Labor should learn from the passionate Ms Palin (Lefty admires her ardent intensity)

IT ain't just what you say but the way you say it when you are selling policy to the public.

I AGREE with Janet Albrechtsen: there is much to learn from Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. My lessons, though, are different.

With the US federal budget $US1.3 trillion in deficit, many of its states and municipalities struggling to make payroll, its infrastructure crumbling and the gap between its haves and the have-nots widening, a populist assault on the nation's tax base is the last thing the US needs, and copying it would risk putting Australia on the same road to decline.

The strength of Palin and the people she leads is not their message; it's the way they deliver it.

Readers may recall how she exploded on to the political stage at the 2008 Republican convention, with a dazzling speech that established her as the voice of angry conservatism. Take, for example, her put-down of Barack Obama's Democratic convention address, which was delivered on a set designed to imitate the Forum Romanum: "When the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot, when that happens, what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?"

Ouch! That speech was admittedly written for her by a Washington pro, but she smashed it out of the park with superb delivery and has been doing so ever since.

Palin and the Tea Party's potency is their ability to project belief and take people with them. They have the capacity - all too rare today - to interest everyday people in a political program that's fundamentally based on ideas. Those ideas may be at odds with economic common sense, flaky and at times ugly, but they are put with edge and passion. Therein lies the lesson for progressives in both the US and Australia: the need to fight passion with passion, belief with belief.

Compare the gutsy if inane rhetoric of the US Right with that we hear from the American and Australian Centre-Left. Progressives are forever appealing to (an often illusory) consensus, always "taking advice on that", "waiting for the evidence to come in", "not wanting to pre-judge the findings of a forthcoming independent report", and "respecting other people's beliefs".

All of which in moderation are fine, but taken to excess, and done without even a semblance of ideological conviction, they can become a substitute for leadership and decision-making. In short, Australian progressives are becoming data and process junkies.

The progressive movement has taken the otherwise laudable concept of "evidence-based policy" and raised it to the status of a governing philosophy. At every turn, we have a new report, undertaken by objective experts, based on the beauty of the numbers. But of course this encounters two serious problems: in the social sciences, numbers are not as objective as in the pure sciences; and the full evidence never quite seems to come in. Trial follows trial, study follows study, and then it's all undone by the only data the political tough nuts are ever really prepared to take a stand on: polling. The Centre-Left has the evidence on global warming, but the Right has the passion and the courage to pursue its convictions.

This inability to project and connect is proving difficult for progressives to overcome. This is partly because both in the US and Australia the Centre-Left's policy machines have become over-professionalised. I don't mean they should go back to being amateurs but rather that they've let the best policy schools - and progressive policy makers increasingly graduate from the very best policy schools - convince them that we live in a post-ideological world. Any policy adviser out there tired of reading regression analyses arguing how social class doesn't explain social inequality will know what I mean.

This isn't just my opinion. In his book The Promise: President Obama, Year One Jonathan Alter perceptively remarks that Obama, his White House staff and senior government office holders have been "in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a 'right answer' to everything. But a right answer to whom?" In other words, dangling the prospect of respectability, the public policy professors have persuaded progressive political advisers to forget one of the ultimate questions of their trade: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Here's another fundamental question of the politician's trade: What is to be done? We don't want the Centre-Left to become a mirror image of the US Right. Vacuous populism isn't the answer; its hollow promises are seldom delivered and are damaging to the nation when they are. But progressives need to ditch the silly idea that voters are nothing but rational calculating machines. Such a view ignores the reality that political decisions are based not just on reason but on emotion, too. If the Almighty had intended politics to be reduced to competing Gini coefficients, he would have given us a USB port instead of a brain.

Here are some ideas. Obama, go back to speaking with force and passion: it's what got you elected. Minister, halve the thickness of that scientific report, shorten the public consultation period and double the persuasiveness of your public statements. MP, talk about the issue, not the process. Pollster, here's a revolver and a bottle of vodka - you know the rest.

Yes, it's right to have reason on your side; it's right to amass facts; and it's right to listen and forge consensus and even occasionally to assess voter research; but even these things require passion and belief for success. Bob Hawke was a consensus man, but he was also a persuader.

This approach is especially important in this age of confident and aggressive movement conservatism, and when Labor faces competition from its Left. Progressives may spurn emotional appeals as unbecoming, and reject conviction and forthrightness as undemocratic, but conservatives never will, and neither will the Greens. If you find the prospect of President Palin frightening and worry about a similar movement invading our politics, it may be necessary to fight fire with fire.

Dennis Glover is a speechwriter and author. His book, The Art of Great Speeches, will be released in December.

The progressive movement has taken the otherwise laudable concept of "evidence-based policy" and raised it to the status of a governing philosophy.

What a joke! The evidence of the failure of socialism is all around and has been for 100s of years, yet these morons claim to be evidence based? LOL!!! They'll never get it!

What a nudnik!

I hear this all the time from brain dead Democrats - the problem is we’re too nice.

The left wants something for nothing. You won’t stir them to action without paying them. Soros funded them last time. He’s done with that for now according to Soros himself, because he doesn’t believe in “standing in front of an avalanche.”

These so-called “progressives”, as Hillary has proudly declared of herself on many occasions, are communists who are simply throwing around a new moniker. We are the guilty ones who have turned our backs on those who gave up their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, as we slept through the take over of our schools and universities, entrenching generations of the enemy within.

Public education is our unfinished business. Save our kids, saves our country, or else.

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