> I used think the WFP was a fraud - and I still don't like their name
> - but then my friend, listmember Josh Mason, went to work for it.
> Since I have a lot of respect for Josh's intelligence and judgment,
> I've been forced to reconsider. If Josh is watching, feel like giving
> us a sales pitch?
I appreciate the compliment, but I'm not sure I can take credit. It seems to me your reevaluation of the WFP is of a piece with other shifts in your views -- see "Marxists for Dean."
I used to think the WFP was a fraud too. I was delighted when it was announced (wrongly, as it turned out) that they hadn't gotten the 50,000 votes they eneded for ballot status is their first election, in 1998. Seemed to show that a timid, "responsible", moderate strategy can't even deliver the very modest gains it promises. Might as well be a Red.
I'm not sure I can make the case for the WFP in the length of an email post. Luckliy, I just gave a talk on fusion and the WFP strategy at the Socialist Scholars Conference. Anyone interested can find the text here: http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/strategy.html.
A couple of points that may not be clear from the talk:
1. WFP is a fusion party. That meas it (mostly) cross-endorses major-party candidates rather than running its own. Votes are tallied separately by party then added up to determine the winner. Fusion was once legal throughout the US, and was widely used by thrid parties (esp. the Populists and their relatives) but is now legal in just a handful. New York is the only state where it's widely used, tho there is now a Connecticut WFP and we're looking at other states for expansion as well.
2. WFP is a labor party. The governance structures were deliberately modeled on the British labor party, with our affiliated unions receiving the bulk of the votes. (This is a very tricky thing since American election law isn't designed for this kind of structure.) Your opinion of the WFP is going to depend to a large extent on how much progressive potential you see in American unions.
3. An advantage of the fusion strategy I didn't stress in the talk, but probably should have, is that it focuses attention away from the canddiates and toward the party. WFP is a no-celebrity party, which is a pretty fundamental difference from most such efforts. We all know that Nader is a one man show. Here in New York, the Greens got their best showing when they ran Grandpa Al Lewis from the old Muensters show for Governor. It's easy to see why third parties are drawn to celebrity candidates, but it's not a strategy for building a party in the long run.
About the name: I don't much like it either. Working Families came out of the New Party (the other two streams feeding into were the degeneration of New York's Liberal Party into a patronage machine and the feeling on the part of the non building trades private sector unions in the state that they had no voice in the existing labor structures). New Party wasn't much of a name either. Working Families was focus grouped, aparently, and tested better than the alternatives, especially among black women. What can I say? It's just a name.
Josh