Should Labor Party be on the ballot?
And if so... when, where, how?
Two years ago, at the Labor Party's founding convention, delegates voted to do something very unconventional: They decided that this political party would not, at least initially, run candidates. Instead, delegates adopted a statement supporting "A New Organizing Approach to Politics." The statement declared that the Labor Party "exists in order to build a powerful movement around our new agenda for working people." Our approach, we stated, recognizes that "electoral action comes only after recruiting and mobilizing workers with sufficient collective resources to take on an electoral system dominated by corporations and the wealthy."
That statement also laid the groundwork for reevaluating the Labor Party's electoral position at our second convention, which is now fast approaching. (The convention will take place Nov. 13-15 in Pittsburgh.) The statement called for the appointment of a special committee to develop a proposal for the party's future electoral involvement; this proposal would be considered at the Labor Party's next convention.
In 1997, that committee was appointed, met, and drafted their proposal. In January, the Labor Party's leadership body, the Interim National Council, adopted the proposal, and the Labor Party Press printed it in the last issue. The proposal's next stop is Pittsburgh in November 1998, where delegates to the convention will discuss it, possibly amend it, and vote it up or down. What the delegates decide at that convention will determine the Labor Party's path in the coming years.
In this issue of the Labor Party Press, we feature a series of interviews with Labor Party activists that reflect a range of views on the proposal and on electoral involvement in general. Our aim is to help Labor Party members clarify the issues that we are facing as we consider electoral involvement, and to set the stage for a full and productive discussion about electoral involvement at the November convention.
proposal for the Labor's Party's Future Electoral Strategy was a collective effort of Dave Campbell (Committee Chair), Frank Borges, Robert Croghan, Jed Dodd, Ed Grystar, Kathy King, Kay McVay, BIll Onasch, Carl Rosen, Bill Shortell, and Brenda Stokely.
The committee, says Campbell, "included individuals who had a range of views on electoral involvement." Despite this, the committee "operated mostly by consensus, debating issues until we could find some common ground."
Campbell says that probably the most substantive debate within the committee was about what kind of campaigns the Labor Party would aim to run, and for what purpose. "Some people essentially came in feeling that it would be a good thing if we ran campaigns as a sort of an educational process to build the party," says Campbell. "Others thought that would isolate the party within the labor movement. The fear was, if we ran a token campaign against a Democrat who was being supported by a majority of the labor movement, we would cut off the Labor Party's dialogue with the rest of the movement."
Ultimately, says Campbell, the committee was able to "find some common ground, to come up with a process and to set some standards. In the end, I think the standards we set are high enough that they satisfy the unions that if we do get involved electorally, they will not be isolated in the labor movement. I think the standards we set will insure that there is significant labor support or else the campaign won't happen. We want to run a campaign to win."
The committee also had a "very rich debate," says Campbell, about whether the Labor Party should endorse candidates running on another party's slate. "We hashed out the pros and cons and in the end we agreed that to achieve political power, we have to be independent of the corporations [which largely bankroll both major parties]. That's what sets us apart from the other parties."
Campbell concludes, "I think it is good that our proposal came out well in advance of the convention, and that there will be some discussion about it in the Labor Party Press. Because I think now people will have a good opportunity to debate the issue. I think some people were so afraid that the Labor Party would never run candidates and that we were going to be some kind of bucket just pouring people into the Democratic Party, that they could hardly even talk about this issue till now. Hopefully this will alleviate some of that unwarranted fear so that we can now talk concretely about it. We can say, 'Okay, we're here, and we need to get there. How do we get there?'"
Included in the electoral committee's proposal is a statement that the Labor Party leadership will develop guidelines, based on legal counsel, to ensure that LP electoral campaigns "meet the requirements of federal and state laws."
The Labor Party is unique among political parties in that its funding, so far, comes mostly from union treasury funds. Union treasury funds - in the form of affiliation fees and contributions from unions - support most of the Labor Party's national staff. Members' dues still represent only a modest portion of the Labor Party's income.
Under federal election law, union treasury funds cannot be used to support candidates for federal office. State and local laws vary: Some states place no limit on the use of union treasury funds in a state or local election; others do.
In the event that the Labor Party decides to field a candidate for national office, the Labor Party will have to insure that all funds coming from union treasuries are strictly segregated, and that none of these funds are used to finance or in any way support a campaign. Similarly, the Labor Party must ensure that state and local Labor Party organizations raise their funds in strict compliance with federal, state, and local laws.
"An electoral campaign shows what kind of
organization you have on the ground, but it doesn't build it." 
Richard Berg, Chicago
"I thought what the Electoral Committee said was fine. And if we pass that resolution at the convention, then I think the committee we create to oversee the electoral stuff will initially have to be very hands-on. In Chicago, we're still pretty far away from being able to run a campaign like that.
Photo: 呻avid Klein
I would see us probably only running one or two candidates nationally at first, and putting a lot of resources into each of those local campaigns. And that first candidate, I think, would have to be not only good at representing people and organized, they would have to be an eloquent national spokesperson. They'd have to be totally into the Labor Party, so that they won't swerve on it, because that's who they are.
If we win, then I don't think our candidates will be able to do what some of the progressive Democrats do - they horse trade a little bit. I don't think we can do that. I think we've got to be purists, basically. Because otherwise, what are we doing that's different? What the Labor Party will have to do is create a movement to protect these people we elect, despite the fact that they don't have any money.
I worked on a lot of campaigns back in the 1980s, a lot of knocking on doors and precinct work. I did a lot of electoral work for Mayor Harold Washington. And in the late eighties I ran a ward for Washington. Washington said several times that he wasn't committed to the Democratic Party, that it was just a tool for this time. It started with black political empowerment, but it had an agenda that was inclusive of Latinos and labor and gays. It was a good thing to do, I think.
It does take a lot of work, especially if you don't have any money. I mean, candidates are spending millions of dollars in their congressional races. You can make up for that if you have a movement - that's what Washington had. But we don't have that movement yet. And unfortunately, a lot of labor people don't know how to do that kind of politics either - they just write a check and don't even ask for anything in return. Of course there are exceptions.
I think it's very hard to make electoral politics an educational process or use it as a way to organize. Even Harold Washington's campaigns had trouble doing that. I think the campaign shows what kind of organization you have on the ground, but it doesn't build it. A campaign can pull together a coalition of folks, people who are already active in different areas. But I really don't think you get new people into the movement by doing this.
As the campaign goes along, it gets to be really slash-and-burn - especially if you want to win. If you're trying to get 80 percent of the vote out of this precinct, you get real driven to do what you have to do to get votes. As good people come forward, you don't sit down and educate them as much as you could, you just give them a clipboard and say, "Go do those blocks."
I look back at all the work I did in the eighties, and I think very few people became active from that time that stayed active till now. I think a lot of the people who get politicized through campaigns tend to just become kind of liberal electoral junkies, with no content.
I think the conversation during campaigns is low-level, and I think that even when people do come forward in a campaign, it's very hard to consolidate them afterwards. Often they're there because they believe in this individual candidate, and then once the campaign ends, it's just diffused. If you want to build a movement, you do that by doing the kind of stuff we're doing right now - negotiating a new contract in your union or doing the Labor Party's 28th Amendment Campaign.
"What will we do in the meantime,
while we're trying to build?"
Jane Slaughter, Detroit LP
I think these are probably good guidelines for electoral activity. I don't want us running candidates in a stupid way, where we don't have much of a base. On the other hand, I don't think many places will meet the guidelines anytime soon. And so what I wonder is, what will we do in the meantime, while we're trying to build? What is our strategy for getting ourselves in shape to run candidates at some point? I don't know the answer to that.s
"The electoral process can help
us build a movement." 
Sean Sweeney, New York Metro
Photo: 和ichael Kaufman
"I think people like myself never expected the electoral committee to be so unequivocal about its commitment to some kind of electoral move, albeit with these restrictions. So I think that's the sugar that lines the pill. I think people are just relieved that the party is now able to say, Yes, we want to run candidates. And we want them to be labor candidates and not from some other party.
A lot is up for interpretation in the proposal. For instance, saying that endorsing unions need to make up a significant portion of local union membership: What's significant? For some people it's 10 percent, for other people it's 70 percent.
For me, the most important sentence in the report is that no one should be denied running candidates if they fail to meet one piece of this criteria. What that means to me is that if I were up in Vermont, and I increased the Labor Party membership up to 500 or 700 members, and I had a dozen locals willing to put resources into a race in Vermont, then I'd be asking to be considered [to run an electoral campaign].
I think we should be running to win. I think protest campaigns are out. Just to run for the sake of running, because you want to be right, should either be ruled out altogether or be a strict exception. I don't think the criteria in the report point to protest campaigns, but to carefully planned campaigns. I ran for city council four times in the British Labor Party. I never won, but I got around 30 percent.
My scenario is, in the 2001 City Council races in New York City, we run for a handful of seats. I think we should plan at least two years in advance for any race, saying to locals, we have a good candidate - a trade unionist or someone well known in the community. We say, this is our program for the local area, this is the opposition, a right-wing Democrat or whatever it might be, and we want you to support or help us select a Labor candidate. If we get 10 locals seriously behind each candidate, and if they can accumulate between them somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000, we've got a race. We also have something the other two parties don't have much of - people power to make a difference on the doorstep.
If you can get two or three Labor candidates elected in 2001 in New York City, then they become a labor caucus, and I don't think it's inevitable that they will have to buckle under and play with the power blocs. Those pressures are real, but there have been a lot of historical examples of caucuses being used as a beachhead.
I really believe, based on the British experience and the experience of other labor parties, that electoral breakthroughs - even local and regional electoral victories - can attract institutional labor support. I think that's one of the strongest arguments: That a well-prepared campaign around a few locals with a lot of energy and excitement, getting a good result, maybe even pulling off a victory... that will attract institutional support. Unions will say, we shouldn't miss out on this.
Why do we have this view that the movement should be created first, and then the rest will follow? The electoral process can help us build a movement. Generally speaking, labor parties are organized differently than big business parties. There's more of a sense of building cadre than there is in, say, the Democratic Party. We'd have to have a code of conduct, and not just for candidates. The real objective of running a candidate is to bring new people in, set up a local structure, and to do ongoing work between elections, whether we win or lose.
What this proposal gives us is criteria that require some really serious planning and organization and door-to-door work, and really being like the early organizers of the CIO. Not sitting around in a room blaming someone else for the fact that we're not this, that or the other. I think this will be good for the internal education of the party. People can't look anymore for someone else to do the work for them in the Labor Party. What these criteria tell people is, we have to work to put this together.s
"We have to be careful that we
don't succumb to the temptation of a quick fix." 
Ebon Dooley, Atlanta
Photo: 和ax Page
Where we are in Atlanta, I'd say running candidates is quite a bit down the road. We want to focus on building the groundwork, building up some membership.
What we've been doing is going through the Labor Party platform in a systematic way, doing a political education session on each plank - we're up to plank number five now. And we're making notes as we discuss the platform and we have some suggestions that we might submit to maybe strengthen some of the positions. So that's what we do in the first half of each meeting. We've just started having one meeting each month in the community, and a second meeting at the AFGE office. We've been fairly fortunate in that we haven't had some of the divisive things that some of the other places have had.
We are getting together a speakers' bureau and a list of the AFGE locals in the area - about 17 in all. We'll do the Labor Party pitch, the sign-up, the pitch for affiliation. That'll start next month. I think planning is key to everything. So starting in April, we hit all the AFGE locals, and then we'll flip over and talk to some locals where we have some individual members, but where the national isn't affiliated.
You have to take your time. If you genuinely believe that we're in this for the long run, and if you believe that the 28th Amendment Campaign is not a charade but a genuine effort to change things, then you have to take a long view.The voting is just another approach to our overall goal. We have no problem in waiting, because this is a real chance by our class to have real representation. And we don't want to blow it by being impatient and reckless. So many people come to the Labor Party from the new left, with all that experience and that background. So we have to be really careful that we don't succumb to the temptation of a quick fix. Because there isn't one.
So many people here in the unions have tremendous experience in electoral politics. So if we can combine the street activism with the experience we've had over the years with electoral politics, well, I think we can come up with something. But I think that's down the road, because when you actually get out here and count the bodies, it's still minuscule. But I do see the direction I'm going to follow!s
" I don't think we're going to vote ourselves free." 
Larry Adams, Mailhandlers Local 300
Photo: 和ichael Kaufman
I think the electoral proposal provides a serious challenge and high threshold hurdles for Labor Party activists to achieve for engaging in electoral activity.
My general position is that pursuing electoral office and engaging in electoral contests is not essential to building a constituency for the program of the Labor Party. I think it shouldn't be the main form of political work that we do. I'd much rather see a mass mobilization around issues that relate to the party program.
I don't think we're going to vote ourselves free. Elections didn't end slavery, elections didn't win the eight-hour day, elections didn't win us Social Security - elections haven't proven to be the most efficacious tactic for political work.
What do you do when you get people into office? The civil rights movement, for instance, resulted in black elected officials capturing office in bankrupt cities. I mean, the Newarks of the world were controlled by Prudential Life. So you get people elected, there's a rising expectation, and an inability to deliver, because the same people still control the economy.
I think that an electoral campaign can be educational. But it can also sap resources, and given the political context we're in, almost all of people's political energy has been channeled toward electoral activity. So every charlatan and opportunist comes forward and says, "Vote for me, I'll set you free." But in fact that can be a dead end, and ends up dissipating people's emotional and political energy and their resources. And it's not the only way through which we can do face-to-face, door-to-door political mobilization.
Those who run under the banner that electoral activity should be our main form of activity ought to be those who are amassing the human and material resources to support that. Because the unions that are the foundation of the Labor Party, as I understand existing election law, may very well be seriously hampered in our capacity to provide material support for the Labor Party. If we're going to lose or in some way restrict that institutional foundation for this party, we'd better be able to replace it with hundreds of thousands of bodies who are financially supporting the institution. Talk is cheap - political success is expensive.
Those who are so gungho truly underestimate the strength of the enemy and overestimate the strength of our friends at this stage in the game. I mean, there are some people who want to run candidates yesterday, and can't raise enough money to rent a hall to hold a meeting.
I don't want to exclude electoral activity, because once we build a constituency for other forms of political activity, we may use elections as a tactic to promote an issue - not to promote an individual. But I think that the rabid enthusiasm about elections reflects a lot of illusions about the nature of the society we're living in, and what the state apparatus represents. A whole lot of people think that if we're elected to office, we'll be able to implement the program of the Labor Party. That's an unrealistic disassociation of politics from economics.
I think that it's always important to use any position of authority as a bully pulpit for our class. But just to get elected to do that I think is an inefficient expenditure of limited resources, both material and human. I mean, you can stand on a ladder on the street corner and turn that into a bully pulpit. We can go and sign up all the union members in this country to be Labor Party members and do what may be more important grassroots political education - and not spread the illusion that capturing office in a corporate-dominated state is going to result in a qualitative change in people's lives.
If the void that the Labor Party seeks to fill is a reflection of the high level of alienation of American working people, then will capturing office and being unable to deliver overcome the alienation or will it deepen the alienation? People don't stay home because they're stupid. People stay home because they're convinced that winning an election is not qualitatively changing their lives.s
" We have to make the Democrats
realize that there are other places to shop." 
Jann Campbell, Rhode Island
Labor Party people here feel very strongly that we'd like to move toward electoral involvement. We have taken positions on local issues that are very specifically things the Labor Party would be for so that we can increase our visibility and to show people what we stand for. But I think some of that just seems redundant with other efforts - like things Jobs with Justice or other coalitions are doing. And there's a concern about burnout - we don't want to just be spinning our wheels.
I believe we should get involved in electoral campaigns, but only very specifically against people who are very bad on working people's issues - on labor, on environmental issues, seniors, low-income people. For instance, there's a state senator here in Rhode Island who is the biggest sleazeball around, and he represents a district that is partly working class. Now, this guy is a Democrat, but he votes like Newt Gingrich. And yet he got elected as some kind of reform candidate. He's in charge of the corporations committee, which oversees everything about business. So he gets all kinds of corporate contributions.
This is what I think the Labor Party should be about: Anybody who claims to be a friend of labor, and is not, we should go after them. We should make people pay for screwing labor! People say, Oh, the Democrats don't have to worry about labor - they know those votes are in the bag. Because where else are they going to shop? We have to make the Democrats realize that there are other places to shop.
We may not get anybody elected in the short term. But I don't think we'll be taken seriously by anybody - many of the unions or the Democrats - until we really have the power to hurt people, and they know it.
We have a lot of experience with third parties in Rhode Island, and some have polled as much as 10 percent of the vote without a lot of resources. We're a very small state, so we know people. If we had 40 people targeting one state senate district, we could make those guys sweat bullets!s
"You can get a surprising amount
accomplished in office." 
Mike Ferner, Toledo OH
I was on the Toledo City Council for two terms, and I ran for mayor of Toledo in 1993 as an independent, and almost won. [Toledo has a population of 310,000.]
I'd like to see the Labor Party take whatever steps possible, sooner rather than later, to get involved electorally. I think the electoral committee's proposal makes sense - you don't want to go charging ahead with no thought at all.
But my two cents would be that the criteria for electoral involvement should be fairly liberal, that the thresholds should be low. For instance, I don't think it makes any sense for us to say we've got to wait until we've got this huge warchest. I think the way you start attracting support for your program and your candidates is to have a minimally credible campaign and candidate. Of course those are all judgment calls.
But hell, the first time I ran for City Council, I ran as an independent, I'd gotten some support from community groups and a very small number of unions, and ran a credible campaign. I had zero electoral experience myself, and very little experience even working on other people's campaigns. Going into it, people might not have thought it was credible, but by the time we got done, it was credible. I didn't win that time, but two years later I did win. So I think the Labor Party would not be doing itself any favors by establishing a high threshold for what is a credible campaign, because then you're never going to get the experience you need to get there.
I definitely think that running a campaign is educational and has an intrinsic value. My advice would be to get involved seriously in issue or referendum campaigns wherever the issues are ones the Labor Party feels it can or should take a position. It's a way to learn all the tricks of the trade of an electoral campaign - go to the Board of Elections, get the walking list, do the targeting of voters. The mechanics are exactly the same in an issue campaign as they are in a candidate's campaign.
Based on my experience on the City Council, I know that you can get a surprising amount accomplished in office. In my first term, I was one of nine members of the City Council - eight Democrats and me. In my second term, there was one Republican, seven Democrats, and me. But I was able to raise issues that would never have been raised otherwise - and that's a very important thing. Now, it takes a certain temperament to be able to hang in there for the long term, if that's all you're able to do. You have to go into it with the understanding that there may not be a whole lot of things that you can actually turn into legislation. But you can, in a significant way, affect the debate beyond what most people think you can do as only one of eight or nine people.
In addition to that, because I had been a community activist for a long time and was used to working with activists, we maintained a decent core of people - I guess you'd call it the inside-outside idea. And we worked that. Just as an example, city government is supposed to readily give citizens access to all kinds of information. But in reality, they don't always do that. I was able, as an elected official, to very easily get citizens access to information they might never have been able to get. For instance, even in a recession, we were able to affect budget questions for environmental programs and for neighborhood programs because we were able to raise enough political hell on the outside and to have just one voice on the City Council. So we were able to not just raise issues and go down in a blaze of glory, but raise issues and even occasionally get some legislation.
We actually got some legislation passed that limited tax breaks for corporations. By working with community people, we got a phaseout of these tax breaks. The final legislation wasn't as good as we had hoped, but over the next year-and-a-half I was in office, that change brought in $8 million in additional revenue. We tried but failed to get something passed that said that if a company got any kind of city assistance, it had to meet wage, environmental, and labor law standards. We got a real debate, but didn't win that vote.
While I was on the council, the state of Ohio began dumping thousands of people off the general relief rolls. So Igot some people who were experts on the impact of all this to get up and talk at the City Council. So we passed a resolution saying that our city was firmly opposed to those cuts. And we did the same kind of thing on national issues - when Bush was sending people to Iraq, I was able to speak up as a veteran and as an elected official opposing that. My resolution got defeated, but it was debated. We talked about how this really was a local issue - our tax dollars were being used, and our young people were being sent. Continued next page
It's true that the electoral model we have tends to demobilize people between elections. Because the political parties that we have are deathly afraid of having people continue to be mobilized: They'd be held a lot more accountable, and maybe people would want to do more with their power.
I made very few compromises, and that's one of the reasons I lost the mayor's race. The primary had narrowed the race down to me and one other person - to many people's surprise. We were seven weeks away from the general election when an issue came up that was a dead-bang setup by the Democratic mayor, who was backing my opponent. We had been in the midst of a terrible murder spree, and the mayor somehow was able to convince the administration to free up an extra $200,000 for the police. The money was to come out of a fund that had already been budgeted for a feasibility study for a public power system in Toledo. He knew full well that as the main supporter of public power, I was never going to go along with it. Well, we had a debate about it, the council chambers were packed about people who were concerned about the crime situation, and I was the only person who voted against taking that money. Even the police chief admitted that they had no plan for using the money, it was all political bull. But because nobody wanted to look soft on crime, they all voted for it, and I was the only one who didn't. And I could just see my opponent's commercials rolling on the television, and that's exactly what happened. You could certainly make the argument that was a stupid vote and I should have bit my tongue and let it go.
I was ahead in the polls before the election. But thirty-six hours before the polls opened, there was another murder, and my opponent ran out there and put his last TV spot on showing me voting against money for the police, and I lost the election - by 700 votes out of 92,000. s
"Electoral involvement is a distraction
that will dilute our power rather than add to it."
Noel Beasley, Midwest UNITE
I think the Labor Party is an important but very fragile vehicle for independent politics, and to jeopardize our credibility - as well as our funding base - at this moment in our development would be suicide, at best. I can't see anything we could possibly gain in this period by running candidates.
Photo: 和ichael Kaufman
I think the fundamental role of the Labor Party at this time is to win a majority of working people, both employed and unemployed, over to a national movement for progressive independent politics. And running candidates will simply distract from that goal. People's time and effort and attention will be devoted to electoral campaigns that there is little prospect of winning, and even if you win, what have you won? The right to be a voice in the wilderness. And we're already that - we don't have to hold office to be a voice in the wilderness!
I think the majority of Labor Party activists are involved in electoral politics already. In fact many of us are up to our eyeballs in it. The opportunity we have in the Labor Party is to have another vehicle for progressive expression that we take to the electoral arena without being swamped by the electoral process.
Just financially alone, it would be a disaster for the Labor Party to run candidates. Funds should be raised now for the development and propagation of our program. And electoral campaigns are just incredibly expensive in terms of the return that we would gain.
I think the most important thing for us to be doing now is to build for a very successful convention. And that can be done by taking our program into primaries and electoral fights that will be held, and in some of the ballot initiative fights. I'm putting my own efforts now into recruiting members and creating organizations in the Midwest that are prepared politically for the convention.
In the past five years, UNITE has been targeting particular campaigns where we thought we could make a difference. Probably the best was Sen. Paul Wellstone's campaign in Minnesota. We got in on the ground floor and worked very closely in developing the position of the campaign.We fought for the kind of issues that the Labor Party stands for, and were recruiting people into the Labor Party while we were at it.
I think Wellstone is a perfect example of both the advantages and disadvantages of electoral politics. We would be in a much worse position in national politics right now without a Paul Wellstone speaking for us. At the same time, without a huge national movement to support him, he's limited in terms of what he can accomplish. And he'd be the first one to say that. He would be much happier having millions of people in the Labor Party crying out for this and that.
I don't think we can run away from the debate [about electoral involvement], and I don't think we can talk about it in an abstract way. The goal for me would not be to just win in a particular couple of races. We don't have a parliamentary system in this country in which a minority political party can have great leverage and negotiating power.
So the question is, what are we trying to build here? It seems to me that our primary goal is to build an independent political movement across color lines, that links the employed and unemployed. And to what extent does a particular campaign for a particular office aid that? Or does that approach detract from the goal? For me, it would seem to be a distraction that dilutes our power rather than adding to it.s
"I think we should keep building from
the bottom, because that's what scares the powers that be." 
Bob Clark, LP CoChair
I think this proposal is a breath of fresh air, because we have something now that we can work with, and some guidelines have been established. Our union has said all along that someday the Labor Party has to run candidates.
If you're going to be a real political party, and you want to gather people around you and make it real in their eyes - that's what a political party does.
Photo: 周eter Gilmore
But that doesn't mean that we're going to jump up and down as a union and say we should run candidates right away. I think we should keep building from the bottom, because that's what scares the powers that be. We understand that you have to build a base in order to do that. In our union, we're focusing on getting our locals affiliated and building this thing.
UE has not been very active in electoral politics. It's been our position for a long time that the electoral process isn't going to change things very much. The only campaign that we really got involved in and sent people to work on was Rep. Bernie Sanders' campaign in Vermont. We always look for an independent candidate, and we give troops rather than money.
You can get a whole lot of political business done without running a candidate - my union has been doing it for years. Just look at what happened with the movement for single payer healthcare a few years ago. We forced the issue, and even Clinton had to address it. It was the movement that pushed the politicians to do the right thing on civil rights in the sixties. It was a movement that stopped the Vietnam War. The politicians didn't - if you'd left it up to them, they never would have done anything. And that's simple stuff, isn't it? But it takes work, and that's what people don't want to do.
Without a strong movement behind you, it's really hard to get anything done - even if you do get someone elected. I was on a school board in Milwaukee, and I went in as a labor rep. And they hated me, they'd say, "Here comes that union guy!" I was playing the role I was supposed to play - I represented labor. But still, the odds were stacked against me.
Some people argue we should start running candidates at the school board level. I'm really against that. Because most of the school systems, at least in the major cities, are bankrupt. So why do you want to elect somebody to run that? There's a trend around the big midwest school systems - they're ending up with black superintendents. But you're administering over a disaster. A similar thing has happened to people who have been elected mayor in a lot of larger cities - you're setting yourself up for failure. I think running on a congressional level is a better idea.
But before you can talk about that, you've got to have a base. It's the same as inside a union: We can't achieve anything without having an organized membership. In UE, we know that if we organize people in the wrong way, we'll lose them. People who just rush in and try to organize, and their only goal is to win - you end up with a really messed up local, and maybe even a campaign to decertify the union.
People confuse a narrow concept of winning with actually having the power to do anything.
"We have to do the same kind of practical groundwork that we do in a
union organizing campaign." 
Kit Costello, LP CoChair
I'm reluctant to adopt an electoral strategy before we've built a strong party base. Because I know from our work in CNA how much time and financial resources it takes. You need active members who are there because of a political vision. You have to have people who can go out and knock on doors, who can go out and mobilize an even larger group. And it's just not there yet in the Labor Party.
Photo: 和ichael Kaufman
It's just like union organizing. We would never say, Oh, our view of ourselves and the issues is so strong that we think all the workers will agree with us - so let's have the union election tomorrow! It would be such an idiot approach. If we're going to sink resources and time and our hearts and souls in an organizing campaign, we do a thorough assessment of our chances.
We have to do deep member education, lots of talking to each other and doing one-on-one assessments to make sure we have the numbers to win before we go forward. And we have concrete thresholds, like the thresholds for when we can file cards. And we have to be sure we have enough support not only to win the election, but to get a first contract. And it's the same with elections. As Ralph Nader says, it's not enough to win the election, you have to win the mobilization. I think that before we run candidates, we have to do the same kind of practical groundwork that you do in a union organizing campaign.
I can't think of anything more discouraging than planning not to win, just laying the groundwork for frustration and disappointment. It doesn't make any sense to go down that road. You've got to meet thresholds, you have to do it like you'd do anything you want to win - methodically.
Anybody we elected from the Labor Party would have to be absolutely dedicated to the vision, absolutely prepared to go up against big business and corporate interests. And that's a person who'd better have a broad base of support, or else they're not going to do that. Nothing would be more tragic than electing somebody with just enough personal ambition and charisma to get there, and then not have a desire to hold steady on our positions.
I think we need to have a discussion about local versus national offices. Some people think you can only get to national office by starting local and building support. My concern is that so much local politics is fraught with trying to do the impossible with a shrinking tax base. A big part of the Labor Party program is that every local government has to have a minimum community investment tax by employers and businesses. Because when you try to impose a tax on business in just one community, they put a gun to your head and say, Hey, I'll relocate. It's an untenable situation - you either run the budget into the red, or play chicken with the employers and dare them to leave town. I do understand that you've got to start somewhere in political office. But the sad reality is that local government is one of the most thankless, difficult jobs, because there hasn't been any national standard for what a community needs in taxes to provide services.
I just hope that anybody who wants to argue for electoral participation has actually had to sit there on a phone bank or knocked on someone's door to try to sell a candidate. Those of us who have worked in serious campaigns know that it feels like you've laid down and rolled with some pigs. It's not a pretty activity. Because until you've walked in those shoes, it's all very theoretical, and that's a very dangerous place to advocate a strategy from - a theoretical view of people rising up.
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