If there is thing we can say with relative certainty at this point in the 2000 election, it is that whomever occupies the White House, he will have great difficulty enacting any legislative program -- given the challenges to the legitimacy of his election, and the virtually evenly divided Congress. [If Bush takes the presidency, things look more and more like a 50/50 tie in the Senate, which will lead to a great partisan struggle over how the Senate should be organized.] This was not a result any one could anticipate a few weeks ago, but it has fundamentally changed the political landscape, and all of the calculations about what a Bush or a Gore victory would mean.
Nonetheless, even with gridlock like no one ever
imagined, whomever occupies the White House will still
control the executive branch, with all of its powers
of appointment [federal judiciary, federal bureaucracy
<NLRB, OSHA, Department of Education, Justice
Department, etc.>], and that is where the
> greatest damage will be done.
Now, why would we be "in the streets" [Doug's answer
to every piece of damage from a potential Bush
presidency that he concedes as real threats] only if
> Bush won? Why wouldn't we be organizing in
extra-electoral ways regardless of who wins? A Gore
presidency just opens up much more possibilities for
the left in terms of that organizing, and forecloses
certain possibilities to the right. A Gore presidency
would provide some breathing room in the battle to
prevent the privatization of public education, but
it does not a solution to the problems of the "savage
inequalities" of public education, and that battle
will still have to be waged. After all, did the left
do better under Carter or under Reagan? Seems to me
that the Bob Kuttner editorial in the latest American
Prospect is awfully convincing on this point.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. http://shopping.yahoo.com/