Grassroots issues must be visible to pass, so they must be simple and urgent, and they require build-up.
Urgency comes from widespread knowledge of the problem. A grassroots legislative push may address a real problem, but if the problem is relatively unknown to the grassroots, it won’t garner enough grassroots support to overcome lobby and liberal pressure.
Even the election of the third-ranked constitutional officer in Texas has taken time to make urgent.
Speaker race build-up has centered around the lobby-controlled speaker chair being too liberal. This is why making the speaker race about a virtually unknown problem – House rules – was bound to damage the urgency of the cause. Even the most engaged conservatives, if asked during the speaker race if they honestly knew the House had a big rules problem, were likely to shrug their shoulders and say, “Sure, I mean, I would think so, ya know?.”
House rules may well be a serious problem. If so, this needs to be messaged thoroughly in the grassroots before the grassroots can provide power to propel an action addressing it.
Also, the grassroots has been lied to so much over the years that no politician can get away with a wink. If you don’t publicly say your bill is about the thing they care about, they have every right to expect that you don’t plan to deliver.
Simplicity is also required to marshal the power of the grassroots with regard to a bill. If the bill’s “pitch” is hard to give, it will keep in-district opinion-makers from convincing enough people.
This was likely the case with regard to the school vouchers several session ago. The strategy provided for it was a complicated, hard-to-follow, incremental plan to spread vouchers all over Texas via inner cities. This bill had tons of build-up. The issue was, and is, urgent - average citizens throughout the country are disgusted by the public school system. However, the bill lacked simplicity.
Why was it made complicated instead of simple?
One of most attractive and common strategic blunders is that of trying to win enemies before friends. In politics things happen because of power. Going to the natural enemies of a political move in order to, essentially, ask their help winning your friends, is feeble.
What is not feeble is going to the next-closest undecided legislator to your cause and saying, “Everyone to your right is signed on. Do you want to be the line between good and bad on this issue?” Strong.
Also, thinking you can distract them from recognizing a bill that will dismantle the educational establishment, or ObamaCare, or anything else with a too-clever-by-half “oh, no, this is all about a brand new thing that I think you can get behind…” may be a comforting way to sidestep the natural opposition to a political move. However, it only does so because it sidesteps natural support, too, leaving the opposition unworried. A wise man once said, “You’ll always know a battle by how much it feels like a battle.”
What about build-up?
The lobby deserves to slink around Austin, slipping their legislation in under cover of darkness. People whose deeds are evil love the darkness. Good deeds, however, love the light, and often need it to grow.
People with the moral high ground simply cannot accept a set of circumstances in which they must hide.
If they do, ostensibly wishing to limit opposing pressure, they’ve signaled to lobby legislators that they aren’t going to do the one thing that could hurt lobby legislators – tell the grassroots what they are doing.
Far from discouraging opposition, conservatives doing business this way ensure intimidation, explicit or implicit, will always be used. And why not? Intimidation is preventing the one thing guilty legislators fear.
This strategy amounts to hoping lobby legislators accidentally vote yes to legislation sneaked in at the last moment. This happens in the lobby’s favor, but against the lobby can this type of thing happen more than once in a blue moon? Can it consistently succeed on impactful items? Not likely.
The shadows are always a home game for them. Full daylight is always a home game for conservatives. The grassroots takes time to get going, but once it is moving it is very hard to stop.
Grassroots issues need to be visible to the grassroots if grassroots power is to be marshaled. This requires simplicity, urgency, and build-up. In the last part of this series, we’ll discuss realistic expectations for grassroots issues.