The high price of disunity.

It might sound strange to hear from a man who made his name in politics as the fearsome House Republican whip, but if you want to know the truth, counting yeas and nays in the days and hours before a floor vote is possibly the least important activity that goes into passing legislation.

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I saw my job as whip the way Vince Lombardi viewed coaching. Members of his famed Green Bay Packers teams used to joke that their brilliant, obsessively prepared coach was invaluable to the team's success between Monday and Saturday--but come Sunday, he was the most useless man in the stadium. Someone else called the offensive and defensive plays, and everybody knew their job and did it to perfection. Lombardi prepared his team so well during the week that they didn't need him come game time.

I like to think that when members arrived in the chamber for a big vote, I wasn't quite useless on the floor, but there's no doubt that 99 percent of my work should have been done long before the buzzers started ringing through the Capitol. My principal job as whip wasn't counting votes on Thursday afternoon but securing them weeks, and perhaps even months, earlier.

And that's where I'd tackle some things differently if I had it to do over. I'd have worked harder and smarter to unify the disparate parts of our political coalition, both on and off the Hill, to inform, unify and activate individuals and organizations around the conservative policies we represented.

Not that I didn't try to do just that. Over my time in leadership, I honed a new approach to my job--what we called "growing the vote," an effort to work with the divergent factions of the Republican coalition, including the moderates, each type of conservative, the vulnerable members who needed political cover and even the ornery ones who didn't want to play in our game. We won some amazing legislative victories with this model, but when it came down to the political fights off the floor, including defending our conservative legislative record, "growing the vote" simply could not translate to "growing the movement."

Under my watch as whip and then House majority leader, we got some big things accomplished. But beneath the surface the conservative movement was fractured and the Reagan coalition was increasingly subject to infighting. One of the biggest challenges to a successful political coalition is how quickly allies of necessity turn into competitors of choice. The Reagan coalition, as has been noted in many places, consisted primarily of three kinds of conservatives: social conservatives, economic conservatives and national security conservatives. As long as all three were being summarily ignored--and, indeed, attacked--by the ruling Democrats on Capitol Hill, all three groups banded together against the common enemy.

Very soon after our takeover of Congress, however, the three groups began to see each other not as kindred spirits, but as competitors for the new congressional leadership's attention. National security conservatives thought tax cuts and regulatory reform were all well and good, so long as they came along after the Pentagon was taken care of. Social conservatives almost always lean to the right on economic and defense policy, but what they really wanted to know was what we were going to do about gun control, abortion and homosexual marriage. Likewise, economic conservatives--even more than the other two--generally see social and security issues as subordinate to fiscal and regulatory policy.

What our congressional and political leadership teams failed to do was to make our component parts understand that their particular success on the floor depended entirely on the overall success of the entire coalition. Economic, social and defense conservatives need each other, and we should have done a better job organizing them all with that understanding.

In 2005, I recall heading to New York to meet with the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board. Many of the board members had at some point been active in the conservative movement, and I thought this was an ideal opportunity to personally share with them the most conservative and ambitious agenda I had worked on in my 20-year career in the House. Despite all the talk of fighting the war and cutting taxes, and using the reconciliation process to cut mandatory spending, the board members were hung up on the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

I was positive that, given the time, I could woo them over--after all, it would save us money in the long run while implementing conservative practices like means testing and health savings accounts. We applied the same principles to welfare reform and conservatives rallied behind us. Why was this not working?

After about an hour of civil discourse, I walked out of there knowing that I hadn't changed a single opinion among their ranks. And at that point it also occurred to me that we didn't have an outside group that could follow up with an ad, or a group of activists who would be willing to write letters to the editor, or anyone other than some of our members and a handful of my constituents back in my district who even knew enough about the conservative elements in the program to get involved in defending it. We were successful in passing landmark legislation, but we failed to unite our conservative coalition on this issue, and we had no hope of finding the political cover for our members who stood up to support it.

Whether out of instinct or, just as likely, because they've been playing that game a long time, liberals of every sort get this. Indeed, the individual agendas of, say, environmentalists, labor unions, trial lawyers, African-Americans and Latino immigrants are in many ways diametrically opposed to one another. The immigrant populations suppress the wages of union workers and threaten the jobs of underprivileged minority communities, while trial lawyers increase the cost of doing business in America, thus reducing the number of employees companies can hire and eating into the union's potential membership.

And yet, despite all these underlying contradictions, the seemingly Balkanized Democrat Party coheres seamlessly on major policy issues and especially in time for campaigns. For whatever reason, liberals of every stripe understand that liberals of other stripes are still liberals, and they must remain allies no matter how much they disagree.

Republicans can be very good at grassroots politics, but we're not naturally effective at fusing our three separate components into a single political force. And, in truth, we didn't try as hard as we could have and should have. If we had, I'm convinced we would still be in the majority today. And if we do finally pull off this trick, we will be in the majority again soon.

Tom DeLay is the former House majority leader and the founder of Coalition for a Conservative Majority (www.ccmajority.org), an organization dedicated to promoting conservative policies by unifying social, economic and national security conservatives.