Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win [Paperback]

Robert Creamer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 20, 2007

To turn this historic opportunity into long-term political realignment, Progressives must forcefully reassert our commitment to fundamental progressive values and to our vision for the future. Some people think that in order to win, Democrats need to move to the political center by adopting conservative values and splitting the difference between progressive and conservatives positions. History shows they are wrong. To win the next election and to win in the long term, we need to redefine the political center. In this book one of America s most experienced political strategists and organizers lays out a broad strategy for progressive victory and describes the tactics needed to win real-world political battles one at a time. The book analyzes: The self-interests of voters; Our targets for political communication; The principles of political messaging; The secrets of winning electoral and issue campaigns; What we mean by progressive values; How to describe a compelling progressive vision for the future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

If Progressives are ready to move beyond the Age of W into a winning era, they can start with Stand Up Straight. This is more than a call to arms. This is a battle plan from one of the best campaign minds in America. Bob Creamer takes his readers from values to votes with practical tactics and insight gathered over decades of experience. This book is for players...spectators need not apply. - Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), Senate Democratic Whip --Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), Senate Democratic Whip

If every activist in America read Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight, we could change our country. This book will help bring on the New Progressive Era. It's that good - Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) --Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)

Bob Creamer has been at the center of every major progressive political movement in America for four decades. If anyone in America knows how to run and win issue campaigns it is Bob. Stand Up Straight is nothing less than the bible for progressive political activists. - Brad Woodhouse, President, Americans United for Change --Brad Woodhouse, President, Americans United for Change

About the Author

AUTHOR BIO: Robert Creamer has been a political organizer and strategist for almost four decades. He and his firm, the Strategic Consulting Group, work with many of the country s most significant issue campaigns. He was one of the major architects and organizers of the successful campaign to defeat the privatization of Social Security. He is a consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, change America s budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform. His clients have included labor unions, public interest groups, and advocacy organizations like MoveOn.org, Americans United for Change and USAction. He has also worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national levels. Creamer is married to Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Illinois.

Product Details

• Paperback: 618 pages
• Publisher: Seven Locks Press (November 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979585295
• ISBN-13: 978-0979585296
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but also odd and irritating, March 13, 2008

By 

L. F. Smith (E. Wenatchee, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win (Paperback)

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This is an interesting book that will probably be very useful to its target audience: "...young people who are considering a life-long commitment to the progressive cause, and for anyone who is curious about how voters make political decisions and what is involved in organizing for change." However, it is also an odd book, to the point of being irritating.

Creamer has, in effect, produced a combination of two books. One is a how-to manual for progressive activists; the other is a rationale for progressive policies and a call to arms for those who favor those policies. Unfortunately, the combination doesn't work particularly well here. One would expect the rationale to come before the how-to manual, but for some unfathomable reason, Creamer does it the other way around. In addition, he really needs some editorial help; the copy design of the book is grotesque, with weird indentation patterns, combinations of bulleted and numbered lists, willy-nilly bold-facing, italics, and underlining-- and sometimes all three together-- and odd rhetorical jumps from chapter to chapter. Finally, the book is too long, at 600+ pages.

In short, this is a book you have to really want to read, or you just won't finish it. That may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

Creamer is an unapologetic advocate for the progressive cause. (By the way, as he explains about 500 pages into the book, "progressive" means "liberal"; the "radical conservatives" have successfully made "liberal" a pejorative, so the liberals can't use that word any more.) He's spent his life as a political organizer, and he uses that experience to illustrate the points he's making with interesting anecdotes. The book is based on the a priori assumption that the progressive cause is true, pure, and right. If you can't accept that assumption, you will not like this book at all.

However, even though the progressive cause is true, pure, and right, the task of progressive organizers is to crush any candidates who run against that cause. That's because, obviously, if progressives aren't elected to office, the progressive agenda cannot be enacted into law and financed.

Fair enough, but Creamer clearly believes that those committed to the progressive cause are justified in using any and all means to "frame" the debate and win the election, while those who run against them are by definition radical conservatives who are not justified ipso facto in using any and all means necessary to win. If you cannot accept that point of view, you will not like this book at all.

I thought the book was interesting, but I really didn't like it at all. Its organization and lack of editorial discipline made it a very nearly unreadable mess. In addition, I am an independent, one of the misguided people Creamer is interested in training activists to motivate and manipulate during campaigns, so there really wasn't much here for me.

I'm afraid that the same will be true for anyone else who's not already one of the progressive activists that Creamer is directing the book toward.

39 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Incomprehensible, February 17, 2008

By 

Michael Heath (North Woods of Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win (Paperback)

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I cannot recommend this book. While I enjoyed the conversational style of the author and appreciate the need for the older Dems to communicate some strategic and tactical advice to young people in the party so their campaign efforts are effective, this book doesn't execute on its objective.

Its primary draw back is its length given the format as a book. The author and editor decided to take a conversational style (book) and create an encyclopedic length survey of every little fundamental issue a Democratic campaign should consider in the modern day. First off, the table of contents and the index are sufficient for a book, but not an encyclopedia. So the reader is left with a 600+ page book with very few devices to reference the issues they're interested in researching if they're able to finish it, causing it to fail as an encyclopedia. The hefty length of the book and its conversational tone is like reading a really, really, long blog post - you don't, read it that is.

If Creamer is truly dedicated to the subject matter, I recommend he revise the book, either make it an easy to reference research source, or slash two-thirds of the material and make it a call to arms for a certain style of campaign or agenda, either - not both.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Progressive's Guide to Encyclopedia Creation, January 9, 2008

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win (Paperback)

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Progressives are finally starting to get their act together, with serious thinkers bringing forth new political strategies and platforms that are dying to be put into action by a new generation of passionate activists. Here Creamer compiles the latest progressive talking points into a fairly serviceable encyclopedia, backed up with many of his own success stories as an activist and consultant. Creamer adds a few good pointers of his own, particularly when it comes to beating the conservatives at their own games of framing, organizing, and coalition building. Near the end of the book, Creamer also puts together outstanding platforms, based on current progressive thought, for health care and foreign policy. However, those new items are pretty rare in this ridiculously padded and repetitive book (though the padding and repetition might be excusable if one uses the book as an activist's encyclopedia). Creamer's basic points keep popping up again and again over nearly 600 pages, with far too much compiling of the ideas of others, adding up to recycling and hindsight rather than synthesis or development.

Creamer spends far too many pages forwarding the prior material of progressive thinkers like sociologist Malcolm Gladwell and linguist George Lakoff. Creamer also delves into other fields to explain modern political behavior, utilizing vast amounts of material from historian Jared Diamond, management expert Clayton Christensen, and even astronomer David Grinspoon, but yet again merely repeats previous works (including more than two entire chapters on Diamond's theories) with which most of this book's readers will already be familiar. Several later chapters destroy a lot of trees by repeating very basic progressive opinions on problems like the environment, war, economics, and justice. With this book Creamer has performed a valuable service in bringing together useful and far-flung progressive thought, and he's got solid strategies for transforming thought into action. But other than compilation, this book doesn't offer enough new inspiration to justify its huge size or the amount of time potential activists will get bogged down in it before taking it to the streets. [~doomsdayer520~]