Ten races to watch: '98 elections - progressive, pro-labor, and environmentalist candidates

Looking across the American political landscape this fall of 1998, I keep remembering Albert Camus's observation: "Politics and the fate of mankind are reshaped by men without ideals without greatness." But some candidates are running passionate campaigns that challenge the political, social, and economic status quo. Ed Garvey of Wisconsin, the Democratic nominee for governor, has offered an innovative proposal to raise taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals, while lowering taxes on the rest. Dan Hamburg, former Democratic Representative from California, has chucked the two-party system and is running as the Green Party nominee for governor of California. You won't see many reports about these campaigns on CNN's Inside Politics. But across the country this fall, in federal, state, and local contests, candidates are advancing progressive ideals. Here are ten campaigns worth watching as election day approaches:

1. HAWAII: JULIE JACOBSON

With fifty-nine elected office holders across the country, the Greens are an increasingly significant presence in local politics. But in few locations are they more serious contenders on a regular basis in partisan politics than on "the big island" of Hawaii.

Two years ago, Hawaii county voters came within a whisker of electing Green candidate Keiko Bonk as mayor. And this year, the Greens are running hard for a number of local positions.

Rene Siracusa, a founder of the Big Island Rainforest Action Group, and Larry Sinkin, who during the 1980s served as a lawyer for the Christic Institute in its anticontra lawsuit, are among the local Green candidates.

Julie Jacobson has made exciting inroads in a county council race with a platform that emphasizes her support for grassroots democracy and tough anti-development laws, as well as her opposition to privatization of county services and the expansion of for-profit prisons on the island.

Jacobson has forged a rare Green-Labor alliance, winning endorsements from powerful union groups, including the Hawaii Government Employees Union.

The Greens have a proven track record of building from local bases in places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Arcata, California-where the party controls the city council. Wins by Jacobson and her fellow Greens could make Hawaii another such green island.

2. NEW MEXICO: DAMACIO LOPEZ

In 1996, the Green Party made one of the most significant third-party breakthroughs in recent electoral history when Ralph Nader's low-profile Presidential campaign scored enough votes to earn the party ballot status in nine states.

But even before that, the New Mexico Green Party had shown its political muscle.

Since 1994, the Greens have attracted enough progressive votes to deny Democrats the governorship and two special elections for vacant U.S. House seats. But the charge that Greens are spoiling Democratic chances is debatable--since the Democrats nominated weak candidates, while the Greens have brought thousands of new voters to the polls.

New Mexico progressive voters may show in smaller numbers for this year's Congressional campaigns by Greens Bob Anderson in the Albuquerque area and Carol Miller in Santa Fe. The prospect of handing Congress to the Republicans for another two years as the result of a divided vote is not popular. That's especially true in Miller's northern New Mexico Third District, where Democrat Tom Udall, son of former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, has been endorsed by some top Greens and appears to be regaining at least a portion of the environmentalist vote for his party.

But polls show that tens of thousands of voters will back Damacio Lopez, the veteran activist running on the Green line for Secretary of State.

Lopez is a fiery campaigner. "When I discovered the connection between big money and politics and radiation poisoning on my family land, I committed myself to reforming the political scene," he says. "I have fought from tiny town halls in New Mexico to the halls of Congress--and even the United Nations. People are fed up. Big money politics must stop!"

The Secretary of State's office, which oversees elections, is an ideal spot for a reformer such as Lopez, and he could do a lot with the job. But even if he fails to win on November 3, a strong showing will help to secure the Green Party's ballot line in New Mexico.

A similar Green campaign is taking place in Wisconsin, where teacher, environmentalist, and Native American rights activist Jeff Peterson is waging a campaign for state treasurer. If Peterson gets just 1 percent of the statewide vote, the Greens will maintain the ballot line they won on the strength of Nader's 1996 showing. But count on Peterson--who has written an impressive plan for using the treasurer's office to monitor state investments with an eye toward environmental and ethical concerns--to do significantly better than that on election day.

3. IOWA: TOM VILSACK

The under-publicized farm crisis of the 1990s is forcing more people off the land than the much more prominent crisis of the 1980s. The 1996 "Freedom to Farm" Act radically shifted the focus of federal farm policies to favor the interests of huge agribusiness firms, f For small farmers and ranchers, as well as the communities where they reside, the bill would better be called--in the words of U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota--the "Freedom to Fail" Act.

This year's race for Iowa governor is a referendum of sorts on farm policy, and progressives could have no better advocate than state senator Tom Vilsack, a populist who has built an impressive labor-farm coalition. Vilsack worked his way through law school and then started representing small farmers in their struggles against agribusiness and insurance companies.

Since his election to the state senate in 1992, he has fought to require firms that receive tax incentives to pay a living wage, battled to extend health-care benefits for laid-off workers and children living in poverty, and become one of the state's leading advocates for family farmers.

His opponent, conservative Republican Jim Ross Lightfoot, has strong backing from agribusiness interests and claims "there is no farm crisis." Vilsack counters by saying the Republican should tell that to the farmers who are moving off the land in record numbers.

"I'm on the side of the farmer who gets his hands dirty," says Vilsack.

4. MICHIGAN: GEOFFREY FIEGER.

For too long we have acted like the party of wimps and oatmeal. We nominate people who seem to be apologetic of our positions and ideals."

Those are the words of the Democratic nominee for governor of Michigan, Geoffrey Fieger, who may well be the most controversial candidate for statewide office anywhere in America in 1998.

Fieger came to national prominence as the attorney for "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian. Fieger's courtroom antics and his angry denunciations of prosecutors and right-to-life activists made him appear to be almost an extension of the strange and often troubling Kevorkian. Because of his client, Fieger is anathema to some disability rights activists. And his decision to seek the Democratic nomination to challenge John Engler, Michigan's Conservative Republican governor, seemed at first to be just one more example of Fieger's life as performance art.

But there is another side to Fieger, which the voters of Michigan recognized long before the pundits did. The son of a radical civil-rights lawyer and an early teachers union organizer who still carries a picket sign in the trunk of her car ("just in case"), Fieger is a passionate lefty given to statements like: Republicans "would rather spend money to test [working mothers'] urine than provide child care so mothers could work."

He dismisses as "bigots" those conservatives who seek to cut social spending while advocating the construction of new prisons. He says, "Race relations cannot improve until we have taken action to remove the obstacles to economic success. Not just the laws and taxes that limit opportunity, or the lack of investment capital. We must also remove the social roots of oppression: the lack of education, the lack of adequate health care, and [the lack of] security from crime."

That message resonated with Democratic primary voters, who chose the attorney over a pair of moderate Democrats who had the backing of party leaders and the state's newspapers. Fieger succeeded in attracting votes from both inner city blacks and young white males.

After the primary, pundits said Fieger had no chance to effectively challenge Engler. They even suggested that Fieger would lose the support of the post-primary state Democratic convention.

Instead, he wowed the convention and his supporters, who identify themselves as "Fieger Tigers." His grassroots appeal suggests that, if more Democrats actually challenged conservative orthodoxies, they might energize nonvoters and start to build winning coalitions.

5. NEW YORK: PETER VALLONE AND THE WORKING FAMILIES PARTY

Why should progressives be excited about the gubernatorial candidacy of a machine politician from the New York City borough of Queens? Because a strong showing by New York City Council leader Peter Vallone could create a serious new labor party in a state where election laws allow it to be a major player.

Vallone is the Democratic Party nominee against popular Republican Governor George Pataki. He is, as well, the candidate of the newly formed Working Families Party. If Vallone gets 50,000 votes on the Working Families line, the party will earn a permanent place on New York ballots--meaning it will be able to influence politics for years to come.

New Party activists, who have long promoted fusion politics (in which candidates are allowed to "fuse" votes gained on different party lines into a winning total), see the Working Families Party initiative as one of the best chances in years to establish an independent third party that will have real influence at the state and regional level.

In New York state, the Working Families Party could eventually force the Democrats to the left. In cases where conservative or centrist Democrats run, the Working Families Party could also run its own candidates, as the old American Labor Party (ALP) once did.

The Working Families Party closely resembles the ALP, which had significant political influence in New York during the 1930s and 1940s before the McCarthyite Red Scare destroyed it. Like the ALP, the Working Families Party has earned broad labor support--from powerful United Auto Workers, Steelworkers, Communications Workers, Hotel Employees, and Amalgamated Transit Workers locals in the New York area--as well as support from activist groups such as Citizen Action and ACORN.

Former New York Mayor David Dinkins is backing the Working Families Party initiative, as are 1997 Democratic mayoral candidates Ruth Messinger and Sal Albanese, openly gay City Councilman Tom Duane, Brooklyn African American community leader Assemblyman Al Vann, and other longtime Democrats.

Says Buffalo Teachers Federation President Philip Rumore: "We will rejuvenate a lot of people who are not voting and who will say, `I finally have a home.'"

6. MINNESOTA: TIM MAHONEY

National political strategists with the AFL-CIO have an ambitious plan to run 2,000 union members for public office at the local, state, and national level in the year 2000. But St. Paul pipefitter Tim Mahoney got a jump on that strategy when he elbowed his way into the race for an open state legislative seat in the neighborhood where he grew up.

Running in a racially mixed, working class district, Mahoney made a virtue of his blue-collar roots, declaring on the front of his literature: "Every day, Tim Mahoney laces up his boots, packs his lunch, and puts in a solid day's work. As our Representative, he'll do the same for us." With strong support from Progressive Minnesota--the local New Party chapter--as well as a long list of unions, he won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party primary in September and is now poised to take the seat on November 3.

Like union printer Mark Pocan, who is expected to win an assembly seat in Madison, Wisconsin, and a handful of other candidates around the country, Mahoney has created a model for the labor movement's "2,000 in 2000" strategy by building a multiracial coalition of supporters, emphasizing living wage issues, and refusing to toe the centrist line of the Democratic Party establishment.

7. ILLINOIS: LANE EVANS

Peace PAC, the group that monitors Congressional opposition to Pentagon excesses, gives Lane Evans a 100 percent rating year after year. The same goes for the anti-hunger group Bread for the World, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the League of Conservation Voters, the ACLU, and just about every other group with which a conscientious legislator would want to be identified.

Yet Evans is no big-city liberal.

Since 1982, Evans has represented rural northwest Illinois, a region of farms and farm implement producers that elected Republicans to Congress before he came along and still frequently backs GOP candidates in statewide races. Evans faced tight reelection contests in 1994 and 1996--when a former TV anchorman named Mark Baker held him to just 52 percent of the vote.

This year, the anchorman is back. With lots of national GOP money, Baker is running a campaign that accuses Evans of having "a far-left social agenda and tax-and-spend record." And he is making none-too-subtle efforts to hang Bill Clinton's moral lapses around Evans's neck in a district where Sunday morning still means going to church.

(U.S. Representative Mel Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, faces a similar assault in Jesse Helms country. Watt and Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, are some of the last Southern progressives left in Congress.)

Evans faces what the Chicago Tribune says is the toughest fight of his career. If he loses, Congress will be a different place. It would miss one of the few serious questioners of the U.S. military.

As a member of the House National Security (formerly the Armed Services) Committee and the ranking Democrat on the Veterans' Affairs Committee for ten years, this former Marine spearheaded the crusade to win Agent Orange compensation for his fellow Vietnam-era veterans. He led the battle to expand services for women veterans. He fought to make the defense and health care establishments take post-traumatic stress disorder seriously. He took up the cause of homeless veterans when few others would, and he was one of the first members of Congress to raise the issue of health problems experienced by Gulf War veterans.

No one in congress has fought harder than Evans for legislation designed to advance an international ban on land mines, a ban that the Clinton Administration and the Republican leadership of the House continue to resist.

"There are very few people whose service in Congress has been characterized by the vision and the courage that Lane Evans displays," says U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont.

8. WISCONSIN: TAMMY BALDWIN

In a Congressional district that was represented a century ago by Robert M. La Follette, Tammy Baldwin is again raising the progressive banner. If she wins the race for an open seat representing Madison and the surrounding farm country of south-central Wisconsin, Baldwin would be a worthy heir to the La Follette tradition.

A thirty-five-year-old state representative who previously served on the city council and county board representing downtown Madison, Baldwin made national news in 1992 when she became the first openly homosexual member of the Wisconsin legislature. While some pundits have a hard time seeing beyond that fact, the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights is only one plank in what may well be the most progressive platform advanced this year by a serious contender for an open Congressional seat.

Baldwin has grounded her campaign in a promise to join U.S. Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, in battling for a single-payer national health care plan similar to Canada's universal program. She says she will fight to slash the military budget in order to emphasize human needs. She courageously questions the wisdom of the "war on drugs," going so far as to join broadcaster Walter Cronkite, former Secretary of State George Shultz, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, and other prominent figures in signing a June New York Times advertisement that states, "We believe the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself."

Baldwin's outspokenness drives Democratic strategists crazy, but her aides long ago realized that they cannot persuade her to compromise her principles in order to score political points. And the voters seem to be impressed: In September, she beat two strong Democratic foes to win the party's nomination.

If she wins in November, Baldwin would help challenge the growing conservatism of Congress by promoting ideas that are not politically safe but that could well address America's long-festering problems.

9. CALIFORNIA: BARBARA BOXER

The woman whose outspoken defense of Anita Hill prompted the 1991 hearings on Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination, and who rode the anger over those hearings to election as the junior Senator for the nation's most populous state, has quietly compiled the best record of the "Year of the Woman" Senators--all of whom are up for election this year.

While other Democratic Senators have joined the Clinton Administration in supporting the Republican welfare reform plan, or the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, Boxer remains true to the progressive social and economic principles of her San Francisco base. She has been one of the Senate's leading proponents of converting defense industries to nonmilitary production. She led opposition to the late-term abortion ban. She gave voice on the Senate floor to grassroots environmental issues--advancing a plan to require labeling of tuna as "dolphin-safe." She earned the antipathy of the gun industry with her support for a bill to require child-proof locks on all handguns. And the one-time victim of sexual harassment at the hands of a college professor has maintained the vigilance she displayed during the Anita Hill battle by breaking the silence of the Senate to force open Ethics Committee hearings on harassment charges against former U.S. Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon. Of late, she has emerged as one of the sharper Democratic critics of Clinton's sexual misdeeds and deceits.

Boxer has not been perfect. Her role in brokering the deal to convert San Francisco's Presidio from military to civilian use tipped the balance toward developers. But Boxer has consistently earned 100 percent ratings from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the AIDS Action Council, the Consumer Federation of America, the AFL-CIO, the National Council of Senior Citizens, the League of Conservation Voters, Handgun Control Inc., the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the American Public Health Association.

Boxer has a tough race this year. Business groups and conservative individual donors are pouring millions of dollars into the campaign of California state treasurer Matt Fong. Along with other progressive Senators who arrived in 1992, such as Wisconsin's Russ Feingold and Washington state's Patty Murray, Boxer is being targeted by the Republican right.

All three candidates are in tight races, with Boxer actually trailing in some polls. If this trio loses, there's a good chance that Trent Lott will gain a Senate super majority that will allow conservatives to shift the legislative debate significantly further to the right.

It is not a stretch to suggest that the fate of first-termers like Boxer, Feingold, and Murray will determine whether the progressive wing of the Democratic Party continues to be an important presence in the Senate.

10. OHIO: CHARLETA B. TAVARES

The biggest threat to American democracy is voter apathy. In a nation where more than half the citizenry failed to participate in the 1996 Presidential election, and where barely a third may vote this year, there is no longer any question that a disenchanted majority is turning off to politics.

Charleta Tavares wants to turn them back on.

"[People have] been led to believe that their vote doesn't matter, that money determines elections," says Tavares, a Democratic state representative from an inner-city district in Columbus who this year is her party's nominee for Ohio Secretary of State. "I'm very passionate about getting people involved in the process. Their vote does make a difference and this is the way they can take control of their destiny."

Running against a Republican who accepted his party's nomination only after being turned down as a gubernatorial candidate, Tavares bluntly says, "I looked at all the statewide offices, and this is the one I believe is the most important."

The Secretary of State's office in Ohio, as in most other states, oversees elections. Tavares wants to turn it into a vehicle for promoting participation in politics. One new idea: sending out birthday cards to eighteen-year-olds, with instructions on how to register to vote.

Tavares talks about using her position to rebuild the grassroots of a political system that is increasingly dominated by money and television. That may sound impossible, but Tavares has a track record of unexpected wins.

Even conservative Republican Representative Joan W. Lawrence, who dismissed Tavares as "a traditional liberal," admits: "She'd make a very good Secretary of State."

So good that, if she wins, she could well create the model for reinvigorating a political system that desperately needs a dose of people power.

John Nichols is editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He covers electoral politics for The Progressive.

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