BY John Nichols
March 22, 2001
Madison Capital Times
Molly Ivins, the Texan who should have been elected president last year, allows as how the big question of the current political moment is not whether George W. Bush is a crooked appendage of corporate America. Not even Republicans can deny that reality without giggling.The mystery of the moment is whether Democrats who are supposed to be mounting the opposition to Bush are the other crooked appendage of corporate America.
Ivins suggests that if Senate Democrat defectors kill campaign finance reform in coming days, they will prove Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader was right when he condemned both the Democrats and Republicans as equally beyond redemption. "It's about whether there are two political parties or one - the Money Party," argues Ivins.
"Either the Democrats stand for something or they don't, and if they stand for letting the current system of legalized bribery continue, then we're better off voting for Ralph Nader."
U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., offers a similar message, suggesting that if Democrats do not begin to mount a credible challenge to Bush, they will prove Nader right. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was even more blunt, suggesting that the Democratic response to Bush proves the party of Roosevelt and Truman is now officially "dead."
This sort of talk is music to the ears of David Cobb, a staff attorney with the Community Legal Defense Fund in Houston and veteran Bush battler. Don't get Cobb wrong, as a passionate foe of corporate excess he wants to beat Bush and the Republicans. He just doesn't believe the Democrats will ever rise to the challenge.
"There are a lot of good Democrats, progressive people who really believe in all the right things," says Cobb. "But their views are not being reflected by the national Democratic party leadership. When Democrats in Washington sell out on basic issues like campaign finance reform, Democrats at the grass-roots level start asking: Where is the political opposition to these corporations going to come from?"
Cobb is working with Madison's Ben Manski and others to build the Green Party as a national political force - in large part because he has lost faith in the willingness of Democrats to stand up to corporate campaign contributors. (An associate of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, he'll speak at 7 tonight at the UW Memorial Union on how community groups are challenging corporations on environmental, sweatshop and development issues.)
Like Ivins, Cobb thinks congressional Democrats face a critical test this spring. If they fail to mount a credible and consistent opposition to Bush, hey will push millions of Americans to look anew at the message carried by Nader and the Greens in last year's campaign.
"When people who want a populist, passionate opposition to Bush realize that the Democrats have let them down," says Cobb, "they'll start to understand just how much America needs the Green Party."
