http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/25/blackwell/print.html
News
My right-wing degree
How I learned to convert
liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell's Leadership
Institute, alma mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss
Americas.
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By
Jeff Horwitz
May
24, 2005 | One recent Sunday, at Morton Blackwell's
Leadership Institute, a dozen students meet for the second and final day of
training in grass-roots youth politics. All are earnest, idealistic and as
right wing as you can get. They take careful notes as instructor Paul Gourley teaches them how to rig a campus mock election.
It's
nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal
colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so
you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing.
College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind
that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.
"Can
anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock
electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"
Stephen,
a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his
hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"
"Stephen
has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing
Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward
Gomorrah."
The
students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson --
that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right
than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from
When
the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin,
as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the
election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it
statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar
victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind
your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press
releases.
There
is no better place to master the art of mock-election rigging -- and there is
no better master than Morton Blackwell, who invented the trick in 1964 and has
been teaching it ever since. Blackwell's half-century career in conservative
grass-roots politics coincides neatly with the fortunes of the conservative
movement: He was there when Goldwater lost, when Southern voters abandoned the
Democratic Party in droves, and when the Moral Majority began its harvest of
evangelical Christian voters. In the 1970s, Blackwell worked with conservative
direct-mail king Richard Viguerie; in 1980, he led
Reagan's youth campaign. Recently, he's been fighting to save Tom DeLay's job.
Yet
Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican
organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity,
drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from
tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality,"
the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever
made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students --
hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the
U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas.
Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old
pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in
The
institute's classes aren't tickets into an exclusive and shadowy club, however:
I am also an institute graduate. In March, I attended its
Over
the last 25 years, more than 40,000 young conservatives have been trained at
the institute's
The
Leadership Institute has succeeded, in part, because it's had little to no
competition from the left. College campuses may still be havens for liberal
thought, but the right-wing students are the ones organized enough to win major
battles. Perhaps expecting that American youth would organize themselves as
they did in decades past, progressive organizations have been outstripped by
their conservative counterparts in professionalizing the ragtag world of
college activism. "When it comes to campus controversy, from affirmative
action to free speech, the right wing pumps in money and expertise and shows
[students] how to out-hustle their opponents," says David Halperin of the liberal Center for American Progress.
Still,
Blackwell says conservatives are underdogs on college campuses. Conservative
students may be better organized, but they're still outnumbered. The Leadership
Institute contends that liberal higher education is robbing the conservative
movement of new blood -- and thereby handicapping the institute's efforts.
"You know, the most conservative students are the freshmen," Blackwell
told me. "There is an acculturation there."
And
that's where the institute is taking its fight. For most of its 25-year
history, it has focused on grooming students to work in conservative politics;
it's now increasingly devoting its efforts to making campuses more conservative
places. Through its Campus Leadership Program, the institute is leading a
growing effort to found and support a national network of conservative student
groups and publications capable of permanently altering the intellectual and
social environment of universities to conservatives' advantage. That goal alone
is a stark rejection of the standard conservative complaint that post-Vietnam
War higher education is not just grossly liberal, but irredeemably so. Already,
the program has shown considerable success. Asked about his campus initiative,
Blackwell simply says, "You're talking about the major project for the
rest of my life."
In
the wake of the 2004 election, some progressive groups have been working to
reinforce their positions on campus. Last February, the Center for American
Progress launched Campus Progress, a student activism support center, to combat
what Halperin describes as "30 years of
effective organizing" by conservative groups like the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, and of course, the Leadership
Institute. But Blackwell is unfazed by the competition. "If they asked me,
which they haven't, I could let them know that it's a lot harder than it
appeared on the surface," he told me. "You've got to work years
before you see any results."
And
Blackwell has put in those years. A young Louisiana Republican in the days when
Democrats owned every statewide office, he cut his political teeth on Barry
Goldwater's doomed 1964 presidential bid. "Don't fully trust anyone until
he has stuck with a good cause which he saw was losing," is an institute
maxim rooted in Blackwell's own political education. "After Goldwater's
defeat, the number of people who would admit to being movement conservatives
could all have fit into an average phone booth," Blackwell said in an
interview. "And among us, we didn't have a dime for a telephone
call."
That
was a long time ago. According to Blackwell, allied "movement
conservatives" took the first steps toward outmaneuvering their party's
moribund minority leadership in the '70s. More than a test of character,
conservatism's formerly abject status provided the key to those gains. With a
wealth of political talent but few resources or constituencies, conservatives
had no choice but to look beyond the two- and four-year cycles that dictate
traditional political strategy. Instead of fighting an intra-party struggle
they were certain to lose, they built an infrastructure outside the Republican
Party dedicated to promoting talent, not winning the next election.
The
Leadership Institute is a perfect example of that strategy, according to Peter
Murray, a progressive management trainer who studied the institute's model
before launching his own nonprofit political training organization, the Center
for Progressive Leadership, last year. "Being a 501(c)(3)
not only means they can get tax deductions for their donors and build
endowments, but they're forced to look long term,"
It's
an approach,
The
structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Program is simple. The Leadership
Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and
dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative
student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing
campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus
administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute
will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your
Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to
drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP
doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is
confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
Unlike
chapter-based political organizations, CLP clubs are unaffiliated with either
the Leadership Institute or each other. According to Blackwell, this trait
offers a serious advantage: "No purges." The clubs' independence also
comes with the benefit of plausible deniability. "You can get away with
stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College
Republicans," says CLP director Dan Flynn. "Because we're
independent, we can do activities that push the envelope," agrees
The
Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy --
making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool
-- is a Blackwell specialty. Before the 2004 Republican Convention, the
conservative elder personally went to a drugstore and bought little pink heart
stickers, bandages and purple nail polish. At home, he made the "Purple
Heart Band-Aids" that he later distributed in
A
stunt is one way to get press -- but a more effective and sustainable method is
to start your own publication. The Leadership Institute trains around 250
students yearly in its student publication workshop, and CLP staff assisted in
launching 22 campus publications last year alone.
The
Rutgers Centurion is a conservative monthly that got off the ground this fall
with institute help.
The
Rutgers Centurion has since analyzed faculty campaign contributions that
favored John Kerry over George W. Bush 104 times over, and it accused one of
The
Centurion's favorite subject, however, seems to be people who don't like the
Centurion. Rutgers student Tabitha Rice earned the February "Liberal of
the Month" title for allegedly defacing copies of the Centurion's previous
issue, and in the spirit of Valentine's Day, the editors framed an excerpt from
their hate mail -- "'F*** [The editors of The Centurion.] F*** Them till they're dead'" -- in a heart-shaped box.
The
Centurion's assertion that campus liberals are intolerant lends its vitriolic
criticism of leftists the veneer of the free speech movement. CLP coordinator
Flynn, the author of "Why the Left Hates America," recalls that
during a speech at
CLP
publications play a crucial role in publicizing such run-ins. Right-wing
watchdog groups like Accuracy in Media have railed against liberal bias in the
classroom for years, but as outsiders, they lack both standing and a direct
connection to campus life. CLP publications have both, allowing them to monitor
bias in every classroom. In December, the editor of the Louisville Patriot, a
CLP-organized publication at the University of Louisville, reported that
sociology lecturer John McTighe had made a very, very
tasteless joke about how religious conservatives who had voted for Bush ought
to be shot. With sufficient outrage, the story jumped from the Patriot to the
local media and the Internet, resulting in McTighe's
suspension and a thoroughly public debate of liberal bias in, of all places,
Sparking
such scandals is "absolutely" a part of CLP's
plan, Blackwell says. "In the last year or so, not taking into account the
flap over Ward Churchill, you have no doubt noticed more news coverage about
complacent leftists' abuses on campus," he says. "Academia is the
last unbreached citadel of the left, and I believe we
are today over the moat."
There's
still plenty to do before then. Chris Stio, an
institute staffer who directed the Bush-Cheney field operations in northeast
Some
progressives have come to that conclusion as well. "This was certainly
needed 25 years ago," says Peter Murray, of the Center for Progressive
Leadership. "Investing beyond any individual election cycle is the way
that we're going to develop the progressive movement into a more robust,
coordinated, compact force that can win elections." But getting donors to
think beyond 2008 is a tough sell. "Our budget this year will be just over
a million. We'd love to be bigger than that," he says. "It's really
going to be up to the progressive donor community as to whether they're going
to look long term and invest in a superstructure. If they do, we can build it
relatively quickly."
In
the meantime, the Leadership Institute will continue its work. Blackwell has found
plenty of humor in his recent vilification as the evil genius that smoothed
fake reporter Jeff Gannon's path to White House press briefings. "If they
want to believe that there's a vast conspiracy, and they want to waste their
time trying to decide who gives all the orders to the conservative movement,
well, let 'em spend their time on that," he
says, laughing.
The
Leadership Institute has better things to do, Blackwell says, than conspire to
put a male escort up to lobbing softballs to White House spokesman Scott
McClellan. For example, training the next generation of Karl
Roves.
"Everyone
knows that for certain breeds of dogs it is customary to cut their tails short
when they are a few weeks old," begins Blackwell's lecture to us on the
importance of releasing negative information on your opponent incrementally.
"Every time you clip the puppy's tail it hurts. It hurts. You might
traumatize the puppy for life."
"The
moral is that if it's your tail that's being clipped, you want it clipped once,"
concludes Blackwell. "But if you get a chance to clip your opponent's
tail, clip that puppy as often as you can."
It
may be hardball, but it isn't cheating, and it would be far less effective if
it were. "These are powerful techniques," Blackwell tells the class
at the end of his marathon lecture. "So I don't want anyone going out of
here and acting unethically. It's not necessary."
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About
the writer
Jeff
Horwitz, a former editorial fellow at Salon, writes
for the Washington City Paper.
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