Twenty years ago, in 1980, I ran for the presidency as the candidate of the Socialist Party USA, sharing the ticket with Sister Diane Drufenbrock. It was the first time an openly gay candidate had run for president, and certainly the first time a Catholic nun had run for vice president. I enjoyed a vigorous campaign that garnered not so many votes (about 10,000). I never expected to do it again.
Then, in the spring of 1999, just after the War Resisters League’s dinner held to honor my years with WRL (a great honor it was!), some of the younger SP members got the idea that perhaps I would make a good candidate for the year 2000. They drew up a letter, getting a number of signatures (some from WRL members), urging me to seek the nomination. The letter was delivered to me by four of the young comrades at a dinner in an Indian restaurant in New York’s East Village. I was surprised (since I had not had even a hint the letter was in circulation) and flattered and said I would think about it.
I spent several weeks thinking and then accepted. The nomination was contested by Eric Chester, who had run for Vice President on the SP ticket four years earlier and felt I was too moderate. But I won a clear majority at the October 1999 SP convention and began campaigning almost immediately after that.
The Reasons
Let me give the primary reasons I agreed to run, even though I was aware that the Green Party was seeking to nominate Ralph Nader. While the Socialist Party is small (all socialist groups are small—the SP is about the same size as the others), nearly half its membership is young. I felt I could offer those members a good campaign, non-sectarian and worth their support. Also, I felt the issue of socialism needed to be put back on the national agenda. When the Cold War ended, people on the Left—even democratic socialists—talked about “the end of the socialist project” and “the global triumph of capitalism.” As a lifelong socialist, I felt we needed to make it legitimate to discuss socialism and re-define it for this country.
And why did I not withdraw and support Nader when he did finally enter the race? With all deference to Nader, a good man and a fine public servant, he wasn’t going to win the election—and he isn’t a socialist. I was also not going to win the election, but I am a socialist, and I want to build a socialist movement, not simply a vaguely defined anti-corporate movement. More important, and something missed by many who pressed me to withdraw, to do so would have been a stunning breach of faith with those who had nominated me. I couldn’t possibly have withdrawn without a consultation with the Socialist Party—when socialists talk about democracy, we mean it—and that debate would have wrecked the organization.
The Issues
That said, I campaigned hard for a full year, often looking back to 1980 and wishing I were 50 again. I found the campaign a marvelous arena to raise all the issues that Bush and Gore were not raising and which, frankly, Nader often ignored: our “Gulag” of more than two million souls in prison; the “war on drugs” that has achieved nothing except military intervention in Central and South America; the military budget that should be cut in half (while all foreign military bases should be closed and the CIA shut down); the crime of the existence of poverty in a nation of great wealth; the need for a “negative income tax” to lift the poor above the poverty level; the need for an increase in the minimum wage to $12 an hour; the need for universal health care; the need for strong defense of trade unions and their right to organize; the need to defend affirmative action; the need to defend the human rights of every person in this nation regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation; the need to abolish capital punishment.
One could go on, but that is a good solid list of points being ignored by the major parties. In a healthier society those issues would be embraced by moderate conservatives. They aren’t radical ideas; they are the basis of a healthy and compassionate democracy. And I pointed this out when I spoke, before going on to make as strong a case as I could for a socialist vision of social ownership of the Fortune 500 and of a society where production is based on human needs, not on the profit motive, and where human beings are no longer treated as mere commodities, cogs in an economic machine based on profit.
I was in 20 states, often more than once, reaching largely student audiences (but sometimes community and church groups and the like). The man who had arranged my “draft,” Shaun Richman, became my campaign manager and did an excellent job. Between us, a student of 21 and a retired radical of 71, with only a smattering of volunteer help, we did a fair job on a budget of less than $30,000. Of course this doesn’t count the incredible work of members of the Socialist Party in state after state, who arranged the speaking tours, and who got us on the ballot in seven states and arranged official write-in status in 11 more.
The Texas trip took 12 days—the state’s immense size was underlined by the fact that twice I took planes to get from one point in Texas to another—and reminded me again of why Texas is one of my favorite states. Everyone on the Left seems to work together. At one stop I was picked up at the airport by a beautiful young supporter of the usually sectarian International Socialist Organization. At a wonderful dinner in another town the guests ranged from Communist Party members to Greens and from a Vietnam veteran to a chaplain. I’d been mildly nervous about Texas, as Steve Rossingol, the SP member who organized it, had urged all his contacts to be on the lookout for anyone who might be carrying a gun. Fortunately, no guns materialized. Iowa was interesting for the informal but very friendly links between the Catholic Worker movement and the Socialist Party, so that half the time I was being hosted by SP members and the other half by Catholics. The most memorable was a nun who was, I believe, 85 and was acting as “mother” to a residence for young men and women who were HIV-positive.
In Philadelphia, as I was walking with a few thousand demonstrators in broiling sun in what was supposed to be a large civil disobedience action for decent public housing (as it turned out, we all got sunburned, the police behaved and no one got arrested), one young Nader supporter came up to me and asked, “Why don’t you get out of the race and support Nader?”
“I’m marching with you folks,” I said. “Where is Nader?”
The most disturbing moment of the campaign was a close look at the newly militarized police in Portland, OR, where I had gone to take part in an innocent May Day parade. Yes, there were a couple of youth with black masks, but there were also women with children, old people, people in the holiday costumes of May Day—a harmless mix. The police, “dressed by Hollywood” with special Darth Vader-like masks and equipped with pepper spray and wooden bullets, tried out all their equipment on the crowd. It was the sort of thing I am glad I saw firsthand, or I might not have believed the reports.
The Connections
The campaign succeeded, from my point of view, in that by its end I had a degree of support from the three other democratic socialist groups—Democratic Socialists of America, the Committees of Correspondence and Solidarity (although those groups also recognized the value of the Nader campaign and in some cases critically supported Gore). It was the first time in decades that the Socialist Party was able to emerge as a kind of recognized electoral arm of the socialist movement. And it was the first time that members of those other groups—and often members of the Green Party—were helpful to an SP candidate at the local level. (My driver for the 12-day tour in Texas was an active Green.)
Among the lessons I learned and would share here is that high-school students are alert and open-minded, prepared to hear a socialist and raise intelligent questions, whether we are talking about students in Massachusetts or Iowa or Oregon. At the college level one expects this; it was the high caliber of questions (and support) at the high-school level that impressed me. There were good turnouts everywhere—not the kind of mass audiences that Nader could draw, but good solid crowds, from the Texas border near Mexico, where the bulk of the students were Latino, to the Black Hills of South Dakota. (WRL locals take note: If the Socialist Party can get me on a college campus and get a speaking fee to cover it, my hunch is that the War Resisters League can do the same thing, and I’d be happy to do it.) I enjoyed having the chance to speak, but, more important, I think the message of democratic radical change has a wide audience.
The foot soldiers of an electoral campaign are those who get out and do the work to get on the ballot. We made it in seven states: Washington, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont. It is hard work to get those petitions circulated and signed. When I hear armchair radicals talk with contempt about the electoral process and about the need for “real action,” I think they ought to spend a day trying to persuade their fellow citizens to get a socialist on the ballot. As the great socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs, once said about violent revolution, “If the workers can’t learn to aim their ballots right, they won’t aim their bullets any better.”
The youth of the Socialist Party took active part in the April demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington and in the Republican and Democratic convention demonstrations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and I was at all of those, in the streets with the youth. I think one of the values of the youth movement today is that it does see the need for direct action. It may be less aware of the need for electoral action. One doesn’t substitute one for the other—they are complementary parts of the movement for a democratic social revolution.
It was an exciting year of my life, and to any readers who were involved, my profound thanks. For any who want information on the Socialist Party, our campaign website is still up at www.votesocialist.org (or write to Socialist Party USA, 339 Lafayette St., Room 333, New York, NY 10012; website, sp-usa.org).
