This week The Guardian reported on a memo reviewed by American Tradition Institute Senior Fellow John Droz, Jr., who also serves on the Board of Directors of NC-20, an advocacy group dedicated to denying the science around climate change and sea level rise in North Carolina. Droz is also a registered speaker at the Heartland Institute's upcoming International Conference on Climate Change.

The Memo
The purpose of the memo was to develop and outline a strategy to attack wind power as a viable energy substitute. Wind power proponents point out that there is no shortage of wind, it's easily harvested, inexpensively converted to electricity, and is a sustainable alternative to coal and other fossil fuel energy generation methods. Hence, a memo outlining a PR campaign with these goals in mind:

• A) Cause the targeted audience to change its opinion and action based on the messages.
• B) Provide credible counter message to the (wind) industry.
• C) Disrupt industry message with countermeasures.
• D) Cause subversion in message of industry so that it effectively becomes so bad no one wants to admit in public they are for it (much like wind has done to coal, by turning green to black and clean to dirty).
• Ultimate Goal: Change policy direction based on the message.

In order to accomplish that goal, the memo suggests "joining forces with some already established organization where there is substantial commonality and commitment." Such organizations include Heartland, CEI, Cato, Manhattan Institute, Americans for Prosperity, ALEC. In addition to the PR campaign, Droz suggests a grassroots effort to provide materials to local groups, document templates for them to file with the state utility commission, and development of negative catch phrases for wind energy. I'm certain Frank Luntz is already on that for them.

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It is so much better to win than to lose, and like all other Democrats I have spent a lot of happy hours since election day reading stories about all the right wing billionaires’ and Wall Street money that was wasted, and all the Republican finger pointing and whining about why they lost.

The many losers on the Republican side were to my mind some of the people and groups who have degraded our politics and policies in the worst kind of way- the biggest names among them besides the actual candidates including Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, the Wall Street money boys, Big Oil and Big Coal, and the extremist anti-gay and anti-choice groups. It is a pleasure to see these people, corporations, and groups unhappy for a while -- not out of any sense of vindictiveness, but just knowing that if they were feeling happy the rest of us would be suffering mightily because of their terrible agenda for America.

But there is one other set of people and groups who lost in this election as well, and it is important to note that as well: Democrats who don't want to have a populist "class warfare" kind of message.

The Obama team, after wandering for two and a half years in the unproductive vineyards of DC centrism, finally planted its flag last fall in the populist turf of Teddy Roosevelt's legacy and reframed the election as a make-or-break moment for the middle class. It campaigned aggressively on more taxes for the wealthy and more regulation for Wall Street, and ripped Romney apart on the way Bain Capital hurt its workers and out-sourced jobs.

Obama was in trouble before making that turn, but once made his poll numbers started rising and he was able to rally both the democratic base and swing vote working class voters to his side. Meanwhile, most of the Senate candidates who won tough races were flaming populists, people like the Wall Street accountabilty crusader Elizabeth Warren, the working class champion Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin who bragged in her stump speeches about opposing the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the fiercely anti-big money in politics Chris Murphy, and Heidi Heitkamp, who bragged in her ads about suing big corporations as North Dakota's Attorney General.

But it wasn't just the candidates who were populists, the voters clearly were as well -- especially the swing voters. One of the most fascinating findings of post-election polling by Democracy Corps and CAF was that swing voters who ended with Obama were actually even more populist than Democratic base voters.

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