Conservatives, we have a lot of work to do if we want to get our message out to the masses.

Example: A liberal friend who generally won't discuss politics but who enjoys laying a rhetorical ambush for me every once in awhile overheard me mentioning that conservatives care about the environment just as much as liberals, but that our proposed solutions are different.

She surprised me by jumping in and stating with great authority that conservatives don't care a thing about the environment, to which I eruditely replied, "Do too," to which she came back with equal rhetorical aplomb, "Do not." It was one of those highly intellectual discussions we have around the office.

Last week I watched talking-head discussions on CNN, and again was struck with how little challenge there is when liberals paint us the way they would like to think we are. Cynthia Tucker, the extreme liberal who runs the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's editorial page, was on the panel.

The discussion centered on the Clinton thing, of course, and the one conservative on the panel of four (it amazes me how often that's the situation) pointed out the degree to which Clinton has set back the cause of equality for women and their right to be free of harassment and preferential treatment in the work place. Tucker and the rest of the liberals on the panel stated matter-of-factly that conservatives have never cared about such things in the past, therefore they have no right to bring up such points in this case.

Patently untrue. I can think of dozens of examples in which conservatives have championed the causes of women. The current conservative Republican Congress just recently passed a bill, signed into law by none other than W.J. Clinton himself, that makes it easier for women to bring up the defendant's past sexual behavior as corroborating evidence in a federal sexual harassment lawsuit.

And if it had been only feminist groups and Democrats clamoring for his resignation, Bob Packwood would still be pinching fannies in his Senate office. Pressure from his own party is what caused him to resign.

But because we don't pass the litmus test of voting for the extreme and pointless programs and regulations that many national liberal leaders espouse as solutions to such problems, they apply the anti-feminist labels. And, thanks to willing collaboration from the national media, the labels stick.

Rep. John Lewis, Democratic congressman from south Fulton, regularly uses demagogic labeling to paint conservatives as nothing short of Nazi war criminals. "They're coming for your children, they're coming for the old people, they're coming for the poor!" Lewis rants, and he gets good press coverage.

One of the things Ronald Reagan accomplished during his ascendancy was to temporarily erase such labels. Reagan managed to put together a conservative coalition of both Republicans and Democrats, and suddenly "conservative" became a positive label once again.

Then someone decided to apply the label "angry white male" to that wonderful ground swell of popular recognition of the need for restraint in government, and in a few short years we were back where we had started... trying to explain that we don't want to starve poor children we just don't believe the liberal welfare disease that has attached itself like a cancer to this nation is helping those children. We think it's hurting.

The "angry white male" label soon became an effective weapon. Try to offer a fresh, innovative idea to replace the stale, failed machinery of the federal juggernaut, and someone will fling the epithet at you, and your point is lost in the resulting attempts to peel off the label.

I know some of you are going to castigate me for being concerned about this. You hear John Lewis raving about mean-spirited Republicans and you don't pay any attention because you know it's not true. And you content yourself with the belief that the vast majority of Americans are conservative.

But let me remind you that the vast majority of Americans think our current president is doing a good job, and most of them would be shocked out of their shoes if they had even a smattering of the facts.

Truth be told, most Americans don't fit under the labels. They listen as the politicians argue, and they try to make the best decisions they can based on the best information they can get.

They want our prospective leaders to tell them a vision of the future that they can grasp and hold onto, and they couldn't care less whether the person articulating that vision wears a label that says "conservative" or one that says "liberal."