Who Won & Who Lost in LA

The entire left side of American political life turned up in Los Angeles last week for an overheated five days of political posturing, party-going, jockeying for media attention, getting beat up in the streets and nominating a presidential candidate.

The Democratic National Convention itself proved to be a panorama of excess, set against a swirling, clashing background of festive protests and street anger. There were massive amounts of corporate largesse, a media frenzy fed by 15,000 journalists and police power beyond what anyone has ever seen in this country.

Such epic displays of resources and firepower tend to create unpredictable ebbs and flows of momentum -- Monday's apparent success can become Wednesday's failure. At first, it looked like the hoopla around the DNC might generate a lot of losers and no big winners. Until Thursday night, the only sure successes were the hundreds of corporations who reinforced their power by plowing millions into both the Democratic convention and the Republican convention. Perhaps the Democratic delegates also could be considered winners, since they walked away from LA with stuffed bellies and overflowing bags of corporate knick-knacks, including Barbie dolls and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. But in the end, a pretty clear list of winners and losers emerged from the heat of LA ...

Winner: Gore and Working Families

Thursday night radically changed the DNC's dynamic with the surprise emergence of Al Gore, The Populist. Before then, the convention's momentum had been creeping to the right, what with Joe Lieberman's moral message, the embrace of big military spending and countless other conservative agenda items. But on Thursday night, Gore stepped forward with a speech that defied expectations.

For one thing, Gore's address moved the party's agenda back to the left. Maybe Gore was taking a cue from Ralph Nader's successful-to-date candidacy -- with his theme of protecting working families from corporate excesses, he reached out to the millions of Americans who have suffered at the hands of HMOs, drug companies, greedy monopolies and corporate polluters. At the same time, union members, minorities and progressives got a strong nod from the VP, instead of just being taken for granted. It's finally okay again to talk about holding corporations accountable and caring about poor children.

Cynics and pragmatists, of course, will suggest that Gore won't walk his populist talk, and that he's still as beholden to corporations as any Republican. Even so, he has publicly defined himself in opposition to the GOP. He has pledged to get specific, fight for issues and avoid the platitudes and personality conflicts that George W. has relied on so far. Gore gave the Democrats something and someone to fight for, and left Bush and the Republicans defensively crying class warfare.

So the biggest winners for the moment are middle and working class Americans -- too often ignored in the prevailing political climate -- and Al Gore, who gave himself a fighting chance to be elected our next president.

Loser: The City of LA and the LAPD

The biggest losers of the week were Los Angeles and the LAPD. Even though they will claim victory because the convention went on without serious interruption or actual deaths in the streets, this "success" squandered opportunities and came at great costs.

Los Angeles has lots of problems -- especially with its huge pockets of poverty -- but it is a beautiful, vibrant, multicultural city, a swirling, shifting political town where labor unions and Latinos are gaining serious political clout. But all that liveliness, all that makes LA admirable, vanished in the police state atmosphere. As LA Times columnist Robert Scheer writes, "You can't buy this kind of lousy publicity for a billion bucks. You need inflexible and panicked city authorities who have turned this jewel of a world class city into a lifeless monument to the petty tyrannies of power."