Cockburn Carries Wisconsin for Bush!; Lunch with Studs Terkel; Eric Alterman's Right-Wing Hero

Yes, this is the same Gore who turns out to be to the right of Bush on many positions, including military spending, crime and, most lately, NATO's role in Yugoslavia. Across three days in crowded meetings in Madison and Milwaukee, also on Madison's WORT public radio, I was able to allay such fears, and remind these waverers that in our lifetimes, there has never been a more propitious moment to wave goodbye to the Democratic ticket, and for people to vote their hopes, not their fears. Had they not voted for "the lesser evil" in 1992, picked Clinton over Bush the Elder? Did they not recall that as an agency of change, the Clinton presidency was cooked by the spring of 1993? At least they got promised universal healthcare in 1992; this year it's a bickering contest over prescription drugs. Had they not watched Gore in that third debate listen to George Bush flourishing the discredited argument of deterrence in response to a question about the death penalty, then heard Gore say exactly the same thing?

To judge by those audiences in Madison and Milwaukee, Nader has recovered from his plummet into the low single digits after the Democratic convention in Los Angeles and Gore's brief rush into Populism Lite. The Nader organizers in Madison were brimful of optimism, bracing themselves for a visit from Jesse Jackson, dispatched by the Gore forces to try to scare the Nader crowd back into the fold. What shall we say to Jackson, someone asked. I reminded them of Jackson's populist campaign of 1988, and of one of the best speeches Jackson ever made, to his own supporters the day after the 1988 convention in Atlanta had wound up, with Dukakis crowned as the nominee. Jackson had come to Atlanta to make his peace with the Democratic Party. As he caustically remarked, his role was to "bale up" the black vote for the white man in the big house. Then, as Dukakis sped off to a campaign event in Mississippi's Neshoba County Fair, where Reagan had once started a presidential campaign, Jackson talked to his fervent cadres in the Rainbow Coalition. The next four years, he said, were going to consist of "street heat." The Rainbow would be working every legislature, every city hall across the country.

It was inspiring, and it was all nonsense. Within a few months Jackson had rolled up the Rainbow and become what he has been ever since, a Democratic Party hack.

Lunch with Studs Terkel The day before I drove up from Chicago to Madison I went along with my host Danny Postel for lunch with the 88-year-old Studs Terkel. Studs claims he's deaf now. I say "claims" because 13 years ago he interviewed me for his radio show and ignored most of my responses while entertaining his loyal listeners with a monologue for about 84 percent of the time. Now as then, he entertained me and Postel with a monologue of only slightly greater protraction in a pleasant Armenian restaurant in the Loop. Why was Gore Vidal so lukewarm, actively hostile even, to Nader, whom he has belittled as "boring." We asked Terkel, hadn't Vidal derided the Democrats for years, and made sarcastic comments about his distant cousin? Studs said he reckoned he knew the reason. Many years before, Vidal had come to Chicago to promote a book. Though Studs welcomed him on his show, Phil Donahue, at that time riding high as a radio host, declined to interview him. These days Donahue is one of the chairs of the Nader campaign. Vidal is not a man to forget a slight, and Terkel figured that this was probably Vidal's long-postponed revenge on Donahue.

Then Terkel hauled out of his pocket a clip from his old friend, the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko, a column published in the Chicago Daily News on Dec. 1, 1970. Royko had printed a coupon carrying the names of the four men most often mentioned as possible Democratic nominees for the presidency in 1972: Muskie, McGovern, Kennedy and Humphrey. Then Royko added Nader's name. Some 2067 people responded to this coupon. Their vote went as follows: Nader, 1614; Muskie, 148; Kennedy, 42; McGovern 41; Humphrey, 11.

"The response to Nader," Royko wrote, "was surprising for something besides its volume. About a third of the people who said they like him as a possible presidential candidate also wrote accompanying letters. I've never received that much mail about any political figure I've written about, except when the readers suggested that one of them be put behind bars. Most of the readers were serious and wildly enthusiastic... Throughout the letters ran a common theme: Nader is honest... None of the writers voiced the possibility that Nader might not share their beliefs on such issues as the war, civil rights, and other matters that have nothing to do with consumerism."

Hot Times in the HotHouse On Oct. 16, I went to a debate at the HotHouse in downtown Chicago, a great club featuring good music and political events. Here were ranged advocates of the Nader/Green third-party bid against Democratic loyalists. I heard an organizer from the United Electrical Workers put up a strong argument as to why labor should rethink its loyalty to the Democrats. He pointed out that at the stroke of a pen Clinton could have helped labor immensely by any number of executive orders. No such orders came. When the shipworkers at Avondale were battling their employers, Clinton/Gore could have exercised some muscle for the union, since the federal government was the yard's prime customer. No such muscle was exerted. After eight long years there's been nothing on striker replacement. Despite all the bright talk of New Labor, unions have actually lost ground in the Clinton-Gore years, simply because the legal playing field is so tilted in favor of the employers. There's no prospect on earth that a Gore-Lieberman administration would work to tilt this playing field the other way. Back in 1993 and 1994, when Democrats held the White House and Congress, what did Clinton-Gore do for labor? They pushed through NAFTA.

The most arrogant sounds that night in the HotHouse came out of the mouth of James Weinstein, boss of In These Times, who has been filling his pages with Gore apologias from the likes of Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. Weinstein dismissed the Nader/Green challenge as a naive exercise in futility by political romantics who would soon relapse into torpor after their brief quadrennial upsurge. To which I was tempted to point out that the most conspicuous form of quadrennial activity is from people like Weinstein, who awaken from their long doze every four years to call for loyalty to the Democratic ticket. The one thing you can say about Naderites and active Greens is that they work for their causes, month after month, year after year.

The Nation's Alterman Just like In These Times, The Nation has been sounding the tocsin for Gore. The magazine that endorsed Jesse Jackson in 1988 is now on the side of the man who put out the most vicious slanders against Jackson that year. In the Oct. 16 edition, Eric Alterman huffed and puffed for nearly 6500 words, straining to prove the unprovable: namely, that the policy gulf dividing Bush from Gore is profound, and that the election of Gore will save the country from a nosedive into fascism. Alterman's harangue was preceded by an entire issue of The Nation devoted to scaremongering about the threat Bush poses to a "delicately balanced" Supreme Court. Both are part of The Nation's project to intimidate potential Nader voters into crawling into the Gore camp. Last week came the magazine's formal endorsement of Gore, in an unctuous drizzle of prose arguing wanly that "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."

Alterman cranks out three arguments for electing Gore: executive orders, the veto and the courts. All of these are cast in the negative. In other words, it's not that Gore is good on any issue the left cares about. It's just that Bush would be worse. Much worse, Alterman trembles.

The evidence he marshals is not compelling. On matters of sexual politics, Alterman suggests that Gore is a real hero and that Bush is a villain who is itching to overturn Roe v. Wade and attack gays. There's not much substance to these charges. Even Susan Estrich, Dukakis' former campaign manager, writing in an earlier edition of The Nation, predicts that Bush won't seek to overturn Roe. In fact, abortion is already beyond the effective reach of many women in this country, and Gore is most certainly among those to blame for this state of affairs.

Unsurprisingly, Alterman sidesteps Gore's own record on abortion. During his congressional career, Gore had an 84 percent pro-life record. Gore voted against federal funding of abortions for poor women and wrote to constituents in Tennessee that he believed abortion was "immoral." You think this guy is someone to rely on?

On gays, Alterman conjures an image of Bush as a vengeful homophobe. But his runningmate Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian, has laid out a libertarian attitude toward gay rights that must make Pat Robertson and James Dobson cringe. Contrast this to Gore, whose record on gay issues is abysmal.

Since the election of Clinton and Gore, industrial jobs have continued to flee the country, in large measure due to the more than 200 trade pacts brokered since 1993. Alterman doesn't mention NAFTA, GATT, the China deal or the African trade agreement.

Take the military. "On missile defense, perhaps Gore's most appalling cave-in to right-wing hysteria, the Vice President cravenly favors 'developing the technology for a national missile defense system to protect against ballistic-missile attacks from rogue states,'" Alterman writes. "But Bush says he would deploy a much more extensive defense right away, whether it works or not." Actually, Gore supports a portable missile defense system that can be shipped off to the Middle East or the Straits of Taiwan. In other words, the system would be designed to be used as part of Gore's "forward engagement" military strategy, a game plan for accelerated interventionism.

Bush's plan is nuttier, but less malign. He talks about a global missile defense system that would be shared with Russia and even China. And it goes hand in hand with Bush's plan to unilaterally dismantle a large stockpile of nuclear missiles. Star Wars, which has been going strong through administrations stretching back to the early 1960s, will never work. If Republicans, for whom the whole mad enterprise has become an article of quasi-religious faith, use it as a rationale for cuts in weapons that represent a greater threat, why spurn the bargain? Every time a Star Wars test shot goes awry, it sinks the Pentagon yet further into welcome disrepute.

Alterman weirdly asserts that Gore's backing of Star Wars represents "his most appalling cave-in to right-wing hysteria." To our knowledge, the Star Wars scheme is typical defense porkbarrel, the kind of big-ticket handouts that have always enjoyed bipartisan backing in Washington. The scheme hasn't caused anyone to go hungry, sleep on the streets or die.

It would be tough to pick Gore's worst act as a politician, but a top-five list might look something like this: the dismantling of welfare; the expansion of the federal death penalty; the assault on habeas corpus; the bombing of Yugoslavia; the genocidal sanctions against Iraq that have starved and killed more than one million children. Nothing from Alterman on such matters.

Alterman resurrects that old canard that liberal presidents (read: any Democrat) give legitimacy to progressive causes. This is top-down thinking of the most frigid kind, and it is devastatingly wrong. The Democratic Party can more accurately be defined as the graveyard of social movements. Progressive causes are infused with legitimacy by the power of popular movements, not by the liberality or graciousness of leaders. An elitist like Alterman can't suppress his excitement over the very notion of the executive office, as if he were part of the parlor cabinet in the court of the Sun King. Alterman's prose becomes moist with excitement about the president's "awesome ability to make things happen just by saying so," as if the president were a medieval king who could cure scrofula with a touch of his hand. Who but Clinton, Alterman effuses, would have awarded John Kenneth Galbraith and George McGovern presidential medals of freedom?

We're pretty sure that Galbraith and McGovern, both loyal Democrats, are behind Gore/Lieberman, but both men also have a fine sense of irony. We think they would both be highly amused by the idea that the quality of executive power in America can be assayed by the recipients of presidential medals.

This item was written with Jeffrey St. Clair.