Last updated on July 4, 2023
In his new book “Go Big” Richard Viguerrie recounts why the ‘New Right’ took over leadership of the conservative movement and brought it to victory, electing Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. He observes that in 1964 there were conservatives, but there was no one planning conservative strategy. He then outlines the scheme Newt Gingrich used to form plans. It had four parts:
- A vision
- A goal
- Strategy
- Tactics/projects
The vision is the overall objective of the planning effort. A goal is a major segment of that objective. Tactics are the bits and pieces of actions that move you towards the goal. Strategy is what organizes the tactics into a coherent whole.
As emphasized here and there, not just in his book, any number of people confuse the vision or the tactic with the organized plan. A vision might be “I want to become a millionaire”. But a vision is not a strategy or tactic. A tactic might be “I will make coffee at home rather than spending ten bucks every day at a fancy doughnut shop.” But neither of those is a coherent plan. A strategy might be “spend less, save more,” in which case eliminating the doughnut shop is a tactic, which might be combined with other tactics that save money in order to increase spending. On the other hand, “throw your credit cards into a wood chipper” is a tactic that might be part of the strategy, but as with making your own coffee you have to evaluate how the tactic fits into the coherent whole.
Viguerie, writing for organizations, suggests as goals “a plan to double donors”, or “a plan to grow the organization by tenfold in the next three or five years”, or “a big-picture plan for the next half decade”. However, first you need the vision, then you need the goals, and finally you can advance to the strategy and the tactics.
It should be recognized that if people of been around for a while on one hand they already know what sort of tactics need to be carried out, and what has gone wrong in the past with them. On the other hand, if they have been around for five or fifteen years, always doing the same thing, they may have fixated on that one thing whether it actually makes any sense or not. For example, there are libertarian leaders who have fixated on the notion of putting the presidential candidate on the ballot in all fifty states in each election cycle, no matter what it costs or what the opportunity costs of this objective are. They may be right, they may be wrong, but at some point you have to sit down and question each of the goals and ask in what order that we should be focusing on them.
Opportunity cost? If you choose to do X, the resources you invest in X are not available to do Y or Z. If you choose to run a fancy, expensive state convention every year, even though it loses money, that’s money you did not have available to support candidates, publish a monthly newsletter, do outreach booths, do advertising,…
