The Rutgers Centurion is a conservative monthly that got off the ground this fall with institute help. Rutgers student James O'Keefe founded the magazine after coming across a conservative publication at Tufts. "I said, why don't we have this?" O'Keefe remembers. He taught himself a page-layout program and got in touch with the Leadership Institute, which dispatched a staffer to take him and his coeditors to dinner at an upscale local brewery. The institute gave O'Keefe books on starting a publication, awarded him a $500 "Balance in Media Grant," and suggested never-fail places on campus to ferret out liberal excess. "They were really excited," O'Keefe recalls.

The Rutgers Centurion has since analyzed faculty campaign contributions that favored John Kerry over George W. Bush 104 times over, and it accused one of Rutgers' most esteemed alumni, African-American author and actor Paul Robeson, of being a Stalinist. The magazine has published poetry about abortion from a fetus's point of view and run allegations of prejudice against Condoleezza Rice, "The Black Woman Liberals Love to Hate."

The Centurion's favorite subject, however, seems to be people who don't like the Centurion. Rutgers student Tabitha Rice earned the February "Liberal of the Month" title for allegedly defacing copies of the Centurion's previous issue, and in the spirit of Valentine's Day, the editors framed an excerpt from their hate mail -- "'F*** [The editors of The Centurion.] F*** Them till they're dead'" -- in a heart-shaped box.

The Centurion's assertion that campus liberals are intolerant lends its vitriolic criticism of leftists the veneer of the free speech movement. CLP coordinator Flynn, the author of "Why the Left Hates America," recalls that during a speech at Berkeley, he encountered "a Nazi-style book burning" of his work and an attempt to rip his microphone cord from the wall. That might not have quite the allure of Mario Savio's rallying a crowd from a squad car's roof during Berkeley's student protests, but it's a start.

CLP publications play a crucial role in publicizing such run-ins. Right-wing watchdog groups like Accuracy in Media have railed against liberal bias in the classroom for years, but as outsiders, they lack both standing and a direct connection to campus life. CLP publications have both, allowing them to monitor bias in every classroom. In December, the editor of the Louisville Patriot, a CLP-organized publication at the University of Louisville, reported that sociology lecturer John McTighe had made a very, very tasteless joke about how religious conservatives who had voted for Bush ought to be shot. With sufficient outrage, the story jumped from the Patriot to the local media and the Internet, resulting in McTighe's suspension and a thoroughly public debate of liberal bias in, of all places, Kentucky.

Sparking such scandals is "absolutely" a part of CLP's plan, Blackwell says. "In the last year or so, not taking into account the flap over Ward Churchill, you have no doubt noticed more news coverage about complacent leftists' abuses on campus," he says. "Academia is the last unbreached citadel of the left, and I believe we are today over the moat."

There's still plenty to do before then. Chris Stio, an institute staffer who directed the Bush-Cheney field operations in northeast Michigan, warns his students not to buy into second-term crowing about America's irrevocable slide into conservatism. "Enough people were yelling and screaming about the president that if they'd actually picked up the phone book and started calling, they might have won," he says. "They went to concerts, they bashed the president, but they didn't work. If enough people had, maybe we'd have a different president. The election was not inevitable. And too many think it was."

Some progressives have come to that conclusion as well. "This was certainly needed 25 years ago," says Peter Murray, of the Center for Progressive Leadership. "Investing beyond any individual election cycle is the way that we're going to develop the progressive movement into a more robust, coordinated, compact force that can win elections." But getting donors to think beyond 2008 is a tough sell. "Our budget this year will be just over a million. We'd love to be bigger than that," he says. "It's really going to be up to the progressive donor community as to whether they're going to look long term and invest in a superstructure. If they do, we can build it relatively quickly."

In the meantime, the Leadership Institute will continue its work. Blackwell has found plenty of humor in his recent vilification as the evil genius that smoothed fake reporter Jeff Gannon's path to White House press briefings. "If they want to believe that there's a vast conspiracy, and they want to waste their time trying to decide who gives all the orders to the conservative movement, well, let 'em spend their time on that," he says, laughing.

The Leadership Institute has better things to do, Blackwell says, than conspire to put a male escort up to lobbing softballs to White House spokesman Scott McClellan. For example, training the next generation of Karl Roves.

"Everyone knows that for certain breeds of dogs it is customary to cut their tails short when they are a few weeks old," begins Blackwell's lecture to us on the importance of releasing negative information on your opponent incrementally. "Every time you clip the puppy's tail it hurts. It hurts. You might traumatize the puppy for life."

"The moral is that if it's your tail that's being clipped, you want it clipped once," concludes Blackwell. "But if you get a chance to clip your opponent's tail, clip that puppy as often as you can."

It may be hardball, but it isn't cheating, and it would be far less effective if it were. "These are powerful techniques," Blackwell tells the class at the end of his marathon lecture. "So I don't want anyone going out of here and acting unethically. It's not necessary."

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