Sarah Jessica Parker pressed into service

[Brad DeLong]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>That said, elections are only a minuscule part of politics, and we 
>>need to win in the court of public opinions & (more importantly) 
>>mobilizations; otherwise, _access_ to abortion _will_ continue to 
>>erode, regardless of whoever will be in the White House.  I wish 
>>that the NARAL, etc. had challenged Nader & the Green Party & 
>>extracted a promise that they _will_ mobilize manpower on this 
>>issue, instead of trying to scare potential Nader/Green supporters 
>>into voting for Gore.
>
>Yes, absolutely. The liberal anguish over Court appointments seems 
>symptomatic of their reliance on elite institutions - what Adolph 
>Reed scornfully refers to as the strategy of getting all the smart 
>people together on the Vineyard...

I am not now and I have never been on Martha's Vineyard--not even to 
go swimming.

But let me put in a plea for a system that would have Mary Jo Bane 
playing a major role in setting up our social insurance system, 
rather than picking someone at random or--even worse--someone who has 
been hypnotized by Rush Limbaugh.

I was on Michael Krasny's show on KQED last Wednesday--as the Gore 
economy guy. And I left thinking (a) that Michael is a genius for 
making his show as informative as it can be, (b) that radio is such 
an immensely low-bandwidth way of disseminating information, and (c) 
that even so we had managed to significantly inform the listeners.

Since moving to California and living under the dead hand of Howard 
Jarvis as magnified by the voter initiative process, I have become a 
lot less enamored of all forms of direct democracy--and a lot more 
enamored of elections as 
picking-smart-hard-working-people-who-approximately-share-your=-priorities...

Brad DeLong