MikeElk

Sure, liberals laugh off the idea of Sarah Palin being elected president. However, elitist, out-of-touch liberals laughed off Nixon, Reagan and Bush as unelectable. Well, guess what, they all won. If we don't stop laughing at white, working class people, we are going to lose too.

Very few of us made any attempt to really reach out and embrace these teabaggers on the issues that we share with them. Many of their concerns about the bailout, NAFTA-style trade deals and the general loss of trust in government are core progressive issues. We could lock arms with the teabaggers and form a powerful alliance, but, instead, we attack our potential allies because we do not take the time to engage them.

Over 400 former staffers have answered the call of the President to "set him right" demanding a strong public option.

I just joined thousands of others including several hundred former staffers from the campaign in signing a petition to President Obama, telling him that health care reform without a public option is not "change we can believe in." As a staffer of the President's working as a community organizer in Crawford County, Pennsylvania in rural Western Pennsylvania, I fought hard for him during the campaign. I worked 16-17 hours a day with no days off for nearly four months working to get the President elected.

West Virginia shows us how we could easily win over this key segment of society, working class whites, with a New Deal-style industrial policy. Currently, 85,000 people in the United States are employed by the wind industry; Slightly more than the 81,000 in the United States working as coal miners. On election night 2000, the biggest shocker for me wasn't Florida, but that West Virginia had voted for a conservative Republican presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 70 years. For decades, West Virginia, with one of the highest rates of unionization in the country, regularly voted for progressive candidates, even being one of only nine other states in 1988 to vote for the epitome of a Massachusetts liberal - Michael Dukakis. To know the story of West Virginia is to know why the progressive movement is failing to win over white working class voters. Because of their primary concern: jobs.

Trade policy may become a flash point in the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary, as both candidates at Netroots Nation sought to criticize the other as too supportive of unfair trade agreements.

Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, has led the outsourcing charge in the past. So commentators were shocked last month when, speaking at the Detroit Economic Club, Immelt said that the United States needs to invest in American manufacturing in order to get out of our current economic crisis.

We as a movement fighting for health care need to ask ourselves "What Would Wellstone Do?"