Micah Sifry: Working Family Party apologia

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Oct 21 13:48:38 PDT 2000


[in the original, non-pejorative sense]

THE NATION

FEATURE STORY | November 6, 2000

A Working Third Party

by MICAH L. SIFRY

T oday, for the first time in years, the political center of gravity

in New York State is shifting. The conservative Senate Republican

majority, which has held state politics in thrall to its agenda of low

taxes, budget cuts and prison-building, has passed a hate-crimes bill

covering gays and lesbians (after blocking same for more than a

decade), expanded healthcare coverage for the working poor and, most

telling, opened the door to a sizable increase in the state minimum

wage.

From where has the impulse for these changes come? Not from regular

Democrats, who have had a cozy understanding for years with the

Republicans. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York

almost 2 to 1, but until recently state Democratic leaders have done

little to upset the balance of power. Rather, the pressure for change

has come from outside the Democratic establishment, centered on a

group of progressive labor unions (the United Auto Workers, the

Communications Workers, various transportation, building trades,

teachers and Teamsters locals), community organizations (especially

ACORN and Citizen Action) and maverick politicians who together have

been building the Working Families Party. It is the WFP, in existence

for just over two years, that has pushed the goal of raising the state

minimum wage to $6.75 per hour and indexing it to inflation, which

would make it among the highest in the nation. (Assembly Democrats

passed the bill this past summer, albeit without covering restaurant

workers.) What's given Working Families real muscle is the party's

demonstrated ability, in a series of lower-level elections over the

past year, to mobilize blacks, Latinos and other minorities, along

with white blue-collar workers and suburban independents, around an

economic populist agenda as well as the concept of a new independent

political party.

One sign of the party's influence: This past summer all of the

vulnerable Senate Republicans from Long Island, New York City and

Westchester County were practically begging for the WFP's endorsement,

offering in exchange their support for boosting the minimum wage. That

deal never occurred--the WFP's executive committee insisted that it

would take a lot more than that to get their line on the ballot, and

the state's business community came down hard against any deal as

well. Weeks later, these same Republicans retaliated by trying,

futilely, to knock the party off the ballot altogether.

New York is unique in that it is the only state where political

parties regularly cross-endorse candidates from other parties (known

as "fusion"). As a result, instead of being marginalized as

"spoilers," third parties have played an important role in state

politics going back to the 1930s, with the Liberals giving FDR his

margin of victory in 1944 and Conservatives averaging 300,000 votes in

state elections. With the decline of the Liberals in recent

years--since their endorsement of Mayor Rudy Giuliani it's been clear

that they're little more than a law firm with a ballot line for

sale--the founders of the WFP saw an opportunity to fill a void.

Now, having passed its second birthday, an evaluation is in order.

Unlike most third-party efforts, the WFP has real resources--a paid

permanent staff of sixteen, the support of major labor and community

institutions, and hundreds of politicians seeking its endorsement. The

question is: How independent is it? Is it just an adjunct of the

Democratic Party, as some critics allege? Or is it a genuine hybrid,

an inside-outside play that makes sense for progressives to support

and try to copy elsewhere?

The answer is complicated. So far, the party has not been afraid to

cross-endorse Green candidates in a few cases when it wanted to send a

clear message to Democratic incumbents who had moved too far to the

right. But because it is not independent of the institutional

interests of the organizations that created it, this party is nowhere

near as freewheeling or oppositional as the Greens.

O ver the past two years, I have watched the WFP take shape. I have

stood in a cold, pouring rain at Union Square in New York City with

hundreds of WFPers gathered to kick off the party's minimum-wage

campaign. At the high point of the party's state convention last

spring, inner-city dwellers and comfortable suburbanites linked arms

to sing "We Shall Overcome" after absorbing an emotional speech from

party co-chairman Bob Master, political director of District One of

the Communications Workers of America (CWA), expressing outrage at

Mayor Giuliani's reaction to the police killing of Patrick Dorismond,

an unarmed and innocent black man. Meanwhile, the party's Rockland

County chapter has pushed and prodded and ultimately forced the

Democratic-controlled county legislature to pass a bill instituting a

living-wage baseline of $8.25 an hour, plus healthcare, indexed to

inflation.

That Rockland story illustrates what is clearest and best about the

WFP's politics. As Bob Master notes, "Our ability to operate

independently increases the lower on the ballot you go." In Rockland

the party started early, getting involved in a special election for an

open State Senate seat in May of 1999. It endorsed the Democratic

candidate, a county legislator named Ken Zebrowski, and in five weeks

managed to pull nearly 2,000 votes for him on their line, almost 5

percent of the total cast. "This showed us there was a market for the

WFP in Rockland," says Ericka Bozzi Gomez, the 27-year-old organizer

working the county.

Early on, the WFP in Rockland joined with the local Liberal Party in

cross-endorsing a Green candidate for county legislature. "That was a

district where we knew a Republican couldn't win," says local activist

Irv Feiner, "and we felt it was important to take a stand. You can't

be a populist party if you support people who raise their salaries

$7,000 and throw in a dental plan when so many people lack

healthcare." The Democratic incumbent won with 53 percent, but the

Green-WFP-Liberal lines combined got 17 percent. "Afterward," recalls

Gomez, "Paul Adler, the chairman of the Democratic Party in the

county, told us that this three-party coalition could tip a lot of

elections. He noticed that we got more votes than the Conservative

Party did. 'This could help push the Democrats back to the left,' he

told us."

Gomez and the Rockland WFP chapter put much of their energy into

building a living-wage coalition, signing up twenty-three local

organizations and building a database of 6,000 likely supporters.

Aware of the 2,000 votes the WFP had pulled for him, Zebrowski acted

as the lead sponsor of the party's bill. But even though Democrats

control the county legislature 11 to 6, getting it passed wasn't easy.

"This bill was almost killed five separate times in the

legislature--the only thing that saved it was that we refused to go

away," Gomez says. Party members picketed regular legislative

meetings, demonstrated at the county executive's home and, most

important, turned up the heat in lawmakers' districts. That's how two

conservative Democrats were tilted into the Yes column. "We did a

postcard campaign in one of these guys' districts," recalls Tom

Stoner, a key Rockland WFP member. "When you get several hundred

postcards from people in the poor, Latino section of your district

that's been organized by the WFP, and where you aren't particularly

strong, you'll pick up the signal."

Now that the Rockland chapter has won the living-wage fight (an

override of the county executive's veto of the bill is considered all

but certain), it's setting its sights on building an

affordable-housing coalition. "First we're going to try to get four to

six thousand votes for Zebrowski [who's running for State Senate

again] and [Hillary] Clinton on our line," Gomez says. "Just as the

2,000 votes we got before set up our living-wage work, our victory on

that issue is drawing in new support. I'm getting calls from Haitians,

blacks and Latino folks who have always been hard-core Democrats.

Hopefully we'll be able to boost our electoral showing in November,

which will then set up our next cycle of issue work."

The WFP's Rockland success shows how being able to offer a ballot line

or withhold it can amplify the voice of a small, organized group. To

achieve this leverage, the party has used sophisticated voter

canvassing, populist appeals and lots of shoe leather to draw

double-digit support in many races, frequently boosting turnout in key

precincts well above normal expectations.

A few weeks ago the party's organizers helped insurgent Barry Ford in

his primary challenge to incumbent Democratic Congressman Edolphus

Towns, a Giuliani supporter who is a shameful friend of the tobacco

lobby. Ford lost, but he received 43 percent of the vote, compared

with 36 percent in 1998. Earlier this year, in an important Nassau

County legislative race, the WFP got 5 percent of the vote for Craig

Johnson and 20 percent in the white, working-class community of Manor

Haven, where it had focused its resources. And in a special State

Assembly election in Far Rockaway, a working-class corner of Queens,

the WFP got as much as 61 percent of the vote in some election

districts, where turnout was three times higher than elsewhere.

"We feel like we have some momentum, and we're determined not to screw

it up," says Dan Cantor, the party's executive director. Cantor, who

conceived the New Party along with Joel Rogers in the wake of the 1988

Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, is one of the WFP's many

midwives. He's hired and guided the party's youthful staff of

organizers, and under his leadership its annual budget has grown to

$800,000. The party's internal spirit bears his mark--spunky,

hard-working, pragmatic and honest.

"There are two models for building a third party in New York State,"

Cantor says. "There's the Liberal Party model, where you wield the

ballot line for your benefit, to leverage jobs and patronage. The

older model is the American Labor Party, which was more organic. You

also wield the line, but you try for the party to have some life

outside the line, with meetings, clubs, trainings, retreats." So far,

the WFP has established a dozen chapters and clubs with nearly 4,000

dues-paying members.

"Already we've begun to have an impact," Cantor says. "In Hempstead,

where we helped get two people elected to the town council, they're

hiring a tenant to be the Tenant Advocate. The living-wage ordinance

in Rockland is a huge victory. The minimum wage will be first up for

us after November. But one of our biggest problems is, we have to

figure out how to wag the dog and not just be the tail that gets

wagged."

How not to be a mere adjunct of the Democratic Party, especially in

the top-of-the-ballot races, which draw most public attention, is a

complicated problem that is rooted in the forces that birthed the WFP,

and it is not an issue that is about to go away. Certainly the party's

early and enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the US Senate

race puts the matter front and center. What kind of progressive third

party gets into bed with a First Lady who once said, "There is no left

in the Clinton White House"? The honest answer: one that is not strong

enough yet to do anything different without blowing up its coalition,

and whose leaders and members have chosen instead to build for the day

when they can act more independently.

"We don't have a huge amount of leverage right now, and we just don't

have the track record and political power to begin dictating whether

this candidate is acceptable or not," Master of the CWA acknowledges.

Nationally, the CWA is run by Morton Bahr, a big supporter of the

Clinton Administration, and whether or not Master likes to admit it,

for that reason alone he had no wiggle room on the Hillary

endorsement. "But in the process of our interviewing her for the

endorsement, she's heard from UAW people on how her position on trade

is no good, and there's been some impact on her speaking out for the

right to organize and the need to raise the minimum wage."

Still, the Hillary pill has not gone down easily. "One-third of our

members think she's a hero," said one of the WFP's staffers, referring

especially to its African-American and Latino members in places like

Brooklyn and Queens. "One-third are just 'eh' on her, but agree that

she's better than Lazio. And one-third probably think she's a dyke,

and I don't mean that in the positive sense." Ericka Bozzi Gomez

agrees with this picture. "I definitely have a separate column for my

Yes votes for Zebrowski and for Hillary. But I tell the one-third who

don't like her to put the 880,000 minimum-wage earners in the state

ahead of whatever they think of her personally."

For Jim Duncan, party co-chairman, this was a no-brainer. "If we draw

150,000 to 200,000 votes that help elect Hillary Clinton, every

politician in the state is going to stand up, take notice and want

those votes in the future," he told the thousand delegates who came to

the party's state convention earlier this year. "And I can promise

that we will deliver those votes only to those candidates and elected

officials who deliver for us--on raising wages, improving workers'

comp benefits, funding healthcare, childcare and education." This

argument has even convinced some notable supporters of Ralph Nader's

presidential campaign (ironically, since the WFP is backing Al Gore

for President). "If people are going to vote for Hillary over Lazio,

which certainly makes sense," says Jim Hightower, "what better way to

put your vote to work for the long-term progressive agenda, which the

WFP represents in New York, than by voting on the party's Line H?"

For most WFPers, the real question is not whether they should take

ideologically pure positions on races in which they are still but a

small player. It is to figure out how to keep their multicultural

coalition growing while acknowledging that the party's membership has

divergent interests. Co-chairwoman Bertha Lewis of ACORN says, "If

this is not going to just be a labor party or a community-organization

party, we are going to have lots of conversations where race, class

and gender matter."

The next year will be a proving time for the Working Families Party.

It has its eye on a number of forty-odd seats on the New York City

Council opening up, thanks to term limits. In several of these races,

it will fight to have its candidate win the Democratic primary,

although in a few white working-class districts in the outer boroughs

the WFP hopes to be decisive in the general election. Yet, while those

races provide opportunities, the mayoral battle among the Democrats

could strain the party's internal alliances. And the hard work of

building local chapters and screening local candidates will never end.

But an infectious sense that working people can stand together against

larger forces in order to claim some justice and security seems to be

on the rise. The WFP's small victories and savvy organizing are

rebuilding hope at a time when cynicism and withdrawal from politics

seem like the only options to many. "This is what people my age have

been looking for--a movement," says twentysomething activist Alan Van

Capelle. "A way to bring community and labor together."

© 2000 The Nation Company, L.P.



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