get involved at all as opposed to simply commenting on the situation, as was the choice of most bloggers. There was no good excuse to sit on the sidelines during this fight.

As I argued a few weeks ago, by the time you get to a point in the fight where fundamentally changing legislation is impossible, progressives need to stop whining and start supporting for reasons of political necessity:

First, Obama must win this fight. I’m with Krugman, Stirling Newberry, and others - I’m not sure this package is going to be big enough or bold enough to solve our economic problems. But I can tell you one thing for certain: If this bill gets defeated, there will be absolutely no chance for recovery, let alone anything else like health care, energy, education, and the like. If Obama loses the first big fight he picks, he gets cautious really quickly, just like Bill Clinton.

Second, if netroots activists don’t go all in on this fight, we lose relevance. We criticize Democratic politicians for treating us like a cash machine to tap every time they need re-election funds. Once they’re in Congress they promptly forget about us and our needs. Well, if the only time we’re going to put our power and credibility on the line is when these people need to get elected, they’ll only turn to us during elections.

If we refuse to take a risk and get involved in legislative battles between elections, we shouldn’t be surprised when our wishes are ignored. Back before the election, we had no trouble asking our readers to get to the phones. I participated in an effort that generated hundreds of thousands of calls about FISA. There were numerous pleas for calls during the last SCHIP fight under Bush. But since the election I’ve seen none of this. If politicians know we won’t get their back during legislative fights, why should they stick their necks out for us?

Now, supporting doesn’t mean cheerleading. Progressives should support from the left as hard as they can. If blog writers were asking their readers to make calls about the economic recovery package, they should have asked their readers to tell Congress the package was too small, or that there should have been less tax cuts and more investment in jobs. These messages support as well as push in the right direction. And what’s more, in sufficient number, they give politicians space to move the center to the left.

Republican Senator Arlen Specter used this rationale last week to explain to his Republican colleagues why he was breaking ranks and voting for the package. Specter probably originally supported the package because it did a lot for his home state of Pennsylvania, and because the package was popular with the public. But the phone calls he received from the left allowed him to make a political argument:

The calls are mounting from one end of the political spectrum saying there are too many expenditures, and the calls are mounting on the other end of the political spectrum saying that there is not enough money being spent on the proposal which we are advancing here tonight.

Of course, all we succeeded in doing was moving some Republicans just barely over to our side. With more pressure from the left, we could have given Harry Reid and President Obama room to cut better deals than the ones that ended up going through the Senate. And if we were out in front early enough, the bill wouldn’t have been introduced with $300 billion in tax breaks at the outset. That $300 billion could then have been offered later during the deal-making.

But that didn’t happen, and the bill got progressively worse as it made its way through Congress. Until the left really started pumping up the calls, Rush Limbaugh and others on the right were making sure their voices were heard in Congress by whipping their supporters to make thousands of calls. It’s no wonder the bill kept slipping, with no pressure from the other side to hold it in place.

This was the major mistake progressives made during this battle. The overall lesson needs to be that once the chips are down, progressives need to be in these fights, no matter how compromised the legislation. Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good; if you think the bill is in any way progressive, no matter how little, then you should support it. And if you truly believe the bill is bad for the country (as opposed to not good enough), then you should actively oppose it. Again, there is no excuse for sitting on the sidelines, especially in fights as big as this one.

3. Coordination is key

Progressives, especially bloggers, need to work together more on these controversial bills. Progressive outside groups, including think tanks like the Campaign for America’s Future and field groups like USAction, worked together ceaselessly to coordinate campaigns to pass this legislation. Bloggers, for the most part, did not.

I know some say coordination in the blogosphere is just about impossible to pull off. Bloggers will never follow talking points, they say, and it’s impossible to force anybody to do anything. While this is all true, bloggers also believe in the fundamental rule that organizing makes you stronger. Email discussion lists are just the start. Bloggers organizing themselves into campaigns can be effective at generating advocacy actions, as groups like the Strange Bedfellows FISA coalition demonstrate. Going forward, we’re going to need to organize around central fights as well as well-intentioned but more obscure fights like FISA.

If we want to stay politically relevant, we’ll need all the power we can get, and we’ll have to organize to do get it.

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If we can learn the above lessons, we will be much better prepared for the next battle.

Here’s how the health care fight might work out if these lessons are learned. Bloggers and other progressive partners could organize and demand a strong public health insurance option be included in health care legislation. We could build our list of support, do public events, and start putting pressure on Congress even before legislation is written. Once legislation starts being written, we could demand a seat at that table to make sure we get a bill into Congress with our ideas in it.

With this kind of groundwork, we’re more likely to get a public health insurance option included when the legislation hits the floor of Congress. And from there, it will be easier to support the bill as it moves (and gets watered down). And we’ll already have the coordinated infrastructure and an organized constiuency to advocate for the bill and push our message from the left when the time comes. But it means we have to organize, organize early, and be ready to support from the left as the legislative process progresses.

The battles that are coming are likely to be bigger and more contentious than this one, but in a lot of ways they will follow similar contours. Let’s learn from our mistakes this time around.

Up next, what Congress and the President should learn from this fight…

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