The next time you have a campaign strategy meeting with your staff and consultants, or maybe you are a campaign manager or field director sending your troops out for a day of voter contact, conduct the following exercise:

Ask everyone in the room to raise their hands if they hate Republicans.

If anyone of those people you working with actually raises their hands, well then there is a good chance that what they are supposed to be producing for the day will end up in failure - especially if they are one of your senior staff.

In Sun Tzu's Art of War an important takeaway is the following quote:

No leader should put troops into the field to gratify his own spleen; no leader should fight a battle simply out of pique.

Anger and hatred tends to lead to poor decision making, wasted energy, a loss of your command of the mission and when trying to present a thoughtful argument, your best points tend to be overtaken by emotion.

In the months leading up to the six recent state senate recall elections in Wisconsin, I noticed that a number of political organizations who were engaging on the battlefield were not only presenting their argument from a position of Republican hatred, but were then communicating that hatred in such a way that it consumed many of the troops they were trying to motivate. Those organizations raised and spent millions of dollars. Democrats won two of those senate seats (the battle) but lost the opportunity to take control of that legislative body (the war).

I watched the coverage of election returns on MSNBC and heard a continued hatred toward Republicans presented by a few of the figureheads of those same organizations (even after the votes had already been counted) and in turn, when Ed Schultz went to get reactions from all the dedicated activists in the crowd, 90% of their comments seemed to focus on hating Republicans.

You need only look to the recent rise and quick fall of the Tea Party. Yes, I said "fall." More and more voters are turned off by the Tea Party and what they represent.   As a result, because of their close ties to congressional Republicans, the GOP has never seen higher disapproval ratings in their history.

Certainly Democrats must present our ideas, but just as equally we must use the power of the GOP candidates own words and policies in order to win back control of Congress and many state legislature (as well as maintain the Presidency to some extent). It's called political jiu jitsu. Basically, hit them with the truth of what they believe. Nothing could make this argument more clearly than today's "truthiness" from Mitt Romney about corporations being people, my friend.

So as Democratic candidates, staff, stakeholder organizations and consultants take aim at 2012, the lesson is this: Stay focused on what matters to people, not what angers them.

If we do that, Democrats win because at the end of the day, we represent the interests of the masses and the truth will build a longer lasting movement than any flash-in-the-pan hot point.