According to Robert Borosage, the co-director of Campaign for America’s Future and an adviser to Jackson, the left should now take advantage of the weakened state of the Republicans by emulating the conservatives’ 1976 strategy that propelled Ronald Reagan and the party’s right wing into the White House four years later. Borosage wants a Reagan redux but with a Rainbow hue.

It was, says Borosage, the key to the right’s eclipse of the Republican agenda, Reagan’s presidential victory and the Republican majority in the Senate in 1980. Borosage asks: “Are today’s progressives prepared to take a similar risk in 2000?” Apparently not, now that Jackson and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) have decided not to run. But even the premise of the strategy is flawed. The right’s post-1976 success involved, among other things, the mobilization of an independent base into the Republican Party. Some key architects of the conservative movement (Richard Viguerie, Kevin Phillips, Joseph Coors), according to accounts by historian James MacGregor Burns, initially counseled Reagan to run as an independent because the Republican Party could not be a viable home for social conservatives.

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