Don't think the antiwar movement has dropped off the political
map. A lot of those people, and there were millions of them, are thinking:
Who should I vote for in 2004?
This brings us to the Democratic candidates vying for the honor
of running against G. Bush in 2004. Senators Joe Lieberman, John Edwards,
Bob Graham, John Kerry and Rep. Dick Gephardt all supported the war with
varying degrees of enthusiasm
Firmly antiwar were one white, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and two
blacks, the Rev. Al Sharpton and former U.S. Senator Carol Mosely Braun.
Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, now vying with Kucinich
for the support of the progressive crowd, stood by his position that any
attack on Iraq should have the explicit blessing of the U.N. Security
Council.
The logic of Dean's position is that if the U.N. Security
Council had approved, war would have been justified. By contrast, Rep.
Dennis Kucinich has always taken the position, as has Rev. Al Sharpton, that
the U.N. inspectors should have been allowed to do their work. In
consequence, across the past few weeks, Kucinich's newly minted candidacy
for the nomination has flourished among the white Left.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Marcus Raskin, both with solid
credentials when it comes to issuing Democratic candidates with visas to
campaign for the left vote, have issued an urgent advisory to the Left that
Kucinich is The One, the best hope for progressives, a rallying point for
those who might have given up on the Democratic Party.
Aside from the backing from Ehrenreich, Raskin and the Institute
for Policy Studies, which is writing many of his position papers, Kucinich
has backing from a slice of liberal Hollywood, in the form of Peter Coyote
and Lindsay Wagner, the Bionic Woman.
As an aspirant for the nomination, Kucinich is in the odd
position of having come back from the dead even before he declared himself a
candidate. Six months ago, his long-standing opposition to abortion seemed
an insuperable barrier inside the Democratic Party.
Kucinich, like Gore before him, duly finessed his position by
saying that his personal antipathy to abortion would not stand in the way of
his appointing pro-choice justices, and like manner heeding to the concerns
of the pro-choice lobby. This hasty bargain with his principles got him into
progressive good odor.
Among Kucinich's Hollywood supporters is Shirley MacLaine, an
old friend who's godmother to Kucinich's daughter. MacLaine is most
definitely in Hollywood's New Age quadrant, high priestess in the groves of
wu-wu, with political obsessions mulched with conspiracies such as the
official suppression of evidence about UFOs and chemtrails.
MacLaine introduced Kucinich to Chris Griscom, a New Age high
priestess from Galisteo, New Mexico's answer to Delphi. Griscom's Web site
pipes her institute as "an enchanting center for spiritual healing and
multi-incarnational explorations." Kucinich has spent time at Galisteo, no
doubt exploring itineraries for campaign trips to the age of Akhnaten and
ur-Atlantis.
In New Mexico Kucinich met up with another big name on the New
Age circuit, in the form of Marianne Williamson, the (extremely attractive)
spiritual guru to out-there Hollywood stars. Williamson dispenses a
conflation of Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity and self-realization, and has
exercised a powerful influence on the vegetarian congressman from Ohio.
Williamson's group, the Global Renaissance Alliance, inspired
Kucinich to make his prime plank The Department of Peace, which is a pretty
silly idea. Better he campaign to have the Defense Department renamed the
War Department, which is what it was until 1949. The way things are in
Washington, any Department of Peace would soon be awash with arms-control
types from Brookings, then probably captured by Special Forces from the
hawkish National Endowment for Democracy.
Though he's hotly touted across the progressive spectrum,
Kucinich hasn't a prayer of becoming a serious contender, and I'm amazed to
see people like Ehrenreich acting as the Pied Piper, calling all the
erstwhile Greens, the Natural Law Party and other exiles back under the Big
Top. Kucinich has no money, no name recognition and didn't do any of the
advance legwork that Dean embarked on long ago.
Kucinich is no opportunist, but I can't say the same for those
who see his candidacy as a come-along to haul people back into the
Democratic Party. Here we are, just under a year away from the first
primaries, and already orders to march in lockstep are being issued. Take
Marty Jezer, a well-known leftish Vermont journalist who writes a weekly
column in the Brattleboro Reformer. Jezer has always held the position that
the Left was irresponsible in not rallying to Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Last
week, Jezer announced that "a Third Party presidential challenge from the
Left would be reactionary and traitorous in the 2004 election."
The same sentiments have been put forth by Moveon.org, the
promoters of Win Without War, a left front for the Democratic Party.
There's a current across the entire liberal Left exercising a
powerful pull on people to unite to put out George Bush. This is
understandable. Bush is awful, far more so than anticipated. Ashcroft is
awful. Rumsfeld is awful. The Bush crowd has used 9-11 as the lever to put
through a truly nightmarish political agenda both at home and overseas.
But does that mean that in the spring of 2003 everyone across
the left-green-anti-Democratic Party spectrum has to hunker down and pledge
support now for any and every Democratic candidate, like Dean whose economic
program is wholeheartedly reactionary and whose foreign policy is only a few
scant degrees athwart that of Bush; like John Kerry, who applauded the war?
Here we are in a world, half of whose population of
6,000,000,000 lives on less than $2 a day. At home the economy teeters on
the edge of long-term recession. A dip in the housing market and it'll be a
fast downhill slide. We've barely heard a single Democratic candidate
address any major problem with anything other than rote rhetoric, though
Dick Gephardt has come out with a health plan that deserves discussion.
"Traitorous" to call for a few new ideas? I don't think so.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
