How to Play Hardball Politics...and Win

Want to know why progressives outside the Beltway should be feeling emboldened? Check out this story in the Staten Island Advance where GOP Rep. Vito Fossella gets muscled. After a massive grassroots campaign to force Fossella to repudiate the most extreme elements of President Bush's agenda, he publicly caved.

The paper reports:

"Yesterday, Fossella came out strongly against Bush's plan for progressive indexing of Social Security benefits as a means of keeping the system solvent. And testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, he expressed doubt about the president's proposal to let workers divert to private accounts money that ordinarily would go into Social Security."

The paper notes that since January, the In This Together Campaign "has been handing out leaflets at the St. George and Whitehall ferry terminals, writing hundreds of letters to Fossella, holding meetings and putting up signs asking: 'Where's Vito? Defend Social Security.'"

That's the kind of hardball politics unions and organizations like the Working Families Party have mastered in New York - and it should serve as a model for everywhere else.