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Nation Topics - The Left
News and Features
The elections of 2000--resulting in the election of George W. Bush to the presidency, a historic 50-50 split in the Senate and a reduced Republican margin in the House--have supplied the basis for countless commentators to intone that Democrats must operate "from the center" or else face political annihilation. Progressives have heard this tune often enough over the past decade, invariably following every election. It seems that regardless of whether Democratic fortunes are up or down in any given year, the lesson drawn by inside-the-Beltway pundits is always the same: Operate from the center. It's easy to dismiss this stale conventional wisdom, but in the aftermath of this unusual election many progressives are legitimately wondering about the prospects of a progressive politics.
The American people do want us to govern from the center, in a sense. But it is not the center the pundits and politicians in Washington talk about. Citizens want us to deal with issues that are at the center of their lives. They yearn for a politics that speaks to and includes them--affordable childcare, a good education for their children, health and retirement security, good jobs that will support their families, respect for the environment and human rights, clean elections and clean campaigns.
One thing this election confirmed is that progressive politics can be winning politics. The public is clearly center-left on the most important issues: campaign finance reform, education, healthcare, living-wage jobs, trade and the environment. And there can be no doubt that Al Gore's championing of ordinary people over powerful interests gave a postconvention boost to his sagging candidacy. Progressive populism responds to the widespread awareness that large forces in our economy have too much power and ordinary people have too little.
Another critical lesson of this election is that progressive constituencies cannot be ignored. Union households, African-Americans and Hispanics were crucial to Democratic mobilization and turnout. It has become increasingly implausible to argue that Democrats must distance themselves from working people and the disadvantaged in order to win elections.
Yet the politics of our country, strangely, is center-right. The cruel irony is that George W. Bush won the presidency, in good part, by campaigning on Democratic issues--investing in children, education, prescription drug costs, healthcare and Social Security. His "compassionate conservatism" praises local volunteer efforts by ordinary citizens yet rejects the notion that government can make a positive difference when it comes to the most pressing issues of people's lives. This is a fine philosophy if you're a large corporation or wealthy, but not such a great deal if you're a working family.
Moreover, President Bush's agenda is bold and clear: $1.6 trillion in tax cuts flowing mainly to the wealthy, which will erode our country's revenue base and thus bar major investments in childcare, education and healthcare; a direct assault on environmental and workplace health and safety standards; massive new Pentagon spending on unworkable missile defense; the privatization of Social Security and Medicare; and an open challenge to Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose. There is more to the Bush agenda, of course, but this much ought to be enough to galvanize progressive forces around the country.
The problem is that all too often progressives have been better at denunciation than annunciation. We need both. People are as interested in what you're for as what you're against. With a unified GOP preparing to take the reins of a new administration, now is the time for progressives to put forward new ideas and new leaders. We need to take stock, compare notes, support one another and begin building today a winning progressive politics for tomorrow. Progressive politics is a winning politics so long as the central focus is on workaday majority issues.
Progressive politics is successful when it is not top-down and elitist and when it respects the capacity of ordinary citizens. That is why the impetus for change must come from outside Washington. There are three crucial ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy, grassroots organizing and electoral politics. Policy provides direction and an agenda for action; grassroots organizing builds a constituency to fight for change; and electoral politics is the main way, in the absence of sweeping social movements, that we contest for power and hold decision-makers accountable for progressive public policy. These ingredients are linked like the three legs of a stool.
As important as new ideas are, another think tank or policy institute not connected to local grassroots organizing will not suffice. Many of the discussions I have had so far in the progressive community have focused on creating a new organization as a counterweight to the Democratic Leadership Council. I am sympathetic to these efforts. Without them, the DLC moves us toward a Democratic Party that gives the country what the eminent political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls "the politics of excluded alternatives"--what Jim Hightower calls "downsized politics." I am all for representing the democratic wing of the Democratic Party. But progressive politics must draw its energy and ideas from local citizen-activists. Too often we have failed to make that critical connection.
On February 28, the Campaign for America's Future will hold a conference of citizens' organizations and activists in Washington to draw a blueprint for a campaign to fight for economic and social progress. I am excited about participating in this gathering, which will be an important first step. There must also be regional gatherings held around the country to involve people in a meaningful way in an inclusive effort to create a progressive politics. As a Midwesterner, I am particularly sensitive to an exclusive focus on East and West Coast gatherings.
We must recognize that there is a wealth of effective labor, community and citizen organizing going on all across the country. The Service Employees International Union is showing the way by organizing a grassroots campaign for universal healthcare. The grassroots campaign for clean money/clean elections is our brightest hope for political reform. The nationwide grassroots campaign for a living wage has supplied new energy to the struggle against inequality. And the Seattle Coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, human rights advocates, family farmers and people of faith is providing a democratic counterweight to corporate-led globalization.
Even so, I often ask myself, "Why doesn't the whole equal the sum of its parts? How does this organizing translate into more national clout for a progressive politics?" If we are to make this grassroots politics part of an effective national politics, grassroots leaders must be included. We must reach out to these leaders, including those disenchanted with party politics. A lot of these leaders' energy is focused on progressive issues, not party politics. Likewise, most citizens are not interested in party strategies; their politics is much more concrete and personal. If we don't speak to the concrete and personal issues that affect people's lives, we will miss out on some of the best opportunities for organizing people.
We need to build a progressive force that does a lot of organizing within the Democratic Party--especially candidate recruitment and elections. But this cannot be the only goal. This new force must not only introduce new and exciting perspectives into the political dialogue of our country; it must also recruit candidates; provide training, skills and resources for successful campaigns; build an infrastructure of field directors and campaign managers to support progressive candidates; have a savvy media presence; apply effective grassroots organizing to electoral politics; and otherwise build political leadership at the local, state and federal levels of government.
This is more a democratic than a Democratic challenge, though I hope there is a strong connection between the two. It is a challenge that is certainly bigger than any one leader or campaign, and it will require progressives to work together and to pull in the same direction. But building such a grassroots-based effort to advocate effectively for the progressive agenda, and to put more progressives in office at every level and across the country, is a goal worth fighting for.
Mandate or no, George W. Bush is forging ahead with Cabinet appointments, policy forums and talk of a "first 100 days." Bush and his team have assembled a Cabinet faster than any administration since Richard Nixon's, and before Bush takes the oath of office on January 20 they'll have laid the groundwork for passage of an agenda that closely resembles the worst-case scenario painted by Bush critics during the 2000 campaign.
Bush's appointments to the EPA, Interior and Energy look ready to lead a furious offensive against environmental regulation and common sense. His appointments to Labor and Justice promise an assault on choice, civil rights and worker rights. His heralded national security team looks resolutely backward to a cold war that isn't, and seems oblivious to the world as it is. No wonder the Reagan cinematic fantasy--Star Wars, missile defense--is paraded as an early priority.
Post-mortems and recriminations must now give way to action, beginning with a flood of e-mails, telegrams and letters of protest to the Capitol Hill offices not just of Republicans but of wavering Democrats who have the power to brake the Bush bandwagon. This is no time for bipartisan blather. "Those who are with the civil rights agenda must not choose collegiality over civil rights and social justice," says the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Democratic members of Congress need to know that they cannot expect the core of their party--women, minorities, workers--to turn out on Election Day only to have their interests abandoned the day after, and that those who surrender in this fight will not be forgotten and not be forgiven. We must make it clear that we are not prepared to refight the battles of the last decades on basic human rights. We are not prepared to surrender to another era of race-bait politics, or to send poor women back to the alleys for abortions, or to lay waste our environment in the interest of big oil.
The frontline troops of this movement are already mobilizing. Civil rights groups and others will take to the streets of Washington starting on January 15, Martin Luther King Day, and continuing through the Inauguration; they will raise necessary questions about the legitimacy of Bush's election and press for voting reforms that guarantee more representative results in the future. The AFL-CIO has pledged to oppose archconservative John Ashcroft's nomination for Attorney General, as have People for the American Way and the Black Leadership Forum (see comments on Ashcroft on pages 4 and 5). Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League have joined that challenge while also promising to oppose Health and Human Services Department nominee Tommy Thompson, who presided over a severe curtailment of access to reproductive rights as governor of Wisconsin.
But the real work must go on at the grassroots--starting now and continuing up to and including the 2002 elections. (For more information on protests and ways to get involved, go to Counter-Inaugural Calendar at www.thenation.com). It is only by exerting constant upward pressure that we can explode the myth of bipartisanship and prevent the Bush presidency from rolling over the will of the great majority of Americans.
Congress cannot salute Dr. King's dream and then go on to pass the dream-busting Bush agenda. Beginning with the Bush nominations, every lawmaker on Capitol Hill must be challenged to stand up, as Dr. King did, for justice.
A cold snowy start to the new year, the first day of the new millennium. Not the fun one with champagne at the Pyramids and the all-night, round-the-globe pseudoprofundities and the secret letdown when our computers didn't turn into pumpkins at midnight. I mean the real millennium, with the bad news bears basking on their ice floes as the stock market sinks and thousands tremble as The Anxious Consumer ponders whether to spring for the new Chevrolet Astro or live with the old Dodge Caravan a bit longer. On the radio a mom explained that her kids just wanted gift certificates for Christmas so they could take advantage of the post-holiday sales. How old are these kids? 50? This morning, same station, a man from the Cato Institute instructs us to count our blessings: We are all a lot better off than a hundred years ago; after all, Americans are two inches taller now.
On New Year's Day, a stern young black man missing his front teeth preaches on the subway: "Mr. Black Man! Mr. White Man! What is the meaning of Eternity? Repent! Repent!" He stalks the aisle, dressed all in black and carrying a blood-red Bible, like a mad priest in an opera, while passengers stare stonily into the headlines: I'm Sacking Satan, declares ex-Jet Marc Gastineau in the New York Post, once again evading jail for beating his wife, who like him has gone into Christian therapy ("'I contributed to a lot of the violence,' said the slight, 5-foot-5 woman"). In the passageway between stations, a tiny man of unguessable age wearing a filthy Ralph Lauren American Flag sweater plays a violin as if it were an unfamiliar object he had found in the trash; a young black man sings Beatles songs expertly and with unflagging good cheer. The Christmas-caroling street minister with the fantastic baritone voice is gone, but the Chinese musician is still seated on the L train platform, bending in total concentration over his pipa, an elegant longnecked stringed instrument that emits at the touch of his bow a thin wail, like a dying cat.
My father turns 81 in his hospital bed. After three brain surgeries, who knows what he understands? Flowers arrive that he does not look at; cards are read that he does not listen to. Friends arrive with "get well" offerings--a sleep mask, earplugs, pictures of their children--and leave quickly, stricken. Newly arrived from England, a Kazakh friend complains, "They won't move him to the other bed, although I keep asking!" It seems that bed is the lucky one, the one where the patients get better. A staggering amount of medical help and equipment swirls around my father; it is as though experts have been summoned from all over the world--a doctor from Korea, nurses from the Philippines and Ireland, aides from Jamaica and Guyana and India and Central America--all for the express purpose of tending a few limp, pale Americans. And yet the simplest realities--that my father has eaten essentially nothing for almost two weeks--seem to evoke no sense of urgency, to fall into the spaces between specialists and between changing shifts.
In Man's Fate, the Russian Communist Katov prepares himself to be thrown alive into a furnace after the Shanghai rebellion he helped organize is betrayed by Stalin. He says to himself, "Let's suppose I died in a fire." What style, I thought as a teenager, what cool. Today I think: Well, it would be scary and painful, but at least it would be quick. And by dying in 1927, Katov got to keep his political dignity: He didn't have to persuade himself that voting for a protest candidate was a radical act or inveigh against "global capitalism," or "corporate capitalism," as if there were some other kind--national capitalism? mom-and-pop capitalism?--that could be brought out of the closet of history, and donned like a comfy old suit.
I had planned a very different column--upbeat and energetic, with exhortations to do more and a list of clever resolutions. I e-mailed my whole address book asking for suggestions for feminist activism. I don't know what I was hoping for--seize the TV stations? Dangle John Ashcroft off a skyscraper till he promises to spend the rest of his life cleaning abortion clinic toilets? Raise a lesbian militia to fight the Taliban? What came in was nothing like that. Write letters, the activists said, make phone calls, raise money, bother your politicians, volunteer. Challenge the sexism of daily life, the writers wrote: racist and sexist remarks, panels with no women, all-male magazine forums and debates. Link issue A with issue B, the academics urged.
Fine, but according to Newsweek, there are now 1 million slaves in America, mostly women and girls--cleaning houses, making clothes, servicing men sexually to pay off traffickers and pimps. Ask yourself what kind of man would fuck a slave, some Chinese or Albanian or Thai teenager in a plywood cubicle with a mattress on the floor. Do you think he cares if you write a letter to your congressman? Maybe he is your congressman.
The world spins only forward, says Prior Walter in Angels in America. But which way is that? Most members of my study group think intellectuals and activists have no special role to play in history. They only perch atop its shifting tectonic plates, ready to jump on the backs of the workers at the first sign of autonomous action. "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing," quotes the Last Marxist at least once per meeting, which goes on all day and ends with a wonderful meal. Last time, we invited the Race Traitors--Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey, Beth Henson--and accused them of daring to think they could spark a movement with a magazine and a book. Wow, said Noel, you guys are really depressed. Yes, I said, usually it takes us all day to feel this irrelevant, and it isn't even lunchtime yet.
I go home in the snow, I e-mail the President to save the Alaskan wilderness, proving yet again that I have no dignity and do not read my own columns. At bedtime we read aloud from Mona in the Promised Land, by my daughter's favorite contemporary American writer, Gish Jen.
"If there's a depression, will we have enough money?" Sophie asks as we turn out the light. "Don't worry about it," I say. "Everything will be fine. We can always sing in the subway."
Death came as a release for Daniel Singer on December 2, but we feel like protesting its rude intrusion. In one of the last things he wrote for us, a review of some books about Sartre, he quoted a friend's son, on the day of the French philosopher's funeral. Asked where he had been, he said he was coming "from the demo against the death of Sartre." We'd like to join a demo against the death of Daniel. Better, though, would be one celebrating the life of our valued colleague, The Nation's Europe correspondent for nearly twenty years.
He wrote about many a demo in his reports to us, incessantly probing for signs of vitality on the European left--or the rot of fascism on the far right. During the 1980s, as Reaganism and Thatcherism blanketed the Continent, he seemed, at times, one of the few remaining Marxists. A protégé of the great Marxist intellectual Isaac Deutscher, he held a steadfast faith in democratic socialism but not in any hard doctrinal way. Indeed, the book of his that prompted Victor Navasky to send associate editor Kai Bird to Paris in 1981 to talk to Daniel about writing regularly for us was The Road to Gdansk, a study of Solidarity, which he presciently celebrated as the first crack in the monolith of Soviet Communism and another exemplar of the power of working people to change the world, which was his abiding faith.
When the neocon intellectuals of France, here and elsewhere jumped aboard the funeral hearse of socialism, Daniel stood defiantly on the sidelines. He never modified his conviction that capitalism's injustices were as glaring after the wall fell as they were before. In his last book, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? he ended with a ringing affirmation: "We are not here to tinker with the world, we are here to change it!"
We'll miss Daniel--his wisdom, his courtly kindness, his brilliance, the stubborn courage that carried him through, from his Polish boyhood before World War II when, as a self-styled "deserter from death," he narrowly escaped the Holocaust, until the end. Before he died, he sent readers the following message:
"These are the last words I shall write to The Nation. With my normal absence of modesty I believe that over the years I acquired a radical readership. Radical need not mean sure of itself; nor does it rule out compromises and calculations. But a 'Luxemburgist socialist' (the definition I like best) could not resign himself to the idea that with the technological genius at our disposal we are unable to build a different world. Nor can we accept the fashion that capitalism will vanish without a vast social movement from below.
"That something can happen does not mean that it will happen. I, for one, shall not see this world. Yet, I am departing with the feeling that on the whole I have followed the right road and even with a degree of confidence. Among my young interns, Carl Bromley and his companions, among the youthful fighters from Seattle to Seoul, one can detect a refusal of resignation. You must join them as they now begin to show the way."
A half-century after the appearance of The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s spirited political polemic, we have more than sufficient cause to meditate on what might be called Dead Centrism.
Ralph really ran. Against the record of his own faux campaign of 1996, against the expectations even of friends who said he lacked the candidate gene and against the calculations of Democratic strategists who were forced to go from dismissing him to clumsily attacking the Green monster, Ralph Nader mounted a presidential campaign that in the closing days of the election defied the pundits' tendency to consign most third party candidacies to endgame obscurity.
As political players began counting down the hours to voting day, Nader was thrust into the national spotlight by media that had long disregarded his candidacy. The man who had been prevented even from attending three dismal debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush found himself portrayed by a New York Times editorial as the "wrecking-ball" of the postdebate campaign. There was Nader, just days before an election to which he was supposed to have been an asterisk, staring ABC newsman Sam Donaldson in the eye and asking, "Do you think Gore is entitled to any votes? Do you think Bush is entitled? Am I entitled to any votes? We have to earn them. If Gore cannot beat the bumbling Texas governor with that horrific record, what good is he?"
Conscious of the Nader threat in states that had been securely married to the Democrats as far back as 1988 but began swinging in 2000, mainstream environmental and abortion rights groups diverted late-campaign energy and resources to scaring Oregon, Washington, Minnesota and Wisconsin Nader supporters into stopping Bush by abandoning the Green for the Gore. But the a-vote-for-Nader-is-a-vote-for-Bush drive ended up buying Nader millions of dollars' worth of free media attention. And what voters saw was a Nader far removed from the stiff scold who launched his Green bid last winter. After watching Nader joust with news anchors desperately seeking to get him to abandon his critique of both parties and declare some hidden sympathy for the Democrat, conservative commentator George Will was heard asking when it was that Nader evolved into so able a candidate.
Nader's focused, fact-based, unapologetic appearances were no surprise to hundreds of thousands of students, renegade trade unionists, angry family farmers, environmentalists, organic-food activists, campaign finance reformers, dissident Democrats and leaderless Perotistas who packed Nader's "superrallies" from Oakland to Minneapolis to New York City. Those modern-day hootenannies raised some of the more than $5 million with which Nader's campaign hired staff in virtually every state, developed a network of 900 campus coordinators, bought a few television ads and papered every coffee shop bulletin board from San Francisco to Boston with Green literature. For their contributions, those who rallied were treated to inspired performances by Nader backers Patti Smith and Eddie Vedder, crowd-rousing appeals from Jim Hightower and Michael Moore, arguments for a split from the Democratic Party by such progressive icons as Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich, and Nader addresses that bore less and less resemblance to college lectures and more and more to the populist orations of William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette.
On a Friday night in Iowa City, just days before the election, Nader arrived to find the University of Iowa Memorial Union overflowing with more than 2,000 cheering supporters. "The two parties have morphed together into one corporate party with two heads wearing different makeup," the candidate declared. The line was dutifully picked up by the Iowa City papers, which, like most local media, lavished front-page coverage on the man drawing some the biggest political crowds of the year. Unfazed by criticism from the Rev. Jesse Jackson and comedian Al Franken, who had appeared in town that day at a hastily scheduled Democratic rally, Nader said, "These frightened progressives say I'm undermining my own legacy of reform. What they don't know is that the Democratic Party has already done it."
Nader was introduced by one of the most prominent Democrats in Iowa, former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson, who explained, "I have worked for the election of Democratic Presidents since Harry Truman in 1948. I have received three presidential appointments from two Democratic Presidents. I have run for Congress from Iowa as a Democrat. I have served the Democratic Party at every level from local precinct chair to a Democratic National Committee task force. So it's not easy for me, this endorsement of a Green Party candidate. But the corporate corruption that engulfs both major parties has now reached the stage when we cannot afford to wait any longer."
But where does such a leap take Nader backers? If their candidate polls 5 percent or more of the national vote, the Green Party will receive at least $7 million in federal campaign funds. As Election Day approached, however, even some in the Nader camp worried that 5 percent earned at the price of a Gore loss might lead to a damning of the Greens that would make party-building difficult, if not impossible. In the final weeks of the campaign, Nader's closest advisers debated whether to tailor their schedule to states where the race was not close--such as New York, where Gore is a prohibitive favorite--or to return to swing states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, where a strong Nader could undermine Gore. Pleas from swing-state Nader backers tipped the decision in favor of the go-for-broke strategy--even as vote-trading schemes like www.nadertrader.org promised Nader fans who agreed to trade Gore votes in states like Oregon and Washington for Nader votes in New York and Texas that they could get the best of both worlds: President Gore and 5 percent for the Greens.
But a good many Nader voters were disinclined to become election day-traders. Their enthusiasm had less to do with party-building than with raising a banner of protest and, perhaps, of faith in a vision of democratic participation. In the crucial swing state of Wisconsin, the village of Belleville took a pre-election break for its UFO Parade, an annual commemoration of a supposed Halloween visit by aliens some years back. Bush and Gore backers were no-shows. But there, between the Brownies and the Belleville Dairy Queen, were forty Nader supporters, almost all of them from nearby farm towns. They carried a banner reading ralph nader is out of this world and handed out packets of seeds with a reminder to "plant a seed for democracy on November 7."
Grandmothers grabbed the seeds, children cheered "Nader!" And Dr. Cynthia Haq, the local physician, clapped as they passed. Torn between Gore and Nader, she said, "I know we're supposed to be worried about Bush, and I am worried. But it makes me feel good to see the Nader people. There's something that feels right about voting for what you believe, as opposed to voting against what you fear. I think that's why a lot of people are sticking with Nader--no matter what."
Bernie Sanders is right. Ralph Nader is "one of the heroes of contemporary American society." How sad, therefore, that he is helping to undo so much of his life's work in a misguided fit of political pique and ideological purity. The Nation's election editorial is wrong in its recommendation of "strategic voting" in this election. Ralph Nader's campaign does not deserve a single progressive vote on November 7. Not one.
To listen to the Naderites--many of whom I admire--you might believe they were constructing a diverse, representative progressive movement with the possibility of one day replacing the Democrats. How odd it is to note, therefore, that this nascent leftist movement has virtually no support among African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans. It has no support among organized feminist groups, organized gay rights groups or mainstream environmental groups. To top it all off, it has no support in the national union movement. So Nader and company are building a nonblack, non-Latino, non-Asian, nonfeminist, nonenvironmentalist, nongay, non-working people's left: Now that really would be quite an achievement.
Although Nader has said that he would not consciously work to elect Bush over Gore, "he is not keeping his pledges," according to his onetime comrades in Nader's Raiders for Gore. Nader has been campaigning aggressively in Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. If Gore loses even a few of those states, then Hello, President Bush. And if Bush does win, then Goodbye to so much of what Nader and his followers profess to cherish. Goodbye, for instance, to affirmative action, abortion rights, gun control, campaign finance reform, minimum-wage raises, environmental protection, consumer protection, class-action lawsuits, worker-safety legislation and just about everything else the government can do to help the neediest and most vulnerable among us.
These are not the scare tactics of the "frightened liberals" that Nader and his fellow political puritans hold in such profound contempt. This is the truth. Nader supporters argue that his candidacy is likely to help elect a Democratic Congress. Oh really? In the first place, careful studies have never been able to identify the so-called silent progressive majority--the Nader voters who otherwise wouldn't make it to the polls but who once there would vote for lower-level Democrats--upon which this strategy rests. And wait a minute: I thought the Democrats weren't worth saving, anyway. The far more likely outcome of Nader's Pied Piper run is the election of a dimwitted right-wing President with Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey inaugurating an era of conservative reaction the likes of which Newt Gingrich could scarcely have imagined.
And for what? A party that polls single digits in national elections? Who needs it? While it has been salutary to see Nader speak some occasional truth to power on television, given the winner-take-all structure of national and local elections the US political system has no role for third parties other than that of a spoiler. Excluding the lunatic Reform Party, only one third party in the twentieth century, the Socialists, ran in more than two consecutive presidential campaigns. The Socialists are also alone in having won more votes in a second election than in their first. Yet as the democratic socialist founder of In These Times, James Weinstein, points out, "Even at the height of their influence they had no potential of becoming a major presence in Congress, much less of electing a president."
Nader's candidacy, moreover, manifests some of the least attractive aspects of the sectarian left. It demonstrates the old faux-revolutionary tendency to focus fire on one's natural allies on the center-left rather than one's genuine enemies on the right. Some Naderites have also displayed a streak of leftist McCarthyism in their attacks on those progressives who question their strategy of abandoning the Democratic Party to the corporations. And Nader has demonstrated extreme carelessness with his words in this campaign, calling the choice between Gore and Bush a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Given the obvious differences between the two parties (see "Bush or Gore: Does It Matter?" October 16), this posturing comes at considerable cost to the man's once unquestionable reputation for intellectual honesty and political integrity.
You don't have to like or admire Al Gore to vote for him. I sure don't. But elections are not therapy. Nor, as philosopher John Dewey reminds us, are they useful occasions for movement-building. If you have to start building your movement by the time Election Day comes around, it's already too late. Given the weakness of the left in America today, our elections are by definition a choice of the lesser evil. The mistake Naderites make is in their refusal to distinguish between those evils.
There is the Clinton/Gore evil where, yes, corporate power runs rampant and inequality is increasing, but minorities, gays, women and low-wage workers have made more economic (and in some cases, social) progress than at any time in nearly four decades. Then there is the Bush/Lott/DeLay evil where these same people will be pushed back to their traditional places, as the Republican Party revives its war against Social Security, progressive taxation, public education and the few remaining sources of democratic solidarity in America.
Had Nader taken a page from the Christian Coalition and challenged Gore and the party leadership in the primary process, he might have forced its center of gravity leftward in response to the organized populist anger we saw on display in Seattle last year. Indeed, I would have been happy to vote for him. A steady, patient challenge to the party's corporate domination at the grassroots and presidential level is just what both the party and its progressives need to build the kind of machine that can win tangible victories down the road. Instead, Nader has chosen to ape Pat Buchanan, leading his followers on a costly and quixotic march to nowhere. Too bad the poor and the powerless will be--as usual--the ones to pay.
In Chicago, in mid-October, I did a radio show with the Bill Buckley-ish Milt Rosenberg of WGN, a big station. Rosenberg said that because of the fairness doctrine our discussion of Al Gore: A User's Manual, written by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself, could not be broadcast until after the election. So we spent an hour bathing ourselves alternately in the dawn light of the impending Bush and Gore administrations.
It's Bush in the White House! And yes, he's there in part because of the Nader vote. The big liberal public-interest organizations, green groups, NOW, begin to roll out their mass mailings, delightedly fundraising against a backdrop of predicted catastrophe: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge pincushioned with test drillings, polar bear cubs licking at the gobs of crude oil on their fur. With any luck Bush will nominate some James Watt look-alike for the Interior Department. Watt got nothing done, but he sure scared up a lot of money for green groups.
Ralph Nader holds an unapologetic postelection superrally. It's packed to the rooftop with exultant young people, who will carry the memory of the Nader/Green drive of 2000 as their transformative political moment. He reminds the Democrats of why they lost. They offered no appealing reasons for enough progressives to vote for them. He points out that throughout American history there have been moments of renewal, of creative destruction and then refreshment of the political process. Nader sketches out the line of march for the next four years.
It's Gore by a nose! Enough progressives who had been tilting toward Nader and the Greens were scared back into the fold those last weeks. Four more years of you-know-what.
"A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." How quickly the Gore liberals adopted a totalitarian mindset, sounding like Soviet commissars back in the old days, who would urge the voters toward a 98 percent turnout for the Communist candidate, arguing that any deviation from absolute loyalty would "objectively" play into the hands of the imperialists.
A vote for Nader was first and foremost a vote for Nader. And since the programs of the Democratic and Republican candidates are pretty much the same on issues ranging from corporate welfare to Wall Street to the war on drugs to crime to military spending and the war in Colombia, a vote for Gore was actually a vote for Bush, and a vote for Bush a vote for Gore. You're getting them both.
Those waning days of the campaign there was a desperation to the alarums of the Gore people about Nader. For one thing, they knew that the Nader superrallies in New York, across the upper Midwest and in the Northwest had a hugely energizing effect on young people. Nothing like it since Jesse Jackson's populist bid for the nomination back in 1988. Back at that time Jackson folded in behind the Democratic ticket and rolled up his Rainbow, leaving hundreds of thousands of supporters with nowhere to go and nothing to do. It was one of the most despicable acts of self-interested betrayal of people's hopes in living memory. If Jackson had led the Rainbow out of the Democratic Party back then, it would have been a far better base for a third party than what the Greens have to offer.
The enthusiasms of these young activists weren't about to be quelled by lectures from Gloria Steinem or Barney Frank or Jesse Jackson Jr. about the need to take the mature view and root for Gore/Lieberman. For one thing, they watched the debates. Did they take from those labored encounters any nourishment from Gore on issues that they have an appetite for, like trade or sweatshop labor or the drug war or the growing divide between rich and poor?
Gore liberals such as Steinem, Patricia Ireland of NOW and Carl Pope of the Sierra Club have been trading in false currency for so long that they don't realize that as shills for the Democratic Party their credit was used up long, long ago.
Listen to Ellen Johnson, an organizer for the Arizona Greens, who teaches at Arizona State in Tempe. "Since the onset of the Clinton presidency NOW's once-stalwart support of many women's rights issues has eroded. While reproductive rights are important, so is quality childcare, a living wage, healthcare and eradication of environmental toxins. Although Clinton/Gore promised to address these issues in '92 and '96, no acceptable plans for improvement have been implemented. Why is NOW so willing to give Gore another chance? Oh yeah, I forgot, for abortion rights. What is Roe v. Wade worth to you, NOW? If it's the wholesale sellout of a constituency you once pledged to serve, then you are on the right track."
What the fall campaign did most of all was to show up the bankruptcy of people like Ireland and Pope--the people who soft-shoed for Clinton and Gore for eight years. The sort of people, come right down to it, who are now trying to fire Pacifica's Amy Goodman. Yes, Mary Frances Berry, consultant to the Pacifica board, was a prominent presence at an October 24 gig organized by People for the American Way, presided over by Bill Clinton, and designed to scare progressives back to Gore.
Of course they want to fire Amy Goodman! She puts on the best show on public radio, doesn't she? The liberals who run Pacifica would much rather have manageable mediocrity than Democracy Now! There's nothing so irksome as success not achieved on their terms, under their rules and their rubrics. Amy has edge. She doesn't take "guidance." She's a loose cannon. She brought Ralph Nader onto the floor of the Republican convention in Philadelphia. She's not Tweety Bird or Terry Gross. So she has to go!
How is the Pacifica directorate trying to dump the most popular voice on the network? Easy. Choke the woman with bureaucracy. Demand that she file broadcasting flight plans a week ahead. Insist that she get prior approval for all her speaking gigs. Put it about that Pacifica needs "new voices," a bigger share of the yuppo audience. Murmur not so softly that Amy is old hat, is not really and truly part of the big Pacifica Picture.
It's a control thing. There's nothing on this earth liberals hate more than radicals straying outside the reservation. Let's stray. Onward!
We dare to be optimistic. Presidential elections are mile markers on a very long road. Our side does not expect to win according to conventional measures; it could hardly be otherwise, since our political objective is the radical reconstruction of US society. This election may shift governing power to new hands, though within a narrowing band of the possible. The returns may reveal something about the nation, though that information is unreliable when half the electorate has opted out of voting. Meanwhile, we seek to rehabilitate America's collapsing democracy, to mobilize systematic confrontation with the harsh economic inequalities, to construct a movement that is both powerful and attentive to human concerns and suffering, the suppression of liberties, the destruction of nature. These matters and others are not going to be resolved by one election or several of them. Yet Election 2000, despite its sorry qualities, turns out to be important--perhaps even pivotal for us.
We hold out the proposition that something promising and positive is under way in the dispirited political landscape, and we should determine to make the most of it. After the past two decades of loss and retreat, it takes nerve to sound so hopeful. Ralph Nader, much as many of us might wish for it, is not going to become the next President. If Al Gore does, the radical vision still remains far distant from the levers of power. On the morning after, if George W. Bush has won, we will be gearing up for familiar battles against the right-wing agenda. And yet people on many progressive fronts do recognize the changing circumstances before them, and they are in a still-fragile process of inventing smart new politics to engage the possibilities. Our endorsement goes first to this spirit of renewal.
The promise can be glimpsed in the precious few bright spots of the campaign--especially the resonance of Nader's voice--but also in the political system's continuing failures. A new movement of allied concerns surfaced in the protests in Seattle a year ago, and yet neither major-party candidate dared even mention globalization when the two men met in face-to-face debate. Their awkward silence suggests our growing presence. If Nader draws enough voters to carry the Green Party over the 5 percent hurdle for ballot recognition, that vehicle provides concrete opportunity. If Democrats manage to win back majority control of the House, or even the Senate, their victory multiplies opportunities for educating and agitating on new issues. A Bush victory would be a terrible setback to our optimism, no way around it, but if Gore manages to win the White House, despite his weaknesses, the center-right moves a little bit our way and, in any case, becomes the object of purposeful leveraging.
These new prospects did not originate from any clever slogans; they reflect the harsh contradictions visible in people's lives and shifting sensibilities across the nation--the general disgust with corporate money's overbearing influence on public decision-making, the fragile desire for a new and more humane internationalism, the growing but unfocused anger at government's failure to act on any of the largest problems. These and other discontents are the opportunities for our side, if people will assume optimistically that many fed-up Americans are at last ready to listen to heretical analysis and fundamental solutions. The fog is lifting, though not yet gone.
If we take the long view and our optimism is grounded in reality, this opening requires some changes in us as well, both in temperament and strategy. The test of a first-rate intelligence, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time. For this election and in the politics beyond, we think our readers must learn to juggle similar tensions, between the pragmatic and the idealistic--accepting that long-term allies will disagree and coalesce at different junctures, that politics can be both inside and outside in pursuit of the same goals.
In that spirit, we embrace Nader's ideas and creative idealism and hope that his strong showing will rattle the windowpanes throughout American politics. However, to realize the openings before us, we warn that there is greater urgency to preventing Bush and company from capturing all three branches of government for the right-wing agenda. In the long view, such tensions are symptoms of forward progress. We can learn to live with them.
Ralph Nader has already accomplished a greater victory than even some of his original supporters imagined possible--he has made our side visible again. Even a two-minute TV burst from Nader provides a stunning catalogue of the neglected grievances in American life and corrupted governance as well as the plausible remedies. He does not talk down to voters. Nader's idealism, starting from his earliest consumer crusades more than thirty years ago, is based upon the conviction that Americans at large are eager for serious discussion of public ideas and fully capable of grasping the complexities. One shudders deliciously at what a three-way debate would have been like if the corporate-owned debates commission had allowed it (the commission is already one of the big losers of Election 2000, and the agitation should start now, not in 2004, to blow up its monopoly on political discourse).
Despite minimal media coverage, Nader connected the spirit of Seattle with a much larger audience of Americans--filling halls of 10,000 and more with people, many of them young, who paid to hear him talk. When did that last occur in US politics? Pat Buchanan's right-wing version of insurgency was effectively eclipsed by Nader; even Gore paid backhanded tribute by discovering that this election is about "the people against the powerful." The point is, Nader started something new and potentially sustainable, both as an alternative soapbox and as electoral leverage on regular politics, especially that of the Democrats (whose Congressional candidates may benefit from the new, young voters Nader draws into the process). The future will depend entirely on what people decide to make of it. In the meantime, Nader has articulated the superstructure of progressive thinking--a work in progress, to be sure, but already brimming with big ideas.
In the spirit of positive thinking, we observe first that Al Gore wisely abandoned his New Democrat playbook on many issues in order to connect with the natural constituencies of his own party. His attacks on big oil, big insurance and other malefactors sounded a bit clunky, to be sure, and, although he attacked Bush's tax cut for the wealthy, Gore evaded a fuller discussion of economic inequality since, as everyone knows, it deepened dramatically while he was Vice President. But the Democratic candidate is a smart and capable man who, at different points in his career, has displayed a forward-looking vision on great public problems, like the ecological crisis. Still, no one who has watched the abrupt changes in his campaign persona can have any confidence that the progressive Al Gore would emerge in the White House. The promise, though limited, lies in the fact that Gore has uttered the requisite words on a wide range of subjects, from universalizing healthcare to establishing labor and environmental rights in global trade agreements. As President, Gore would have to choose between the people who elected him and the DLC moneybags who financed him. It's another opening for popular mobilization.
The real argument for Gore is named Bush, and it's the most compelling case. The implications of a Bush victory are well understood across many vital issues (one of Nader's rare false notes was to assert that these are inconsequential differences). The Gore-Bush agendas are indeed overlapping on many central matters--monetary policy, the death penalty, the failed drug war, to name a few--but that doesn't tell the whole story. Gore promises, for instance, to listen to labor, environmentalists, human rights advocates and other protest voices on reforming the global system. Bush's leading foreign policy adviser, on the other hand, proclaims, "The Seattle agenda is a real threat." Bush embraces the continuing crusade against women's right to choose abortion, among other retrograde social positions, while no one doubts Gore would appoint Supreme Court Justices who would defend Roe v. Wade and other civil liberties.
While Bush appears an amiable lightweight, his blank, meek expression merely accentuates the question of who really owns this man. The answer is obvious from his Texas record and personal heritage. Tearing up Social Security delivers the money to Wall Street brokerages. His "compassionate conservatism" extends to shielding insurance companies and drug manufacturers from public wrath, plus old friends in oil and the military-industrial complex. His education experiments, if they proceed, are destined to gut the financing of public schools. It's a long and devastating list, which candidate Gore failed to illuminate fully. Bush's handlers, on the other hand, understood that the son could not run like the father or as a born-again Newt--that revolution is over. At the end of the day, however, the right-wing legacy rules. Bush's White House would obediently vet its legislative agenda and appointments not only with corporate America but with Trent Lott and Tom DeLay, the hard-right caucuses in the Senate and House, the TV Bible-thumpers whose piety is rooted in intolerance.
In another season, when our insurgent values have accumulated more momentum and self-confidence, we might see things differently. This time around, we believe the practical priority of keeping the Bush squad from winning power takes precedence, while we also urge that, if possible, progressives help Nader score a blow to the status quo. For the larger progressive community, the tension can be resolved by following the logic of Texas columnist Molly Ivins. Her rule: Vote with your heart where you can, and vote with your head where you must. In states where either Gore or Bush has a commanding lead, vote Nader. In the states too close to call, vote Gore. In either case, the imperative is to end Republican control in Congress by electing Democrats, also vital to the prospects for progressive change.
The question Election 2000 poses for the ranks of left-labor-liberal-progressive outsiders is: Despite occasional clashes over their different directions, can the radical-to-moderate critics of the decayed status quo learn how to pursue a politics in which radical idealism coexists with heads-up pragmatism? As Nader has said, "There are millions of progressives in this country--the problem is, they've never met each other." That captures the larger, long-term challenge, regardless of the election's outcome. If the fragmented progressive community can begin working together, developing inside-outside electoral strategies, doing the hard work of engaging alienated citizens in the conversation, things will look very much better four years from now. Despite its disappointments, Election 2000 might yet turn out to be the progressive moment--when we stopped backing up and started moving forward.
THE NOVEMBER 7 ELECTION is not merely about ending six years of GOP dominance but also about assuring that the next Congress is pulled in a more enlightened direction. Starting early this year, The Nation began tracking races around the country, keeping an eye on contests where progressive incumbents are battling to keep their seats and identifying the next generation of leaders on economic and social justice issues. The Nation adopted author and activist Michael Harrington's "left wing of the possible" standard--looking for candidates who combine a chance of winning with a commitment to use the victory to fight for real change. None of the contenders profiled in this year's "Nation Dozen" list--which represents only a fraction of the progressive candidates running as Democrats, Greens or independents--are assured victory; indeed, several had to overcome daunting odds just to earn a place on the November ballot. But they have put themselves in contention with strong support from groups like the AFL-CIO, NARAL, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, Peace Action PAC, the Human Rights Campaign Fund and the National Committee for an Effective Congress. A decade ago, Minnesota professor Paul Wellstone beat an entrenched Republican US senator and went on to serve as a mentor to other progressives, including several of this year's Nation Dozen. Says Wellstone: "Progressives have got to get serious about these Congressional races around the country. We need to recognize that it matters a great deal when we elect members who understand human rights and economic justice issues; that those members will have the power to raise issues, to shift the direction of the Democratic Party and to build coalitions that can actually prevail." With that thought in mind, here is the "Nation Dozen." With support from Nation readers and other progressives, they have the potential not only to win but to change the way Washington does business.
ED FLANAGAN, Vermont, US Senate
When Ed Flanagan won the Democratic nomination for the seat held by Republican Jim Jeffords, the incumbent warned that Flanagan's progressive populist style would not go over well in the tradition-bound Senate. "He makes a lot of noise, shakes things up, and that's the last thing we need down in Washington," said Jeffords, who is best known for singing in a barbershop quartet with Trent Lott. Jeffords is right about Flanagan; he would shake things up. A former intern to liberal Republican Senator George Aiken and a four-term state auditor, Flanagan condemns "the military-industrial complex that does not have America's defense interests in mind, but is simply out to make the big bucks," and he asks how the Senate can justify a failure to implement living-wage legislation "in the context of an economy that is so rich but has concentrated so much wealth with so few people and so few huge multinational corporations." The odds against Flanagan are long, in part because he is an openly gay man running in a state where conservatives are stirring a backlash against Vermont's just-implemented civil union law. But he is betting that the state that sends Bernie Sanders to the House is, indeed, prepared to shake up the Senate (www.flanagan2000.org).
NANCY KEENAN, Montana, House, At-Large
To understand where Nancy Keenan is coming from, you need to know the story of the Smelterman's Day Picnic that used to be held every August 8 in Anaconda, Montana. Keenan, the daughter of a boilermaker, would line up with the other kids at the picnic to receive a silver dollar from the copper-smelting company that gave the town its name. "As you stepped forward, the management representative would look you straight in the eye and press that shiny silver dollar firmly in your hand. The message couldn't have been clearer: You knew who owned you," Keenan recalled in a speech to the state AFL-CIO. "But the company was wrong. They might have owned our sweat, they might have owned our labor, but because we were members of a union family, they could not own our souls." Keenan, who is seeking to be a voice for hard-pressed factory and farm families in a state where annual incomes are among the lowest in the nation, got into politics to battle for corporate responsibility: After Atlantic Richfield shuttered the Anaconda smelter in 1980, she was elected to the legislature and helped pass a plant-closing notification law. Now, the three-term state superintendent of public instruction is running for Congress against a right-wing opponent on a platform that includes pledges to fight for labor-law reform, vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws against agribusiness monopolies and guarantees that farmers and workers "are not sacrificed at the altar of international trade relations." She says politics beats her old job--shoveling ore and wrangling buckets of boiling copper. "You wore an asbestos suit and counted on your workmate to beat out the flames when you occasionally caught on fire," recalls Keenan, who promises to fight to toughen workplace safety regulations (www.nancykeenan.com).
BRIAN SCHWEITZER, Montana, US Senate
Long before Al Gore and the Democratic National Committee read polls that told them prescription drug prices were a potent political issue, Brian Schweitzer, a peppermint farmer with no political experience, began loading senior citizens onto buses and driving them over the border to buy cheap drugs in Canada. The first-time candidate's political instincts proved so good, and so threatening to troglodyte conservative incumbent Conrad Burns, that a faked-up "citizens' group" funded by drug manufacturers began blanketing the state with anti-Schweitzer commercials. Schweitzer took the attacks as a badge of honor, while the Billings Gazette joked that anti-Schweitzer forces would have a hard time convincing Montana voters to fear him as a candidate "coming to strip us of our God-given right to be shafted by the pharmaceutical industry." After Burns voted against a proposal to place a moratorium on agribusiness mergers that harm Montana farmers, Schweitzer detailed Burns's $198,608 in contributions from agribusiness lobbyists. When he is not banging away at corporations, Schweitzer works to heal rifts between unions and environmentalists that Burns and other Western conservatives have fanned in order to divide progressive voters in states with depressed economies and threatened natural areas. "The debate over the past ten years has been jobs versus the environment," says Schweitzer. "The results are in, and it's clear that we're losing both" (www.brianschweitzer.com).
LANE EVANS, Illinois, District 17
Congress has no truer heir to the prairie populist tradition of the Midwest Progressive, Farmer-Labor and Non-Partisan League movements than Illinois's Lane Evans. In nine terms as the representative from a farm-and-factory district that hugs the Mississippi River, Evans has been one of the few members who consistently earn top ratings from the AFL-CIO and progressive groups. In a district where Republicans remain a powerful political force and where business groups pump thousands of dollars into the campaigns of his Republican challengers, Evans talks tough about corporate crime, wages lonely battles on behalf of family farmers and helps lead the fight against Wall Street's free-trade agenda. This year the GOP has made Evans a top target. The Congressman is suffering from Parkinson's disease, and while he is fully capable of performing his Congressional duties--which would include chairing the powerful Veterans' Affairs Committee if Democrats retake the House--his weakened condition has been the target of whispering campaigns and none-too-subtle jabs from Republican backers of his opponent, a former TV anchorman (www.laneevans.com, www.house.gov.evans).
ELEANOR JORDAN, Kentucky, District 3
With Eleanor Jordan in Congress, the House of Representatives would be a lot more representative. An African-American woman old enough to remember segregation days in the border state of Kentucky, a onetime teenage single parent who understands the challenge of meeting childcare and health bills, a neighborhood activist who got mad enough about legislative neglect to run for and win a seat in the General Assembly, she has lived the issues that most members of Congress only debate. Jordan, who directed a childcare center before her election, has emerged as one of the Kentucky House's most effective advocates for programs that aid children and working moms--winning a high-profile battle to prevent the gutting of the Kentucky childcare policy council. Now, Jordan is challenging incumbent Anne Northup, a conservative Republican who came to the House as a Newt Gingrich protégée and who has established one of the most reliably reactionary records in Congress. Jordan proudly identifies herself as an "outspoken advocate for women, working families, minorities, the poor and children." She says she's not proud of all the earlier choices she made in her life. "But they were choices I had to live with, and people get the benefit of your experience only if you tell them" (www.jordanforcongress.com).
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota, District 4
Even before she won the Democratic Farmer Labor Party nod in a hard-fought, four-way primary to fill an open St. Paul-area seat, Betty McCollum had lined up support from the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and other green groups that usually withhold endorsements until after nominations are settled. It wasn't that her foes were so bad but rather that McCollum was so good. She was a leader in the fight to secure funding for one of the first urban wetlands restoration projects in the country. And as a member of the Environmental Policy and Environmental Finance committees of the Minnesota House, she earned a national reputation for developing and advancing innovative legislation to combat air and water pollution, destruction of natural habitats, urban sprawl and environmental racism. McCollum, who continued to work as a clerk at a St. Paul department store during her years as a legislator, is outspoken in her support of living-wage initiatives, organizing rights for unions and protections for working women. Normally, her labor, feminist and environmentalist backing would be enough to secure victory in this liberal district. But McCollum faces a tough race against a former Democratic prosecutor running as the candidate of Governor Jesse Ventura's Independence Party and a well-funded conservative Republican state senator (www.mccollumforcongress.org).
MARYANNE CONNELLY, New Jersey, District 7
Abortion is supposed to be too "dangerous" an issue for candidates in close Congressional races to touch--especially Democratic candidates seeking to grab suburban seats previously held by conservative Republicans. But Maryanne Connelly is breaking the political rules, putting her support for abortion rights front and center in her campaign to win the New Jersey seat being vacated by Republican Senate candidate Bob Franks. "I believe every woman should have the right to choose.... It's no place for the government to be involved," says Connelly. Her tough talk did not endear her to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which endorsed her primary opponent, a more pliant pol backed by powerful political machines in the region. But Connelly's emphasis on women's rights, gun control and campaign finance reform gave her the edge in the primary. In her general-election campaign against a conservative Republican, Connelly continues to eschew compromise. A former police commissioner in her hometown of Fanwood, she is fiercely critical of the NRA, promising to fight to require that all handgun owners--"just like all automobile owners"--must register their guns, have a photo license and pass a safety test (www.connellyforcongress.com).
GERRIE SCHIPSKE, California, District 38
Gerrie Schipske wasn't supposed to be the Democratic nominee against moderate Republican incumbent Steve Horn for a Long Beach-area House seat. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee insiders had groomed a young, not particularly political teacher--whose chief qualification appeared to be the fact that she had been featured on national television programs as an innovative educator--for the race to reclaim the historically Democratic seat. But Schipske, a nurse practioner, lawyer and healthcare policy consultant to the Service Employees International Union, won a primary upset with backing from labor and the district's large gay and lesbian community. Allies including Congressman Barney Frank have worked with labor and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund to keep Schipske, who is openly lesbian, even with Horn in fundraising. She is in an uphill fight, but, says Frank, "She's serious, she's progressive, she's got a chance to be elected, and if she wins she will immediately be a leader in Congress on healthcare issues" (www.schipske4congress.org).
SUSAN BASS LEVIN, New Jersey, District 3
Susan Bass Levin, a first-time Congressional candidate who has served four terms as mayor of Cherry Hill, doesn't try to be all things to all voters. When the House voted to cut $32 million from the Clinton Administration's civil rights enforcement budget, she angrily condemned the move as an affront not just to minorities but to women, noting that "working families already lose more than $4,000 a year on average because women do not receive equal pay." The founder of a statewide fundraising network to elect pro-choice Democratic women, Levin has thrown a scare into GOP incumbent Jim Saxton. A relative moderate, Saxton for years cultivated links with labor--so much so that after he voted with labor against granting China permanent normal trade status, the state AFL-CIO executive board recommended that unions remain neutral in the Saxton-Levin race. Not a fan of neutrality, Levin sought a roll-call of unions. She won the endorsement by a 4-to-1 ratio, capitalizing on her years of work with local unions to promote pay equity, minimum-wage increases and expansion of worker health and safety programs. "I'm an activist," says Levin. "That's why I signed on to being an elected official" (www.levinforcongress.org).
MIKE KELLEHER, Illinois, District 15
If first-time candidate Mike Kelleher wins an upset victory in his race for an open Congressional seat, it will be on the strength of a paper clip. His better-known and better-funded opponent, Tim Johnson, is a veteran GOP legislator who should be coasting to victory in a rural district with a long history of sending conservative Republicans to Congress. But Johnson got caught using a paper clip to hold in place the button that recorded his legislative votes, making it possible to appear to be present when he was absent. Kelleher, an Illinois State University professor originally regarded as a sacrificial lamb, has juxtaposed Johnson's slacker service against the work ethic of the farmers, factory hands and smalltown shopkeepers who form the core of the district's electorate. Kelleher is airing commercials that feature a construction worker trying to paper-clip shut his lunchbox, and he's launched a www/timspaperclip.com website. He backs up his populist appeal with attacks on HMOs, drug companies and paper-clip pushing Republicans (www.kelleher2000.com).
DAVID WU, Oregon, District 1
Few members of Congress were better positioned to stamp their return ticket to the House with a single vote than David Wu. The first-term Democrat from Oregon represents an international-trade-reliant West Coast district where the politically powerful business community was chomping at the bit to capitalize on "free trade" with China. But Wu, the first person of full Chinese ancestry ever elected to Congress, chose his commitment to international human rights over the easy route to re-election; he voted against the permanent normal trade relations bill, which brought to an end annual Congressional review of China's human rights record. Wu was one of only a handful of West Coast Democrats to do so. Retribution was swift. High-tech corporations in his Portland-area district--a region known as the Silicon Forest--began pouring money into the campaign of Wu's challenger, right-wing Republican State Senator Charles Starr. Wu is standing firm, telling reporters, "If the voters of Oregon decide to send me home for [the PNTR vote], I'll have to live with that. But I'd rather turn my back on the office than turn my back on my principles" (www.wuforcongress.com, http://www.house.gov/wu).
MARYELLEN O'SHAUGHNESSY, Ohio, District 12
In a Columbus district where a quarter of the population is African-American, City Councilor Maryellen O'Shaughnessy is working to build a multiracial coalition by positioning herself as a contender who won't lose sight of the need to strengthen the federal commitment to education, healthcare and senior programs. "I know how hard it is to make ends meet," says O'Shaughnessy, who put herself through college working night jobs and in recent years struggled to care for her ill mother. Running in a GOP-leaning district against a state representative who has received maximum backing from retiring conservative icon John Kasich and national Republicans, O'Shaughnessy has driven her opponent to distraction by expressing a mother's horror at his legislative votes against programs designed to protect low-income children from lead poisoning. "This woman deserves to win," says Representative John Conyers, who campaigned in Columbus for O'Shaughnessy. And, he adds, "I'm convinced that if she wins, Democrats retake the House" (www.meos2000.org).
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THE YEAR OF LEAR: SHAKESPEARE IN 1606
By James Shapiro
The Year of Lear is a direct sequel to A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, picking up the Bard’s story five or so years later. I leave the date vague because the title isn’t all that apt. As I understand it King Lear was mostly written in 1605, which is also when the Gunpowder Plot, the signal event discussed here, was discovered. Nor do we spend that much time talking about the life of Shakespeare, as opposed to his plays. Instead this is a literary-historical survey that looks at those “connections to [the] moments of creation” surrounding the writing of King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra, all assumed to have been composed around this time.
Of course we don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life anyway, so Shapiro is perfectly justified in going further afield. There’s only so much you can do with the scattered biographical evidence that we possess. Instead, more time is spent on pulling out threads from the plays, like an entire chapter discussing the special significance the word “equivocate” had and why Shakespeare might have been so taken with it. I found this interesting stuff, even if in the end it didn’t tell me a lot about the tragedy of Macbeth, and could be overdone (for example, I don’t think Macduff is being equivocal so much as ambiguous when he says “He has no children”).
It’s a shame, but it seems as though this is the only form of literary criticism now tolerated by the general public: playing as a sort of background music to biography and cultural history. Still, we should be thankful we’re getting this much. Shapiro is an expert on Shakespeare’s world and makes that world come to life with lots of energy and insight. Some of what he has to say is worth making notes on, like the difference in the use of “you” and “thou” at the time, and the relevance this has in Act One of Lear. Other parts are more of a stretch. For example, Shapiro quotes a letter from the minor courtier Sir John Harington, likening the revels of King James hosting King Christian of Denmark to that of those held by Solomon for the Queen of Sheba, to Shakespeare’s writing of Anthony and Cleopatra. “It’s an uncommon coincidence,” Shapiro concludes, “that even as Shakespeare was writing of a famous encounter with one African queen, Harington’s letter describes another.” I don’t think this rises to the level of any sort of coincidence. Every work of art has countless connections to the moments of its creation, but I doubt this is one of them.
The year of Lear? I can’t think of anything else that 1606 is remembered for today. And yet the play left so little immediate impression that we can’t even say for sure when it was written or first performed. The afterlife or long tail of literature plays out in mysterious and sometimes random ways, leading one to reflect on what will last from our own literary culture. Or whether anything will at all.
Review first published online May 4, 2021.

domain: literature


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Jennifer Lopez was born on July 24, 1969 in Bronx, NY to Puerto Rican parents, Guadalupe and David. She was raised alongside two teens, Leslie and Lynda. J.Lo’s
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Jennifer Lynn Lopez (born July 24, 1969), also known by her nickname J.Lo, is an American singer, actress, dancer, fashion designer, author, and producer.
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Jennifer Lopez, Actress: Out of Sight. Jennifer Lynn Lopez was born in the Castle Hill section of The Bronx on July 24, 1969. She is the middle of three musically
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Council bosses have put off making a decision on whether to spend more than a third of a million pounds on upgrading Rugby?s town hall.
Rugby borough council cabinet members discussed the #360,000 scheme at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
The project would see a mezzanine floor put in above the main council chamber, which could accommodate workspace or a call centre, and extra disabled access to be put in to the public gallery.
The council outbuildings - The Lawn and The Retreat, which are currently used for offices and interview rooms - would then be sold off.
Two alternative, cheaper schemes, which would not include a mezzanine floor or separate disabled access, were also put forward.
But councillors asked for more information on the new disability laws which come into force in 2004 before making a decision.
Rugby Borough Council cabinet member Cllr Alan Webb (Lab, Brownsover South) said: ?We felt it was more sensible to find out all about how the new laws will affect us and what it will mean for the town hall before taking the decision.?
The plans are now set to be discussed next month.


The treasurer refused to apologize for the failed vaccine deployment, despite being proposed by today’s show host Karl Stefanović during a fierce interview.
While talking to the panel on Thursday morning, Josh Frydenberg was repeatedly told “sorry” because he was late in putting the jab in his arm.
“The Prime Minister said yesterday that he regrets the first statement that the vaccine deployment was not racial. Josh, why don’t you say I’m sorry?” Stefanović said.
“He accepts responsibility and, most importantly, has the solutions needed to deploy the vaccine as soon as possible,” the finance officer claimed.
Scott Morrison then claimed that the response to the pandemic saved tens of thousands of lives, and then claimed that the country’s economic recovery was stronger and faster than most other countries.
“People are angry. People are frustrated. The Prime Minister does not say sorry. Are you ready to deploy and say sorry?” Asked the host of today’s show.
“Well, we accept responsibility … it’s even more important,” Frydenberg said.
“‘I’m sorry’ seems to be the most difficult word, right?” Stefanović equipped.
“Look, this is really, really difficult. Deploying this vaccine,” Frydenberg insisted.
“Josh, please tell me,” Stefanović replied.
Treasury officials avoided the investigation and instead repeatedly accepted the responsibility of the government, confessing that they hoped the deployment would be faster in the future.
“I’m sorry every day that Ally has to work with me,” Stefanović joked.
“Sorry. Please tell me. It’s not difficult.”
“I’m sorry for her too,” Frydenberg replied.
Morrison said Wednesday that the government is doing its best to “make it right.”
“I am responsible for the problems we have and the solutions we are implementing and the vaccination rates we are currently achieving,” he told reporters. It was.
But he refused to apologize.
When asked if his own misunderstandings with Australians about the safety and availability of AstraZeneca contributed to his hesitation in taking the vaccine, the Prime Minister fired.
“If the Australian Immunity Technical Advisory Group (some of the country’s most senior scientists) advises the government, does the government suggest that the advice should be rejected?” He said. ..
But just minutes ago, he said, the government was trying to persuade ATAGI to change the advice surrounding AstraZeneca.
“It’s a constant attraction. I can assure you. Whether Morrison is directly appealing to ATAGI to change his medical advice on AstraZeneca and open it up to people over the age of 50. When asked, it’s a constant complaint.
Australia has given more than 10 million vaccines.
“Tell me that”: Karl Stefanović blows up at Josh Frydenberg over vaccine deployment
Source link “Tell me that”: Karl Stefanović blows up at Josh Frydenberg over vaccine deployment


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June 11: Combating Religious Radicalism in South Asia and Beyond
Dear IRF Roundtable Participants,
Nadeem Nusrat and the board of South Asia Minorities Alliance Foundation (www.SAMAF.org) would greatly appreciate you joining them for an important discussion on “Combating Radicalism in South Asia and Beyond”.
There will be a great panel of experts and leaders who will share their personal experiences. Your active participation is essential if we are to promote religious freedom and minority rights across the world. We all are ambassadors of our nation’s great values. As proud Americans, we each define individual freedom and liberty.
SAMAF hopes to see you at the Congressional Meeting Room (North), Capitol Hill Visitor Center, Capitol Hill on June 11th from 2:00 – 4:00 PM.
Here are the details…
COMBATING RELIGIOUS RADICALISM IN SOUTH ASIA AND BEYOND
- Date: TOMORROW, Tuesday, June 11, 2019
- Time: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
- Location: Congressional Meeting Room (North), Capitol Hill Visitor Center, Capitol Hill
- Congressman Scott Perry (R-PA)
- Former Congressman Tom Garrett
- His Excellency Minister Taj Ayubi Former Advisor to President Karzai of Afghanistan on Strategic International Affairs
- Clifford Smith of the Middle East Forum
- Abha Shankar, Director of Research at the Investigative Project on Terrorism
- Bassam Ishakk of the Syrian Democratic Counsel
- Bol Gai Deng from South Sudan
- Moderated by Puneet Ahluwalia of the SAMAF
With warm regards,

domain: news


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Neha sharma dating varun jain
Regarding her personal & family life, Nia is more attached with her mom and she know all about her likes and dislikes.Nia Sharma was born with the real name of Neha Sharma as on 17 September 1990.In just the small time span of the career, this celebrity has made a big name as being one of the promising Indian television actresses.She stood to fame all through the way of playing the role of the Manvi in the soap opera Ek Hazaaron Mein Meri Behna Hai.Even after the show went off air they were spotted together. There is nothing between us.” According to the Varun, they didn’t have time for each other as their work kept them busy. And then your friends do not care if one is playing the lead while the other is not.Sources say Nia Sharma stopped talking to the guy after she bagged the meaty role in the show. When you’re doing a show, you are together 24×7, but the moment you move out of it, you�re not in touch.
Nia Sharma and Varun Jain, both did a show together on Star Plus called Kaali – Ek Agnipariksha, where they bonded really well. We did a show together and are still in touch with each other.5 in the list of the Top 50 Sexiest Asian Women List by Eastern Eye.In one of her roles she played the role of the girl suffering from cancer for which she got bald in reality. Nia Sharma was part of the soap opera Ek Hazaaron Mein Meri Behna Hai in which she shared a strong and closer screen chemistry with Khushal Tandon.After Behenein, Nia went on to portray Maanvi, one of the protagonists in the Cinevistaas production Ek Hazaaron Mein Meri Behna Hai.She is the first “Indian Television Actress” to go bald for her onscreen role of a cancer patient as Manvi.
Her next television appearance was as Nisha, the daughter of Jay (Akshay Anand), in Star Plus’s Behenein.

domain: entertainment


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Hollywood will try to turn anything that is popular into a movie, and the latest evidence of this is today’s announcement that a film based on Dance Dance Revolution is in development.
According to its official description, the DDR movie has incredibly high takes. “The project will explore a world on the brink of destruction where the only hope is to unite through the universal language of dance,” according to Variety.
Konami, which owns the DDR IP, is working with film company Stampede on the film.
DDR, which utilises a physical dance pad, launched in Japanese arcades in the late ’90s before coming to North America in the early 2000s. The game was a massive success, and Konami would go on to partner with companies like Nintendo on versions of the game, including DDR: Mario Mix.
There are no further details at this stage about the DDR movie, so we don’t know when it’ll enter production or any of the talent behind it. It seems like very early days for the project.
In other news about movies you never thought would happen, the Tetris film has an $80 million budget and plans to be the first in a trilogy of movies.


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Published: 2024-02-09 18:09
Last Updated: 2024-04-21 07:29
The Irish women's national basketball team declined to participate in the customary pre-match handshake with Israeli Occupation's team following allegations of antisemitism made by an Israeli Occupation player.
Prior to their game in the FIBA Women's Euro Basket 2025 Qualifier on Thursday, tensions escalated as the Irish players chose to sing their national anthem on the sidelines, while Israeli Occupation's team stood on the court.
The match, originally scheduled to take place in Israeli Occupation but relocated to a neutral venue in Latvia, ended in a 87-57 victory for Israeli Occupation. The decision to abstain from pre-match formalities was a response to inflammatory remarks made by Israeli Occupation players and staff, who labelled the Irish team as antisemitic.
Basketball Ireland supported the team's decision, citing recent comments as the reason for the boycott. The move drew criticism, with calls for a boycott, but Basketball Ireland faced potential fines and bans from FIBA if they did not fulfill the fixture against Israeli Occupation.


Automating Flow Control in the Laboratory: Options from Analogue to Industrial
Nov 16 2017 Read 502 Times
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When setting up the automated components for controlling flow and pressure in your lab, you will have many things to take into account. Your considerations will be shaped by your end goal, and by the speed, methods, costs and complexity of the processes used to reach the goal. With unlimited funds, one could create a spectacular - albeit Rube Goldberg-esque - lab with every type of instrument, and it might tell you the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe. This is unrealistic, of course: labs are expected to adopt processes that produce the desired result, efficiently and cost-effectively. Automated processes assist in accomplishing such goals. In most cases, the range of choices short-listed for consideration will depend on what is already used in the current lab, and what may make the test or process faster, more controllable and efficient - and produce the most usable outcome, whether that be a physical change or data-based insight into a result.
Choosing a Road to Travel
Having decided on remote communications, the next consideration is, what form should that take? While it is certainly true that most organisations with previously installed communications protocols will want to continue in the same vein, networking and communications have undergone decades of revolution - a greater variety of installable instruments, cheaper networking hardware, or larger, faster networks may now be essential considerations. Who today would opt for dial-up speed internet, if high speed is cheaply available?
Going Analogue in a Digital World
Digital is not the only option. Although the technology environment is binary, in small scale systems with complexity equivalent to a benchtop seed-culture bioreactor, or automating the calibration of several gas chromatographs, analogue I/O is easier to configure. Its simplicity makes it an attractive option to many experimenters. If speed is paramount, the continuous data stream of an analogue connection remains the fastest method of communications available. In processes that are extremely timing-sensitive, that speed may be decisive. That said, this advantage is diminishing with the increase in digital protocol speeds.
On the downside, a potential risk in analogue communications is that of signal degradation. Signal degradation can lead to inaccurate readings, and can be caused by excessive cable length or external noise sources.
For some analogue installations, wiring complexity is very high, causing troubleshooting and maintenance issues, and raising costs. This comes of being able to read only one sensor, or signal, per wire. In a fluid (plasma, gas or liquid) control process, the gauge pressure, input and output pressure, flow rate, species of gas, process temperature and even humidity each have interdependent effects. Tracking all the variables means that wiring complexity gets high.
The reality is that much of the instrumentation today uses digital signal processing internally, so converting those signals to analogue, and then possibly back to digital for analysis at a later point in the process, itself adds noise to the originally lossless digital signal. This may not be decisive, but it does eat into one’s measurement uncertainty budget.
Analogue communications may offer only limited control. In many cases, analogue communications permit only the most rudimentary commands, such as changing the setpoint of pressure or flow control. Given that many fluid control instruments incorporate extensive programmability (such as being able to change engineering units or fluid mix settings), this reduces the device’s native flexibility and power in a process control application.
Quick Serial Options
Where the precision and versatility of digital communication is desirable, but the purchase of industrial PLCs for handling automation is beyond the wallet, instrument manufacturers offer drivers and even starter software kits. This may serve as a toehold entry to digital communications.
Through serial communications, a common computer can be substituted for a proprietary PLC. It would provide data processing, monitoring of closed loop conditions, a human-machine interface, and data logging. Indeed, smaller process control systems can be managed using nothing more than ASCII commands over RS-485 and a common data management program like LabVIEW. Basic RS-485 networks, and even some RS-232 variants, can communicate with 26 or more instruments by assigning a unique letter-based unit ID to each instrument. For new users, it’s best to look for a vendor with driver and communications utilities prepared for download, written instructions and readily available tech support.
In comparison to an industrial protocol system, there are some shortcomings. A computer-serial-device connection probably means adding upfront coding. It’s likely that the entire system would take longer to respond to operational changes because of the added overhead of the computer operating system, and relatively slow COM port transfer rates. The lack of standardisation also means it can be burdensome to change system administrators, or transfer the custom application to any other process.
Complex Control Loops and Processes
Academic, aerospace, biotech and chemical research labs require great versatility, precision and repeatability to be valuable and effective in their findings. Whether replicating human breathing through life-saving apparatuses, analysing chemical catalysts, or transfer-filtering a culture’s by-products for a pharmaceutical test, the stability of fluid control is critical. Each of these examples requires precise control to ensure that the lab results are repeatable.
The control mechanisms that need to be in place to achieve this are myriad. Let’s consider the simple example of what happens when a storm front comes through your region. The barometric pressure drops, and this changes the baseline of every device in your lab that references gauge pressure. The systems that incorporate these gauge pressure devices must compensate for the change in pressure, and these resulting system changes may in turn reduce the stability of your flow control processes. Even this simple scenario reveals the need for closed-loop process control instrumentation that can continuously monitor changes in pressure and temperature in order to keep flow control processes stable.
Multivariate Digital Data Streams
A significant advantage of using multivariate process control instruments that communicate digitally is that a single digital data frame can carry data from multiple process variables. The example below is a data frame from a flow monitoring instrument that features data for eight different process variables, in addition to date and time stamps and other data that supplement the measurement. Such a multivariate data frame can be obtained via simple ASCII commands at a frequency of about 20 Hz. Considering just the eight process variables, the effective transmission frequency of the data from this single device becomes 160 Hz.
Figure 3: Data frame with multivariate readings from an Alicat Scientific flow calibration device. Source: Alicat Scientific, Inc.
Complex data streams like the example above make individual instruments more efficient, reducing the overhead of purchasing and maintaining multiple flow, humidity, pressure and temperature instruments for individual variables. This reduction of equipment naturally makes lab setups physically smaller and more easily managed.
Figure 4: The front display of an Alicat Scientific multivariate flow controller, demonstrates multivariate process data for mass flow, volumetric flow, absolute pressure and temperature. Source: Alicat Scientific, Inc.
Getting Faster Performance out of Networked Digital Protocols
The advantages of industrial protocols, compared to serial and analogue, are standardisation of requirements, ubiquity of appliances, and expandability. For larger networks, numerous industrial digital protocols are available, some of which have been around for several decades. Long-established industrial automation protocols include CANopen, DeviceNet, FOUNDATION Fieldbus, HART, Modbus, PROFIBUS and many others. These older protocols provide communication with 64 to 250 individual devices per network.
More recently, a number of Industrial Ethernet (IE) protocols have been developed, including EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP, DeviceNet, Modbus TCP/IP and PROFINET. They are designed for fast communications, typically requiring as little as 30-100 microseconds (about 10-30 kHz) per data update cycle. They can operate over Gigabit Ethernet optical fibre for lossless transmissions. Additionally, these protocols enable communications with a nearly unlimited number of devices on a single network, (except for EtherCAT, which has a cap of 65,536 devices). One thing to remember is that Industrial Ethernet data frames are larger, at a minimum 64 kb, compared to non-Ethernet industrial protocol data frames that can be as small as 1 kb. Although this greater size is included in the transmission figures above, the automation management system must be capable of managing these larger data packets from potentially thousands of devices.
In practice, however, Industrial Ethernet data transmission bandwidth is actually much slower for many industrial automation devices, because so many do not directly communicate over an IE protocol. In order to connect these devices to your IE network, you must use an intermediate adapter module that can translate the device’s proprietary communications language to an IE protocol. Even when used with a single process measurement device, the IE conversion slows data transfer to and from the device. When up to eight devices must share one translator, this can create a bottleneck in communications. To preserve the fast native speeds of IE protocols, it is best to choose fluid control instruments that communicate over IE directly, without the need for intermediate translators. Eliminating translators also makes it much easier to update older IE networks, or to create new ones.
Figure 5: Optimising speed in a digital network is often a concern.
Taking the leap to Industrial Ethernet Communications for Fast Multivariate Process Control
Ethernet/IP is one of the most rapidly growing Industrial Ethernet protocols, and its communications speeds are more than fast enough for most applications, provided your instruments do not require the addition of translators. If you are establishing a new IE network, Ethernet/IP is often a safe choice, as there is a large and growing catalogue of devices that are available with this protocol, with what is reputed to be the largest number of installed instruments in the world. Their peripherals are usually less expensive than those required for proprietary PLCs.
For typical users, the difference between analogue and IE speeds will be insignificant to the operation of a lab. However, the increases in accuracy and efficiency that result from the elimination of noisy analogue signals can make a very positive impact indeed. The greater data throughput of an IE protocol can significantly increase efficiency for closed-loop control systems. This throughput is especially critical for fluidic process control instruments that rely upon rapid feedback in order to adjust to changing process conditions.
While Rube Goldberg contraptions are entertaining for the way they cobble together different mechanisms, they are memorable because they work. Because there is no single version of a laboratory, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for lab automation of flow and pressure control. For those accustomed to analogue signals, going digital may seem like distancing oneself from the process, but the increased variety of data, precision and efficiency are compelling benefits. Which isn’t to say that a direct analogue signal has no place in automation, it’s just reaching a point of diminishing returns. Explore the range, and go with the best for your situation - from analogue to the most modern industrial protocols, there are a lot of choices that can work.
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