Beyond Bush

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It’s a big job, so we’d better start today. George W. Bush has proven himself to be a startlingly effective spokesman for radical right-wing ideas. Instead of laughing him off as a grammatically challenged intellectual underachiever, we should have been studying his gift for making connections with people—especially many Middle Americans who find something in him that reassures them, despite the fact that his economic, environmental, and foreign policies undercut their best interests. So how do we beat Bush in 2004?

It’s not as hard as it looks, says Jim Hightower, chief rabble-rouser for the cause of progressive populism and a former elected state official in conservative Texas. “The Republicans won with only 15 percent of eligible voters in last year’s congressional races. We need a message that appeals to the people who aren’t voting.”

Hightower doesn’t buy the standard political line that Democrats must moderate their views to pull in more supporters. Just the opposite, he says in his amiable drawl. “I say we need to get people excited. We need a candidate with integrity who will ignite the public. And we need a message that shows people that ‘we’re on your side.’”

The peace movement, Hightower says, is the place to start organizing an ouster of Bush and company. He then rattles off a few other key issues that Democrats could embrace to win a majority of voters (see box).

Veteran activist Harriet Barlow, who was sufficiently disenchanted with the Democrats in 1980 to become one of the driving forces behind Barry Commoner’s Citizens Party, is also strategizing how to get the Democratic Party back into power. “What people really want is to hear a voice that is as determined to promote the values of an open society and the rule of law and the well-being of the domestic populace, as George Bush is about his ideology of god and guns.

“We should be doing everything we can as citizens,” she adds, “ to force the Democrats to change their terrible tendency to spend untold amounts of money battling each other in the primaries, destroying the party’s chance of competing in November. My big fantasy is that instead of having primary debates where the candidates fight with each other, we put together some footage of George Bush so the candidates can debate him. Then we can see who’s really good at it.”

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