Eight years ago there was a Black candidate in the Democratic Party primary for Governor who ran against someone named Cuomo. The Cuomo in question was Mario Cuomo, then the three-term sitting governor. The Black candidate who challenged him in the Democratic primary was me.

Unlike with Carl McCall’s current bid, in 1994 there was no cry from Black Democratic leadership to support me on the grounds that my campaign would energize the Black Agenda or that my election would empower African-Americans. There was no talk promoting the fact that if elected, I’d be the first Black governor of New York. To the contrary.

The Black Democrats’ posture toward me was – in a word – hostile. Two Black Democratic county leaders installed a round-the-clock operation at the Board of Elections in an effort to challenge my petitions and throw me off the ballot. They failed. When Governor Cuomo refused to appear in a televised debate with me – his only challenger in the Democratic primary – the Black Democrats did not criticize him or hold him to account. Gabe Pressman – who is not Black – did more to call attention to Cuomo’s arrogance than any Black leader when he hosted a debate on WNBC-TV between me and an empty chair.

Rev. Al Sharpton, who had personally pledged to me that he would endorse my candidacy against Cuomo, broke his promise. Instead of supporting a “sister,” Sharpton and his buddy, Alton “Fulani’s a Whore” Maddox, spent the entire campaign attacking me in the Black media.

Why were the Black Democrats so incensed about my run? Because they had a very specific agenda in 1994 and my candidacy threw a wrench into their plans. The 1994 election cycle was supposed to be Rev. Sharpton’s year – when Black Democrats resurrected him -this time, as a legitimate mainstream leader who would become the new Democratic arbiter of the Black vote.

The Democrats needed to crush me in order to properly position Sharpton.

In spite of the Black Democrats’ vicious antagonism toward my candidacy, and Cuomo having spent $3.5 million to my $180,000, on primary day I polled 21% of the vote. In Black Assembly Districts I polled between 30% and 35%.

The Black Democrats tried to be sanguine about my results. “A ham sandwich could have gotten 20%,” Assemblyman Herman Denny Farrell, now Democratic state party chairman, said at the time. In contrast, the Amsterdam News was more forthcoming. It described my showing as “incredible,” adding “Fulani and the organized Black community may well hold the key to victory or defeat” for Cuomo.

My candidacy had become a barometer of the growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party in the Black community. Cuomo was well aware of the perception that he was responsible for David Dinkins’ defeat in 1993, when he cunningly chose to commission and release the notorious Girgenti Report – which negatively evaluated Mayor Dinkins’ performance during the Crown Heights incidents – in the midst of the rematch between Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani. Cuomo’s strong advocacy for Carl McCall – then a first-time candidate for State Comptroller – was his strategy for neutralizing his “negatives” among African-Americans given that he had just helped elect a provocatively anti-Black mayor. McCall’s candidacy was promoted by Cuomo and the Black leadership as the opportunity to elect the first Black statewide official, but its true purpose was to help Cuomo survive. McCall was just a pawn – and a beneficiary – in the Democrats’ power game.

McCall won. Cuomo lost. George Pataki won. And, in a little reported story, the Black community won, too, because the Independence Party – whose gubernatorial candidate, Tom Golisano, I supported in the general election – won ballot status and began to evolve as a vehicle for Black empowerment.

We saw the fruits of that process recently when the Independence Party’s backing of Mike Bloomberg helped produce 30% of the Black vote for the new mayor and created a “new paradigm” – a non-Democrat paradigm – in Black politics.

Black grassroots dissatisfaction with the Democrats, which surfaced under Mayor Ed Koch in the ’80s, seethed under Mario Cuomo in the ’90s, and exploded in response to the vulgar racialism of the Democratic mayoral primary last year, has the Black Democrats worried. They’re worried – having lived through the Bloomberg experience – that the political cat is out of the bag. Now that a large segment of our community has tasted political freedom by voting against the Democrats and in their own interests, the leadership may not so easily stuff Black voters back in. Carl McCall is the Great Black Hope – the candidate through whom the Black Democrats hope to re-establish their iron-fisted control over the Black vote.

This year’s governor’s race, in my opinion, is about these issues – issues of power. It is not about racial achievement. It is not even about which of the candidates have the better education policy or job creation record or government experience. That is how the contest is being defined by partisan types across the spectrum and certainly the Black Democrats are trying to define it in those terms. We must define for ourselves what the election is about. And it must be about improving and advancing our political strength – as a community and as partners in broader coalitions. That means learning how to see through the smoke and mirrors of racialistic appeals. That means being smart enough to continue building the independent road.

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Last week Governor George Pataki attended the annual Black and Hispanic Caucus dinner, causing something of an uproar in Democratic Party circles. Predictably, he was criticized for showing up on the grounds he hadn’t come to the Caucus event in prior years. (Actually, this was the Governor’s third appearance.) Carl McCall, vying for the Democratic nomination to oppose Pataki in November, tried to score points by making a distinction between “new friends” and “true friends.”

Brother McCall might consider himself an expert on friendship, but I think Plato had better things to say on the topic than the State Comptroller does. When it comes to politics there is a basic axiom I follow. Politics has nothing to do with friendship. It has to do with power.

Governor Pataki didn’t come to the Black and Hispanic Caucus dinner looking for friends. He came because our communities have more political power now than in previous gubernatorial elections. How did we become more powerful? By demonstrating that we are becoming more independent.

A significant percentage of Black and Hispanic voters in New York have indicated that they will not automatically vote for a Democrat. The 30% of the Black vote and 48% of the Hispanic vote that broke with the Democratic Party and went for Mike Bloomberg in last year’s mayoral election established that a new paradigm is in the making. Gov. Pataki is responding to what Black and Latino voters did. He is responding to our political power.

Gov. Pataki is doing what he should be doing – reaching out to communities that have been traditionally ignored or underrated by the Republican Party. How should we respond? Not with foolish platitudes about friendship. The Black and Latino communities need to go to work discussing what policies we favor, and how to build and expand the political power we now hold.

I’m hosting a series of community forums in partnership with KISS-FM radio and the iconoclastic talk show wizards Bob Slade, Bob Pickett and James Mtume. Mark Riley of WLIB, Bob Law of WWRL and Gary James of WPAT have joined us. Together we’ve been organizing Town Hall meetings attended by 500 people at a time to discuss how our communities want to cultivate and build off of our independence. The Harlem meeting at the National Black Theatre was standing room only. The Brooklyn meeting at Medgar Evers drew nearly 600 people. These meetings weren’t set up to make friends. They were set up to create more of an independent power base – one that is not mediated by the Democrats – to exercise political power.

Now we’re all moving on to the Bronx and Queens. In the Bronx on Thursday, April 4th we’ll be joined by State Senator Pedro Espada, Jr. who recently made a grand power move of his own when he resigned from the Democratic Party, registered as a Republican and joined the Republican majority caucus in the State Senate. Edwin Ortiz, a leader of the Independence Party in the Bronx with a significant following among young people, will be on the panel, too. This will be a moment to make a statement about independent Black and Latino unity – the kind of unity that makes us powerful, rather than subservient to the Democratic Party.

Bill Withers famously sang the words, “Just call on me, brother, when you need a friend.” I love that song and I love that sentiment. I just don’t buy it when phony politicians try to sing it.

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The pages of Big Apple newspapers have been filled with spin on the results of the mayoral race. For the first few days, the story (made up by pundits who have nothing much else to do) was that the Giuliani vote put Mike Bloomberg over the top. Then the story switched to the role of the Black and Hispanic vote. Some commentators insisted that the winning combination was really Catholics, conservatives and men. One even suggested that it was Queens that sent Mike to City Hall, as if Queens were a political description instead of a borough.

I have a different spin. Actually, it’s kind of an anti-spin. My thinking is that there is no such thing as the “Giuliani vote” or the “Jewish vote” or the “Black vote.” And as a Black person I feel particularly strongly about this last point.

There is no such thing as “the Black vote.” “Black” is not a political category, any more than “Queens” is. Black is a racial category. It denotes skin color, not politics. When people vote they’re making a political statement, not a racial statement. Relating to it as such is a form of political racial profiling.

I campaigned strongly for Mike Bloomberg who was the candidate of the Independence Party – the party I helped to build. I was the first Black leader to endorse him and I reached out to tens of thousand of New Yorkers, many African-American, to ask for their votes for Mike. Many voted for him.

Roughly 25% of Black voters who went to the polls voted for Bloomberg, a notable increase in the number who
voted against the Democratic Party as compared with the last mayoral election. In 1997, some 57,000 African-Americans voted for Giuliani. In 2001, over 80,000 voted for Bloomberg.

Still, from my vantage point, none of that adds up to there being a Black vote. There are Black voters. But no Black vote.

For years my point has been that the Black community should be freed up from partisan control to vote for the best choice. On November 6th, a portion of the Black community did so. African Americans because a part of the broad independent takeover of City Hall.

Many people have asked me what the influence of the Black community will be in the new administration. I think Mike is eager to reach out and work with all communities, including the Black community. He didn’t get into office as part of a racialist political machine. He shook hands with Al Sharpton more times in the first two days after the election than Rudy Giuliani did in eight years.

Reporters have been asking me what job I’m going to demand in the new administration. I tell them I don’t want a job. I’m not interested in patronage. I’m interested in something much, much bigger: opening up the political process and getting rid of partisanship.

Some people are shocked to hear me say that. They think Mike owes me. He doesn’t. I’m a firm believer in the principle of giving to give — not giving to get. That’s a principle I believe in psychologically, emotionally and politically. Mike Bloomberg owes me nothing. And I owe him nothing. The issue now is whether there are some new things that we can do together for our city.

It’s becoming more and more recognizable that the Democratic Party is built on a racialistic foundation, not on a consensus building process. The party is very controlled by special interests and it’s hard to keep it
together. Mark Green exposed how visionless the Democratic Party is. Mike Bloomberg – together with the Independence Party and the independent voter- created an alternative.

There’s a new political environment in the city today. Independent voters of all races (and all boroughs) created it. It’s an environment where people can make choices based on merit and vision, not based on machine loyalty. For the Black community, that is key. It’s kind of a postmodern Emancipation Proclamation. We don’t have to be slaves to the Democrats anymore. We’re free.

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Last week, while our government was marshalling its resources to bring the fanatic perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack to justice, the New York Post editorial staff took time out to pen another of its diatribes against me. This one stemmed from my having raised questions about whether U.S. foreign policy had in any way contributed to the atmosphere of anti-American hatred that fueled the attackers. The Post singled me out for its usual vitriol, as if I am the only person in America to raise them.

In the days that followed the tragic event, however, others from across the political spectrum began to ask similar questions and offer some answers.

In a special report entitled “The Roots of Resentment – Why so many people hate America,” Business Week asserts, “Beneath the surface of public promises of solidarity with the U.S. in this time of crisis lurks a deep and growing resentment of America and its policies. To be sure, anti-Americanism in most places is hardly the virulent variety exhibited by flag-burning mobs. And more often than not, it’s mixed with admiration and even a desire to live in America. But the sentiment is serious enough that it could pose major challenges…”

Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, my one-time coalition partner in a left-right alliance for democracy reform and anti-interventionism, weighed in at the Los Angeles Times: “What took place last Tuesday was an atrocity. What is coming may qualify as tragedy. For the mass murder of our citizens has filled this country with a terrible resolve that could lead it to plunge headlong into an all-out war against despised Arab and Islamic regimes that turns into a war of civilizations, with the United States almost alone.”

Author and social critic Susan Sontag wrote in The New Yorker:

“The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

Perhaps most striking to me among the commentaries was an exchange between Meet the Press host Tim Russert and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Russert concluded his interview with Secretary Powell (by all accounts the most progressive of the President’s advisors) by asking him why we are so hated by the Islamic world.

Secretary Powell attempted to answer by counter-example, pointing to the many Arabs and Muslims who have emigrated to the United States to share in our way of life, like so many other nationalities before them, including his own.

But Powell makes an even deeper point than he (perhaps) intended. For while we may be loved by those who have become beneficiaries of American prosperity, we are deeply resented by those who haven’t. “Admiration and envy commingle with resentment and outright hatred,” observes Iran expert Elaine Sciolino in Sunday’s New York Times.

Some Americans are blinded by the pain of the tragedy and the bipartisan war rhetoric coming out of Washington, DC. Many others are concerned that war rhetoric may be functioning as a cover-up for what The Economist called “an extraordinary failure of intelligence gathering.”

Many who have reached out to me are aware that behind all the rhetoric, it is the continued immiseration of so much of the world, the graphic inequality in the distribution of wealth that must somehow be addressed. Counter-terrorist actions can and should be exercised to the fullest extent to catch and punish the murderers and protect against future attacks. But the “new kind of war” we most need is a U.S.-led war on international poverty.

Right now, the U.S. financial spigot is on full force. The Bush Administration is horse-trading for political and military partners. It eased economic sanctions on Pakistan and promised help with its $38 billion debt in exchange for President Pervez Musharraf’s agreement to squeeze the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. It has negotiated to base U.S. troops in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, both formerly part of the Soviet Union and on the Afghanistan border. It is expected that U.S. aid to both governments will be forthcoming in exchange for that access.

This economic aide is a double-edged sword because while it shores up the U.S. coalition, it does less by way of redistributing the wealth than supporting authoritarian regimes. This merely exacerbates the problem which Sciolino describes as “the perception that America bolsters authoritarian governments even while it heralds democracy as an ideal.”

A new kind of war to eliminate poverty internationally is not a war to buy friends. It is a war to liberate the world’s people from misery and the ideological traps that often accompany misery, like ultra-nationalism, tribalism, and religious fanaticism. We have the technology. We have the wealth-producing capacity. We have the human capital to support the institution-building needed to relieve poverty. What we need now is the will. And the will, ultimately, will have to come from the American people.

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A very intriguing and controversial political relationship has formed with huge implications for the Black electorate. Not surprisingly, Dr. Lenora Fulani is at the center of that controversy and said relationship. Dr. Fulani has endorsed Michael Bloomberg, a Republican candidate for Mayor of New York City who, as a staple of his campaign strategy, is actively courting independent voters. The combination of a consistently unpredictable political maverick like Dr. Fulani and the financial news emperor with an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion dollars – Michael Rubens Bloomberg – on the surface appears odd. But that is before one considers the important role that Fulani’s Independence Party plays in New York politics. Remember it was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and her husband, the former President of the United States, who actively courted members of the Independence Party in an effort to win over the Party’s support of the then-candidate for U.S. Senator – Mrs. Clinton. In addition, many credit Sen. Charles Schumer’s victory over Alfonse D’Amato (in the 1998 Senate race) to the fact that Schumer received 109,027 votes from individuals voting for him on the Independence Party line. For all of the controversy that surrounds the Independence Party and its association with the controversial Fulani, politicians recognize that the Party has, in the past, played the role of “king-maker”. Bloomberg realizes this and thus, his outreach to “I.P.”, as the party is known in New York political circles.

On the other hand, Dr. Fulani sees in Bloomberg not just an opportunity for her party’s political agenda and profile to be raised by Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy, but also an opportunity to break Black voters out of the habit of their traditional support of the Democratic Party and into the beginning stages of an effort that she hopes will bring the Black electorate into independent politics.

In a recent discussion Dr. Fulani told BlackElectorate.com that she thinks that the Democratic Party is especially vulnerable in the New York Mayoral election and that the Bloomberg candidacy represents a great opportunity for the Black electorate to leverage its voting power in a way that allows it to break free of the deadly dichotomy where Black voters are taken for granted by Democrats and ignored by the Republican Party. She even informed us that she sees a potential victory for the Black electorate in this election even if Bloomberg loses.

She told us:

“What this election is about is whether or not we in the Black community are going to break with the Democratic Party. The four Democrats running for Mayor (City Council Speaker Peter Vallone; Public Advocate Mark Green; City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer) have not produced any passion in the Black community. If 20% of the Black community voted for Bloomberg it would help the entire community. If we give him 20% then we win because it makes the Black vote an unpredictable vote in the future. The Black community doesn’t realize how valuable unpredictable votes are. People have to negotiate with you if they don’t know what you are going to do. In 1992, when Ross Perot got 20% of the White vote, that group was the most sought after group of votes in the country because they were unpredictable”

We asked Dr. Fulani why a decision on her part, to run for Mayor would not accomplish this goal better than her endorsement of Bloomberg and she responded, ” Bloomberg is bigger than I am. He will get more votes than I could and our Party grows from this in a way that it could not from my candidacy. And it is important for people to realize that the Independence Party is a Party with a significant and influential Black membership. We have a say in this Party like we have never had in the Republican Party or Democratic Party. In the Independence party of our 50,000 registrars, 15,000 are Black”

While Fulani has endorsed Bloomberg, the question remains whether Bloomberg, unlike Reform Party Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan, will actually follow Fulani’s advice regarding how he should pursue the Black vote. Some wonder whether Bloomberg is sincerely after the votes of disgruntled Black Democrats and those who don’t vote at all or whether he is solely content with winning the votes of those who are already members of the Independence Party. Most political observers don’t believe that Bloomberg can defeat the Democratic Party nominee without a showing of 15% or better among Black voters. But his chances of winning the Republican Party nomination in his race against Herman Badillo seem to be improving everyday. Yesterday a poll was released that indicated that Bloomberg would fare better against any of the Democratic opponents than would Badillo. In addition Bloomberg’s deep pockets may eventually overpower Badillo’s dwindling and relatively meager campaign fund. Thus far Bloomberg is said to have dropped around $8 million already , on his campaign, while Badillo has raised $215,635 and has spent almost $186,000 of it.

If Bloomberg can win the Republican nomination and run a campaign that attracts dissatisfied Black Democrats, and independent and young Black voters, he could pull an upset and have the effect that Fulani suggests.

Cedric Muhammad
July 26, 2001

Here is Dr. Fulani’s explanation, unedited, as to why she is supporting Michael Bloomberg for Mayor of New York City. It was written last month.

——————————————-

WHY I’M ENDORSING MIKE BLOOMBERG FOR MAYOR
By Lenora B. Fulani

The Black community has a solid and exciting option in the mayoral
race this year. He’s Mike Bloomberg and he’s running for mayor on the
Independence Party ticket. I’m enthusiastically endorsing his candidacy.
And I’m hitting the streets to campaign for him among Black voters this week.

Mike Bloomberg is the kind of candidate the Black community likes to
vote for. He has liberal values and a genuine concern about education,
public health and social justice. But more than that, he’s independent.
That’s why the Independence Party endorsed him. And that’s why I think
he’s far and away the best mayoral candidate for Black New Yorkers.

African Americans have been loyal Democrats for a long time. Some – myself
among them – think it’s been too long. The Democratic machine counts on
our votes to stay in power, but we’ve little to show for it. Our schools
are failing. Our kids aren’t learning. And our political leverage has all
but dried up.

The Democratic mayoral candidates may be courting us now with
pronouncements about racial profiling and Black-Latino unity, but
the Democratic nominee will surely turn his back on us as soon
as he needs to. That’s what it means to be taken for granted
politically. And that’s our current situation.

Mike Bloomberg is not a machine politician. Though a longtime
registered Democrat, he bypassed the Democratic Party for this
election because he knew that only a clubhouse politician could
capture the Democratic nomination. He decided to run as a Republican,
not because he is a conservative, but because he is a radical.
He was radical enough to say party labels don’t matter. The real
issue is what you stand for. And he stands for many things that the
Black community needs and wants.

But I’m endorsing Mike Bloomberg for reasons that go well beyond
what he stands for. I’m endorsing him and campaigning for him in
the streets, the churches, the playgrounds and the shopping centers
because if Black people grab this opportunity to vote for an independent,
the entire New York political establishment will wake up and take notice.

Consider this. If we produce a strong Black independent vote this
year, Al Sharpton will seriously weigh a 2004 presidential run as
an independent. Every Black elected official in this town (all
Democrats now) will be forced to – and able to – shift positions
away from the party line toward the community’s line. For example,
poll after poll shows the Black community supports school choice,
in the form of charter schools and vouchers. But our Black elected
officials won’t fight for them because they must dance to the tune
of the Democratic leadership. If we go independent, all the
choreography changes.

There are lots of folks in this town who don’t want us to go
independent for Bloomberg. Some of them are typical white
liberals like Gail Collins of the New York Times who has questioned
whether anyone will be willing to vote for Mike Bloomberg on the
Independence Party line because I’m a leader of the party. The
“anyone” she has in mind includes Black people, whom Gail – and
all white liberals of that ilk – think are too stupid to make up their own
mind. We’re not.

Mike Bloomberg isn’t stupid, either. He didn’t get to be a billionaire
by making the wrong partnerships or misreading the marketplace.
He made a partnership with the Independence Party because he
believes political independence is the right way and the way of the
future. He knows there are 750,000 registered independents in
New York City. And he told the Independence Party in no uncertain
terms that he wants the Black community to be part of his coalition.

The trend toward political independence among Blacks is reaching
new levels. Last week I was an invited guest at a conference called
by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies where a report
was released showing that 42.6% of African Americans between 18
and 25 now consider themselves politically independent. My aim is to
reach those young people, as well as the many disillusioned older
people, with the message that the Bloomberg candidacy offers us the
opportunity to turn things around for our community.

I’ve met Mike Bloomberg. I followed the process by which he pursued
and received the nomination of my party, the Independence Party. I
noted that his first public appearance as a candidate was in Harlem.
And I watched him stand alongside dozens of Independence Party
candidates – many of them Black and Latino – and support our call for
nonpartisan municipal elections, a critical reform designed to break
machine control of politics.

Mike Bloomberg is a good man. He’s a caring man. He cares about
people not parties. I’m for him 100%. I think his campaign can make
all the difference in the world for us.

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My good friend Rev. Al Sharpton is in jail again. There are two places I’ve tried to keep him out of over the years – prison and the Democratic Party. Obviously, I’m not doing too well on the first goal. What about the second?

Convicted of trespassing for his protest of Navy bombings at the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, Sharpton was transferred to federal prison in Brooklyn last week, keeping his profile and his spirits high. Sharpton, who has gone everywhere for every important social justice cause, knows full well that Vieques has become a means to court Puerto Rican voters in New York City where wants to set himself up as the center of a Black-Latino coalition – a sought-after commodity in the racialized world of Big Apple politics.

This is vintage Sharpton – genuine political vision with a hardball lining. Of course, he never got himself arrested for Vieques while Bill Clinton, Democrat, was Commander in Chief. It took having a Republican in the White House to make it politically correct for him to protest. Democrat Jimmy Carter was President when the outcry first started, led by Puerto Rican independents like Gilberto Gerena-Valentin, the first New York Chairman of the New Alliance Party (NAP). I later ran for President twice on the NAP line calling for – among other things – the withdrawal of the U.S. military from Puerto Rico and full voting rights for its people. And while we’re on the subject of running for the presidency, let’s get on to Sharpton’s own potential run.

I know Rev well. I’m the person who got him into electoral politics in the first place (even though I’ve been trying to get him out of the Democratic Party ever since). Here’s how I read his presidential musings, which included remarks about considering a third party. I think Rev. is looking around his cell thinking, I’m not only in jail, I’m in a box.

Sharpton has built a significant base among African-Americans, but he knows that if that’s all he’s got, he’s limited to power brokering within Democratic Party circles. He’s always vulnerable to being marginalized by demographics and by the racism of the Democratic hierarchs, who respect him when they need to and mistreat him when they need to. They believe that he will never leave because Black = Democrat, end of story. You’ll not see Daschle/Sharpton in ’04 or any other year. I don’t care how many headlines he gets on Vieques or any other racial justice issue. Rev’s in a bind. And I think he’s mulling the presidential picture to see if it offers a way out. Sharpton says he’d consider a run in 2004, in part to commemorate Rev. Jesse Jackson’s first run 20 years ago. In 1984, Jackson polled 3 1/2 million votes and got a prime time speaking slot at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, where he was forced to apologize for controversial remarks made during his campaign. A lot of the Jackson delegates wanted to walk out and run a third party candidacy that night, but the effort fizzled.

Several months later the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan conducted a poll, which showed that 57% of Blacks would have voted for Jackson as an independent candidate. If he’d done that, the Black community would have been at the helm of the independent political movement. We might have had a Perot/Jackson ticket in 1992, and we might have started up a multi-racial independent populist party competing toe-to-toe in elections with Democrats and Republicans all over the country today.

That didn’t happen. Rev. Sharpton should take some time, while he’s behind bars, reflecting on that. When the next presidential race comes around, we don’t need a symbolic celebration of what was and might have been. Black America needs a way forward. And Sharpton needs a way out of his political incarceration. The only way out is to go independent.

Anyone for Ventura/Sharpton in ’04?

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A lot of the talk on the political pundit circuit lately is about how independent presidential candidates will affect the campaigns of the Democrat and the Republican.

This spin cycle began when Forbes magazine speculated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, conservative Pat Buchanan may injure Al Gore more than George Bush in November by drawing rank and file labor voters to the Reform Party ticket because of his positions on trade and globalism.

Then there is speculation about the extent to which Buchanan will peel away hard-core pro-lifers if Bush chooses a pro-choice running mate. Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said, “Five to eight percent of the voters will defect on the pro-life issue, and Pat Buchanan is there.”

At the same time Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate who was profiled in the New York Times last week, is widely regarded as
a left candidate who will pull votes from Gore. Commenting on a poll by the Zogby Group that showed Nader at 5 percent and Buchanan at 3 percent, the Times added — perhaps to comfort two-party enthusiasts who are miffed that there are any independents running at all — “… an aggressive Nader campaign could entirely offset advantages Mr. Gore might gain from Mr. Buchanan’s candidacy, which is expected to siphon votes from the apparent Republican nominee, Gov. George W. Bush.”

These are certainly interesting — if highly speculative — analyses. But they miss what is, in the long run, a far more important story. That is the story of the impact of the independent presidential candidates on the independent movement which seeks to supplant bipartisan special interest control of government with a multi-party grass-roots democratic system.

At one level, Buchanan and Nader have straightforward goals. Buchanan wants to get the Reform Party nomination so he’ll have $12.5 million to get his message out in November. Nader wants to get his message out and poll above 5 percent so that the next time around, the Greens will have $12 million to spend.

But at another level, these independent candidacies have put a potential realignment of American politics on the table. As candidates of the left and right, respectively, who share a remarkable number of positions on trade, globalization, foreign policy and political reform, they popularize the notion of a left/right coalition as the base of a future majority party in America.

While Buchanan may be more forthright in his left/right efforts (by seeking my endorsement for example) when the ballots are counted in November, we may well be looking at 15 million total votes cast for Nader and Buchanan. In other words, we’ll see 15 million Americans from the left and the right who want an alternative to the current globalist bipartisan system. That’s a sign there is a basis for a long-term left/right independent coalition.

Will the left and right come together? Alexander Cockburn, theleftist arch-muckraker, was a guest on my weekly TV show last week and
had some insightful comments about the potential for left/right coalitions. He also has some acid observations about the extent to which the traditional left — in the face of that potential — keeps its followers in the fold by terrifying them with a fantasized picture of the power of the right.

In a dialogue with my co-host Fred Newman, Cockburn observed that the left, often in conjunction with the U.S. Justice Department, “cultivate(s) this image of an America where there is an enormously powerful right waiting like a panther to pounce. It’s drivel. But the minute you have a possibility of unusual alliances, of getting behind the theatre, the mime of the American politics, they invoke this bogey.”

The left is conservative in the extreme when it comes to left/right coalitions. And Cockburn is one of the powerful voices on the American left who see the “creative” use of left/right coalitions offering an opportunity to go beyond the corruption of current day politics. Referring to Buchanan having reversed his pro-war posture of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Cockburn said,

To the extent that Buchanan’s come off that position, then congratulations to him … look, he is against the sanctions in Iraq

that are killing all those Iraqi children. Some fellow on the left protested to me about my being at that conference (the Antiwar.com

conference at which Cockburn, Buchanan and I all spoke).

I said, “Al Gore is in favor of sanctions, Bill Clinton is in favor of sanctions, Madeleine Albright is in favor of sanctions. Pat Buchanan is not in favor of sanctions. So I’m happy to be at a conference with him.”

The traditional right, like the traditional left, opposes left/right coalitions, too. In last week’s issue of the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor and the author of a left-baiting
broadside against Pat Buchanan’s move to the Reform Party entitled, “Conservative No More,” pooh-poohed the notion that America could go beyond left and right, dismissing it as “something pretty much only said by liberals and leftists.” Ponnuru’s observation, however, misses a new turn of events in U.S.

Ponnuru’s observation, however, misses a new turn of events in U.S. politics — namely, how some conservatives are now the ones raising cutting edge policy issues that have been abandoned by the left and liberals. Cockburn noted this on my show in a discussion of the U.S.-led war in the Balkans: “… a lot of the opposition to the war and the most spirited opposition to the war came from what would convincingly be regarded as the right. Of course, the center, so to speak, the liberals, had been the most prominent faction calling for war, calling for bombing, as they have called for other interventions in recent times like the Somalian intervention and Iraq. They are the drum beaters for war.”

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The left’s ongoing hysteria over Patrick Buchanan’s turn to the Reform Party, and his subsequent endorsement by Reform’s progressive Black leader Lenora Fulani, speaks volumes about the state of the American left. It tells us that beneath the anti-Buchanan and anti-Fulani rhetoric, the left believes itself to be so weak that if it comes in contact with social conservatism, it will be overwhelmed. In order to keep Buchanan at bay, the left insists that even if he has some inescapably populist, anti-globalist positions, like the ones on trade, imperialism and political reform, the fact that he is “right” (i.e., wrong) on cultural issues negates the extent to which he has a constituency which responds to a class politic.

The left’s fear that it will be overwhelmed is comprehensible, but, as a practical matter, impossible. The U.S. left cannot be overwhelmed by the right. Why? Because it has already been overwhelmed by the Democratic Party. It has no separate identity, no distinct principles, no mass movement or tactic to call its own.

The “Buchanan panic” is really not about Buchanan. It’s actually a panic over the prospect that progressives are talking to, communicating with and interacting with the American people. This is an activity that the American left works overtime to avoid. Progressives who violate this axiom, like Fulani, are ostracized. The left prefers to talk only to itself, which is one good reason it has been rendered irrelevant.

BACKING “COMRADE” GORE

Look at the left’s sad tactical position in Campaign 2000. First, they have Al Gore. Okay, so he’s pro-war and pro-global capitalist economic savagery. He was an early architect of the Democratic Leadership Council takeover of the Democratic Party which threw the Rainbow (Blacks and the left) and the old New Deal left (labor) out of power. You can’t have everything. On the plus side, he wrote a feel good book on the environment, thinks gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military (but won’t require the Joint Chiefs to share his belief), and he got the AFL-CIO’s early endorsement (even if it was rammed through as the rank and file headed for Seattle to protest Clinton/Gore support for the World Trade Organization). He invented the Internet … okay, so he didn’t invent the Internet, but he knows how to spell it.

The left says it is just being realistic. It couldn’t produce its own candidate to challenge Gore in the Democratic primary. Jackson wouldn’t run. Sen. Paul Wellstone wouldn’t run. Sen. Bob Kerrey – yes, Kerrey was on the left’s short list – wouldn’t run. Warren Beatty wouldn’t run. Bill Bradley, the only alternative to Gore, is not a left candidate. He’s just an alternative candidate, who calls himself a reformer. Thus, much of the left will embrace Gore as a compañero. Those who are disgruntled will go to Plan B. Ralph Nader.

CLEAN FOR THE GREENS

Nader, who is about to announce that he will run for the presidency as an independent on the Green Party ticket for a second time, is the left’s escape hatch candidate. If you can’t bear to vote for Gore (like some of the writers at The Nation can’t), you vote for Nader. But you make damn sure that Nader doesn’t go anywhere near (a) Pat Buchanan, (b) Lenora Fulani, (c) the Reform Party, and (d) working class America. Ralph is to be a “progressive populist.” That’s leftspeak for “good” populist, i.e., one who talks only to other “good” populists and stays away from the backward, racist, sexist, homophobic, politically incorrect masses, because they’re … well, politically incorrect. Never mind that this leaves the left talking only to itself and leaves the rightwing with a clear path to organize and politicize the bulk of the population.

Nader and I were on a television talk show together recently – the Canadian Broadcast Network’s Counterspin, where we had a dialogue on independent politics and the left/center/right coalition. Nader said the purpose of independent politics was to pull the Democratic Party to the left.

I disagreed. Independent politics should be pulling the left to the American people-all the American people. The left should be organizing a left/center/right base around the need for structural political and economic reform. Nader conceded that left/center/right coalitions on issues like trade are useful. But his tactical perspective on his own candidacy is more narrow; it is designed to appeal mainly to the left.

Nader and his handlers turned down overtures to meet with Fulani’s left wing of Reform on the grounds that Reform is ideologically impure, thus consigning the Nader candidacy to the rarified playing field of radicals, students, enviros and liberal “goo-goos.” Why can’t the left participate with the right and the center in building a new electoral movement and political party? Because it has to hold onto its “principles.” In other words, if the left gets anywhere near middle America, it fears it will lose its progressivism. That doesn’t say very much for the left’s commitment to its core values.

Oddly, leftists seem totally oblivious to the fact that they have for the most part sold out their principles, i.e., the left’s independent identity and its historic mission to organize the working class. It’s as if the left didn’t realize that it has been totally outmaneuvered within and by the party that it believes it is “power sharing” inside of.

THE PHONY WAR ON REAGAN

In 1984, after Ronald Reagan, the scourge of American leftists and liberals had served one term, the left cranked up its timeworn machinery and hit the bricks. “Reagan must go!” was the battle cry. The left took to the streets with bright red banners and militant placards. Reagan, the warmonger! Reagan, the anti-poor budget cutter! Reagan the anti-civil rights, pro-life, anti-people “Darth Vader in the White House” devil! We’re gonna take him apart! It’s time for class war! Power to the All People’s Front Against Reaganism! Great stuff. But did the left have a way to get rid of Reagan, other than by electing a Democrat? No.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party was torn by intense internecine power struggles. The democratized rules changes wrought by George McGovern after 1968 were rolled back by former Vice President Walter Mondale, who would soon become the party’s presidential nominee. The party’s left wing, including Jesse Jackson who was running for the first time, was being shut out. But the left, in an uproar over Reaganism, was too busy fabricating its revolutionary uprising to notice.

At the 1984 San Francisco Democratic Convention (the one where Jackson made his prime time mea culpa speech to the party’s hierarchs and squashed the rebellion in his own ranks to walk out and set up a national independent Rainbow party that very night) the Mondale Machine took control of the party and the nomination. They didn’t care about defeating Reagan. As the commentator Walter Karp wrote in Harper’s magazine that July:

“Ronald Reagan, in short, could not be opposed; the more extreme his program, the more dangerous it would be to oppose him. Such a collusive policy would make the 1984 Democratic nominations something considerably less than the high road to the White House, but Democratic leaders had no choice. They could not nominate their tame creature and also offer opposition to the counterrevolt of the privileged. What electorate that cared deeply about anything could possibly care about Walter Mondale? For the Democrats, power and popularity had parted company.”

Ever since the popular front with Franklin Roosevelt the left has been a little slow to pick up on what’s going on. In the streets of San Francisco and in the vast parking lot outside the Moscone Convention Center the left was there in all its militant glory. Dump Reagan! For an All People’s Front Against Reaganism!

Naturally, Mondale and his gang of party regulars loved it. There was the American left, pouring its heart out, for who? Walter Mondale, the guy who chased the reds out of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and Geraldine Ferraro, the centrist mob wife-turned-feminist goddess. But the revolution was canceled. Mondale/Ferraro got creamed. And what of the working class? They voted for Reagan.

LEFT AT THE ALTAR

From then on, the left has been in a state of political dementia. At some level it was aware that its Democratic Party tactic had run its course. Though Mondale’s liberal coalition seized control of the party from the new left, it also set the stage for its own demise and the ascendancy of the centrist DLC: Mondale, and four years later, Michael Dukakis proved that traditional liberalism was no longer viable if you wanted to be competitive in national politics.

In 1988, Jesse Jackson ran as a left wing pro-working class candidate, got twice the number of votes he had in the 1984 primaries, and was entirely shut out of the party’s centers of power. Lenora Fulani ran her first presidential campaign in 1988, getting on the ballot in all 50 states, qualifying for federal primary funds and polling 220,000 votes. She was vilified by the official left during the campaign, which cranked up an aggressive rumor mill against her designed to discourage the left from going independent.

Al Gore ran for the first time in 1988, too, in a kind of test run for the centrist DLC, which was circling the bloodied Mondale coalition like a vulture. Still, Gore’s southern strategy didn’t have enough traction to make it to the party’s nomination. But the 1988 Dukakis debacle and the refusal of the left to go independent was enough to convince the DLC that another southern white boy with a little more sex appeal might be able to do the trick. That was Bill Clinton, who took both the party and the presidency in 1992, riding the implosion of the Democratic Party’s old New Deal center, the explosion of the independent populist movement for Ross Perot and the erosion of the economy under George Bush.

At that point, the left was faced with three choices.

A) It could muster a left challenge to Clinton and DLC in the 1996 presidential primaries.

B) It could submerge itself in the Clinton coalition, grabbing little policy-making sinecures and wait for the mythic pendulum to swing back to the left, all the while engaging in high minded debates on whether Clinton’s “Third Way” was the death or rebirth of American progressivism.

C) It could go independent and begin the long hard road of deconstructing and reconstructing itself, its tactic and its message and try talking to someone other than themselves.

FEMINISTS ABORT INDEPENDENT TACTIC

The left chose (B). However, not without some conflict. The women’s movement, for example, afraid that its status would crumble if the sexist southern white boys regime took power, made a brief foray into 3rd party politics. In 1991, leaders of NOW launched the 21st Century Party – with UFW organizer Dolores Huerta as its chair. Fulani, among others, applauded the move and participated in the founding convention. But this effort, dedicated to creating an independent tactical alternative to the Democratic Party, closed up shop within its first year. Why? Not because grassroots women didn’t want to participate. Not because there weren’t plenty of ordinary American women interested in putting the gender gap to work for women, rather than for the two parties. But because Pat Ireland and the NOW leadership bought the Democratic Party’s argument that social conservatives like Pat Buchanan would win the day on abortion in America if women went independent. And so they retreated virtually the moment the 21st Century Party was formed.

However, the much-ballyhooed social conservative juggernaut did not materialize. It unraveled, largely because the majority of Americans support choice, even if they are conflicted on the issue of abortion. The Republican Party recognized it could not win national elections by embracing social conservatism. That’s why George W. Bush will be the Republican nominee this year. And that is why Buchanan left the Republican Party and threw his hat into the Reform Party ring. The American people are fundamentally libertarian on social issues and the social conservatives could not forge a national majority on the rights of the unborn.

But the feminists, like the left from which it takes its cues, have little trust or faith in the American people. They are elitist to the core and believe that they are all that stands between an enlightened secular social policy on abortion and the pro-life Dark Ages.

I was recently interviewed on a PBS women’s affairs show hosted by Bonnie Erbé, “To the Contrary,” on the topic of the Reform Party’s relevance to women. I discussed the connection between restructuring the political system and breaking up the “men’s club” that still controls American politics, noting the fact that only 12% of members Congress are women. She asked me why there were no women candidates seeking the Reform Party’s presidential nomination. I pointed out that the women’s movement had stayed out of independent politics, choosing instead to hitch its wagon to the Democratic Party.

After the interview, Erbé played it for a panel of feminist experts including Ruth Coniff of The Progressive and Julianne Malveaux of the Center for Policy Alternatives. All the panel could do was giggle incessantly over the “spectacle” of the Buchanan/Fulani alliance.

The notion that Fulani, the Black feminist left winger had co-created a new political party to whom Buchanan, the displaced disempowered pro-lifer had come for support, was inconsequential to them. The notion that this was an opportunity for feminism to diversify its political connections and thereby increase its leverage with the Democratic Party was unimaginable. So was any consideration of the possibility that Fulani’s connection to Buchanan might give them access to the masses of ordinary, working class pro-life women, women who a left with principles would want to engage. There was, however, none of that. To the contrary. The show became one more opportunity to belittle (or in this case, giggle about) left/center/right coalition building, which is really an elaborate cover for the left saying it’s too frightened to go out of the house.

THE LEFT’S NEW MCCARTHY: ITSELF

It’s not as if there aren’t historical reasons for the left’s paranoia. The Democratic Party – i.e., Roosevelt and later his successor Harry Truman did betray the popular front. Senator Joseph McCarthy did conduct a scurrilous witch hunt with the blessing of the bipartisan political establishment – including notably, the liberal establishment-and the left was badly hurt and isolated as a result. It was the American people who managed to hold on to the substantive gains of the working class movement of the 1930’s and later the social liberation movements of the 1960’s, in spite of the fact that left leadership has become increasingly marginalized or compromised in contemporary US politics.

Sadly, the left’s paranoia in the face of its own defeats, has caused it to become more and more isolated and thereby more and more paranoid. Journalistic voices of the left like the New Republic and The Nation, who were among the most ardent critics of McCarthyism and the anti-communist Reign of Terror, today practice their own brand of McCarthyism. Now it’s directed at progressives like Fulani and her political mentor Fred Newman who eschew the “party line” on the Democratic Party and who have conjoined with politically incorrect antiestablishment partners to build a populist independent party. They aim to use the Reform Party and the partnership with Buchanan to create a new majoritarian class coalition.

The traditional left’s antipathy to leftists seeking extra-Democratic Party alliances with the center and the right is so extreme that The New Republic and The Nation have both run articles to incite government investigations of Fulani. That is sad evidence that the left is terribly corrupt. “Naming names” of other leftists was once the definition of left betrayal. Today it is the mantra of what’s left of the left.

Journalist Justin Raimondo, author of Behind the Headlines on Antiwar.com helpfully summarized the hysteria over the Fulani/Buchanan alliance this way in his recent column, “Fulani, Buchanan, and the Smear Machine”:

“For now, suffice it to say that the smearing of Lenora Fulani is meant to intimidate thinking leftists (and thinking conservatives) into staying safely inside their predetermined and unalterable political categories, like prisoners locked up for life. It’s meant to scare people away from Fulani and Buchanan and mark them as political untouchables. But most of all it is meant to show that the realm of politics belongs to the elites, and is not to be intruded on by the hoi polloi like Buchanan, Fulani, or anyone not likely to be endorsed by the editors of the New York Times or the New Republic.”

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