For years, people have been saying that the left lacks new ideas. Anyone who makes that claim today hasn't heard from Joel Rogers.

A professor of law, political science, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin and a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant' recipient, Rogers is bursting with ideas about how to reinvigorate democracy and win back voters to the progressive cause, which he spells out in a steady round of speeches, books, and alternative press articles. He is also a founder and national chair of the New Party, which has gained impressive ground in local elections in Wisconsin, Arkansas, Maryland, and Montana.

The MacArthur people weren't the first to tag Rogers with the 'genius' label. After an Irish Catholic boyhood in Middletown, New Jersey, he sprinted through Yale in two years, graduating with a triple major in philosophy, political science, and economics. (Asked if anyone had ever done that before, he replies, a little sheepishly, 'I don't think so.') He also took a law degree at Yale before moving on to Princeton for two years to get a Ph.D. in political science and then to Heidelberg in 1977 for further study of philosophy.

Yet Rogers, a remarkably young-looking 44 with unruly reddish hair and a sly grin, didn't spend his entire youth sitting in seminar rooms. He marched through the streets of New Haven in anti-war protests, volunteered as a draft counselor, and was a rock-concert promoter. In his spacious old house in Madison, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife, Sarah, a public interest lawyer, and their daughters, Sophia, 6, and Helen, 8, you'll find as many books about rock 'n' roll and soul music as about political philosophy.

In a way, as an academic whiz kid from modest origins who was shaped by the political tides of the '60s, he resembles Bill Clinton. (A friend from college said everyone who knew him half expected Rogers to wind up in the White House.) So what does Rogers think of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? 'I think Clinton is the most talented politician of his generation,' he says, 'but he's without a clear and confident moral center. He is, I guess, basically a good guy in many ways but he is not prepared to stand up to the unbridled corporate power now stomping this country.'