You’re ticked off by the budget and deficit deal. The old-guard Republicans caved again and took a few Tea Party people with them. So now what are you going to do? Sulk? Whine? Bitch and moan? Not me. There’s one thing about liberals that I admire. They never quit. When Jimmy Carter and a whole bunch of liberal Congressmen were thrown out in the 1980 election, conservatives declared victory and liberals planned how to win it all back. And they did.

Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), author of Rules for Radicals, is a favorite strategist of the Left. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are students of Alinsky’s methods. Hillary had met Alinsky at a Methodist church outing when she was a teenager. They were impressed with one another. In late 1968, Alinsky offered Hillary Rodham a job working for him. She had insider aspirations. In 1969, she wrote her Senior Thesis on Alinsky: “There is Only the Fight . . .”: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.

After Alinsky’s death, “a group of his disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate, to organize black residents on the South Side of Chicago, while learning and applying Alinsky’s philosophy of street-level democracy. The recruiter called the $13,000-a-year job ‘very romantic, until you do it.’” The rest, as they say, is history.

She and Obama drank deep from the Alinsky strategy well, and it has paid off for them and their fellow radicals. There’s one particular Alinsky line from his Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971) that is inspiring, even for someone like me on the right side of the political spectrum. Liberals must be doing something right to continually out strategize conservatives. Here’s one of the reasons that comes out of the Alinsky playbook:

“Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing — but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.”

So what are you going to do? Cry about the betrayal? Not me. Blow something up? How foolish and counter-productive and morally wrong. What’s the lesson? Work harder, smarter, and longer. To quote Tim Allen’s character Peter Quincy Taggart in the film Galaxy Quest, “Never give up, never surrender.” I can assure you, liberals never will. It’s time we beat them at their own game.

You, I, and every person we know have to make a decision . . . now! We can’t wait for the next election. We must engage to find good candidates who can replace the faux conservatives and self-avowed RINOs! The liberals are already planning their 2012 take-back strategy.

The 2010 election is over. It’s old news that we can’t rest on. We’ve made some progress, but it’s time for “More Tea in 2012.” Make it a rallying cry.