After the U.S. Senate voted last year to strip Guantanamo detainees of the right to habeas corpus, you'd think it would have dashed the hopes of the desperate prisoners that the world's greatest deliberative body would prove their salvation. But Saifullah Paracha is apparently an eternal optimist. In March, after 18 months in Guantanamo, Paracha, 58, decided to write a letter to 98 U.S. senators describing his plight. The senators haven't responded, though it's hard to blame them. They don't know the letters exist. The Department of Defense won't release them for delivery.

"He lived in the United States," says Paracha's lawyer G. T. Hunt. "He's a pro-American person. He believes in American justice. He believes that if he can get a hearing he'll get out."

In 1986, after studying and working in New York for 16 years, Paracha moved back to Pakistan, to Karachi where he and his wife raised four children and he managed several business ventures. In July 2003, Paracha traveled to Bangkok for what he thought was a meeting about a business opportunity. He never made it out of the airport. Masked men abducted him, taking him to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where he was interrogated and, according to Hunt, imprisoned in a cell with no toilet. His family spent a month with no idea of his whereabouts, until the International Committee of the Red Cross notified them he was in U.S. custody. After a year in Bagram, he was sent to Guantanamo in September 2004.

The United States believes that both Paracha and his son Uzair aided several Pakistani men alleged to be al Qaeda operatives. In November, Uzair was convicted in federal court of providing the operatives with "material support" and now faces up to 75 years in jail. Uzair maintains his innocence. He says he was an unwitting accomplice, merely helping his father's business associates with their U.S. immigration papers. Saifullah says he does have a relationship with the alleged terrorists, but only knew the men as investors, not al Qaeda operatives. Unlike his son, he hasn't been afforded an opportunity to make his case in court.

The rules guiding attorney/client correspondence at Guantanamo are frustratingly vague, lawyers for the detainees say, and the processing delays are maddening. Mail routinely arrives six months after it's been sent, if it arrives at all. "For months I sent him letters and he sent me letters and they were all just impounded," Hunt says. "Now, I think my letters get through but they take their sweet time about it."

The ostensible reason for the backlog is security. "The attorney/client communications go to a secure facility, which happens to be here in Washington," Hunt says. "And they can't leave there until the government clears it and says it's not sensitive and not classified."

In order to read Paracha's correspondence, Hunt must go to the secure location--"a grim featureless office, with blinds drawn 24 hours a day"--where he's allowed to read Paracha's letters to him before placing them back in a safe. Last month he saw the 98 letters, painstakingly copied in longhand, which Paracha had sent to him to review and distribute. But Hunt was told he couldn't remove them from the safe. He can't disclose what's in the letters--"it's a state secret," he quips--but says "the person with the right authority could sit down, take a glance at them and then say, 'OK they can go out.' "

A Pentagon spokesperson wouldn't comment directly on Paracha's letters but said that over a six-month span in 2005, there were 10,000 pieces of mail sent to or from detainees. The detainees are "in close contact with family and friends if they choose to be," the spokesperson said.

After Hunt sent an email to his fellow Guantanamo lawyers about the detained letters, several of them contacted their senators to inform them they had mail the Pentagon wasn't letting them read.

This prompted an indignant letter from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who wrote to Rumsfeld on June 5, asking if the Department of Defense has a "written or unwritten policy prohibiting all persons detained at Guantanamo Bay from writing to, or communicating in any manner with, Members of Congress?"

If so, "please explain what legal authority supports such a policy."

On the bottom of the letter, Leahy scrawled in pen: "Is this really happening!"

Paracha must be asking himself the same question.

"We progressives, we just keep going back for more and more punishment," Rachel Barber says to me between sips of coffee. "We never learn."

It's just after 9 am on a wickedly gray, damp October Saturday in Westerville, Ohio, just outside Columbus. Barber, a music teacher with a sunny demeanor, is sitting in a union hall with 150 other volunteers and grassroots activists. If you had fallen asleep, Rip Van Winkle-like, a year ago and awoken inside this meeting room, draped with the familiar banners of Democracy for America and America Votes and overflowing with earnest volunteers munching on bagels, you'd think it was still 2004 and the quest to defeat Bush was at its height.

But it's 2005, and Bush hardly gets a mention. The volunteers are here to help pass a November ballot initiative called Reform Ohio Now (RON), a package of reforms aimed at the increasingly wide-reaching scandals of the state's governing Republican machine.

Herb Asher, an Ohio State University political science professor emeritus who helped initiate RON, warns the room that they face a formidable opponent: "Most of the Republican grassroots organization is intact because the people involved were from right here in Ohio. And a lot of the people who supported our side were from out of state. So the fact is, we're bragging about our grassroots organization, but let me tell you: We have to work hard just to match them."

Asher proves prescient. Despite polls late in the campaign that indicated several of the RON initiatives would pass, all four were defeated by large margins. Last year's presidential election inspired an unprecedented mobilization on both the left and the right, but while the pro-Bush mobilization happened primarily within the channels of the Republican Party, things were far different on the left.

Because the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law banned the unrestricted donations called "soft money," which had previously formed the financial backbone of the Democratic Party, a broad coalition of independent organizations arose to accept the checks the party could no longer take. These "527" organizations, most notable among them America Coming Together and the America Votes coalition, executed their very own campaign on Kerry's behalf, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, training thousands of new organizers and contacting millions of voters.

(Conservatives made use of 527s as well, most no-toriously the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.) Given the Bush victory, Democrats could hardly call the enterprise a success. But last year's mobilization pointed the way -- albeit in a sometimes dysfunctional fashion -- toward a future progressive movement radically different from the loose conglomeration of Washington-based issue-advocacy organizations that have dominated the liberal-left since the 1970s.

"Last year was the League of Nations phase of the left's reorganization," says Dan Berwick, who managed several swing-state field programs for the League of Conservation Voters. "The basic idea -- the basic need -- was identified and addressed but with at best marginal success."

There were three key features of last year's effort. First, the 527s and their issue-advocacy partners in the institutional left rediscovered old-fashioned, face-to-face voter contact. While the bulk of this work was carried out by paid canvassers, a significant portion was done by volunteers -- hundreds of thousands of them, often in unfamiliar terrain and at great personal sacrifice, renting vans, driving to swing states and sleeping on floors.

Second, without a Democratic Party or candidate's campaign to coordinate efforts, the disparate groups within the broad America Votes coalition, from the NAACP National Voter Fund to MoveOn.org to the Sierra Club, had to figure out a way to work together. In many places coordination was flawed, but the presence of any coordination at all was a serious breakthrough.

Finally, there was the money: The 2004 election was the most expensive exercise of democracy in history, and for the first time in recent memory the center-left was able to keep pace with the corporate loaves-and-fishes bank account that is the Republican Party. "Infrastructure" is a word so resolutely unsexy it makes "think tank" sound erotic.

These days, though, you can't get five minutes into a conversation with a strategist, activist or donor without the word cropping up. Since the infrastructure last year was built, like a refugee camp, for a short-term purpose, you might think that a year later the camp has been struck, with the equipment rolled up and stored away for the next election. That's partly true -- America Coming Together announced this past summer that it could raise only enough money to continue as a skeletal research organization, and dozens of the grassroots groups founded last year have folded as well.

But it's striking just how much has carried over. Democracy for America meetings in cities from Austin to Cincinnati draw hundreds, and there are small, informal progressive groups meeting at this moment in some of the most conservative counties in the country. None of this existed just three years ago. Dozens if not hundreds of activists who worked on last year's election are now running for local office, and the big institutional players like the labor and environmental movements continue to build power through grassroots organizing.

"It wasn't a blip," says Robert Kraig, political director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Wisconsin. "It was part of something that's seriously going on, on the left."

Steve Rosenthal, co-founder and CEO of America Coming Together, sits on an early September morning in the organization's Washington headquarters, in a small office strewn with reports and campaign detritus. He's a short, sturdy man with a blunt but appealing manner. When I casually refer to him as an organizer he interrupts to say, "Thank you, that's the highest praise you could offer," and blushes a little.

Last year ACT was the 800-pound gorilla of the 527s. It had a budget of $142 million and offices in seventeen states, hired more than 3,000 canvassers and knocked on 16 million doors. It was also one of the strangest organizations in American political history: a campaign with a candidate it could not mention, a movement with a focus-group-tested platform and an old-fashioned door-to-door field operation funded largely by billionaire financier George Soros. Because of its size and novelty, it attracted a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of last year's defeat.

Rosenthal still chafes at the charge that ACT failed to capitalize on the millions it raised. "We're seeing everywhere we look that this kind of stuff made a huge difference," he says a touch defensively. For years Rosenthal had been a prophet of the power of face-to-face voter contact, convinced of its effectiveness by his experience as political director of the AFL-CIO, where he used this method to increase union household turnout by 4.8 million votes at a time when nonunion-household turnout had declined by 15 million.

"Field," as door-to-door politicking is known, is the neglected grandparent of campaigning. Labor-intensive and time-consuming, it was considered inefficient by political professionals in an age when a single TV ad could reach millions of viewers. "There are many of us who spent a lifetime advocating grassroots voter-to-voter contact as an alternative to TV," says Rosenthal.

"We fought this out with the party and the candidates for years." In the 2004 election cycle a confluence of factors brought much of the political establishment around to Rosenthal's view. With the growth of cable, the decline of the networks and the rise of TiVo, there's no longer a single venue where an ad is guaranteed a wide swath of the electorate.

Besides, voters are so bombarded with advertising these days that they screen much of it out. And with the GOP getting better and better at get-out-the-vote operations, or GOTV, the final outcome could be determined by just how well the left got out its own base. ACT's plan was to layer phone calls, direct mail and, most important, door-to-door conversations to boost turnout among Democrats and persuade undecideds.

Rosenthal is adamant that it worked. In most of the contested swing states Kerry's vote totals were greater than Gore's in 2000. But Rosenthal hands me a postmortem study ACT conducted showing that in urban counties such as Philadelphia and Cuyahoga, in which ACT was involved, Kerry's percentage increase over Gore was anywhere between ten and thirty points more than his increase in the demographically similar county of Wayne, Michigan, where ACT had no presence. Rosenthal is joined by others, including independent political analyst Charlie Cook and even RNC chair Ken Mehlman, who credited ACT's "turnout prowess" for keeping Kerry within "striking range."

Even if ACT did significantly boost Kerry's vote totals in key states, it was, according to many who worked for it, hamstrung because it was erected on a massive scale in just a year and was disconnected from any pre-existing local infrastructure. Its approach was more like door-to-door sales -- a stranger at the door with a pitch -- than the old-fashioned precinct captain who knows the name and birthday of everyone in the household.

High-level staff was brought in from out of state, as were canvassers, many of whom were union members on loan from SEIU working on foreign terrain. This sort of trans-geographical politicking reached its logically absurd conclusion when a British newspaper urged its readers to call Ohio citizens and convince them to vote for Kerry.

Needless to say, it often backfired. As an alternative, consider Arnie Graf, who's been an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation for thirty years. Graf and about ten fellow community organizers from Maryland and DC took the last two weeks of the 2004 election off and headed to East Cleveland, a city of about 30,000 mostly poor and working-class African-Americans. They had been invited by a community-based organization that set them up in a local church to work on boosting voter turnout in the city.

"We learned as much as we could about East Cleveland and got to know the issues," says Graf. "We wound up covering every door, about 30,000 people, and we decided instead of canvassing and talking about Iraq or how many jobs had been lost in Ohio we would talk to people about what was happening in East Cleveland."

Through the network of the East Cleveland Concerned Pastors for Progress, they recruited 140 volunteers who went door to door among their neighbors, and when election day was over Kerry's vote total in East Cleveland exceeded Gore's by 97 percent. Rosenthal acknowledges that for the long term, it's crucial to organize from the bottom up. In a business plan circulated after the election, ACT painted a picture of a kind of ACT 2.0, with deeper local roots, a focus on local issues and races and a mission of training a permanent, stable cohort of professional organizers.

"The greatest experience for me," says Rosenthal, "was going out to places and seeing young organizers who knew how to cut walk lists and put material together and run a GOTV. That was one of the stated missions from the beginning: We were going to train a whole new generation of organizers, and we were going to figure out a way to keep them working year-round."

But ACT's chief benefactors, most notably George Soros, balked. ACT's founders, says one source close to Soros, "had for a long time thought it would be a good idea to have something like ACT as a going concern. But that's not what George funded. He doesn't feel that he wasted his money. ACT did what it said it would do…. But the notion that it was ever an idea that he would give $20 million to ACT for 2005 was not on the books."

This strange marriage of grassroots organizing and wealthy funding ended, at least for the time being, in an abrupt if amicable divorce. While ACT may have met its demise, the vision of permanent, grassroots, locally based organizing is exactly what other groups across the country are now attempting to put in place.

It's hard to overstate just how much of a sea change this is. Beginning in the 1970s, as the 1960s social movements became institutionalized and moved to Washington to work on legislative advocacy, there were fewer and fewer organizers in the field, with the notable exception of groups like ACORN and the PIRGs. Community organizers like Graf continued to organize in the inner city, but they've traditionally eschewed electoral work. Unions retained the largest local presence, but the labor movement had been in decline for decades.

At the same time, the Democratic Party's organization had atrophied so thoroughly that by the late 1990s the party had become, in the words of one organizer, little more than a "brand name and a bank account." If liberals substituted financial capital for social capital, as Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam puts it, ACT attempted to convert financial capital into social capital, to turn money from donors into a web of relationships with voters.

It was an inefficient process, and if there's a single difference between the state of progressive politics before last year and after, it's the organic regeneration of this kind of social capital.

Consider Paul Hackett's near-upset victory in an August special election for a Congressional seat in Ohio's conservative Second District. Before the race became the focus of national attention and blogger fundraising, Hackett campaign manager David Woodruff had a shoestring budget and a staff of three. So he turned to members of the Hamilton County Democratic Forum, a group of local activists who'd banded together after the presidential campaign in an attempt to maintain the momentum they'd built up. They continued to meet regularly and reached out to Woodruff, who came to rely on them.

"I could call this organization and say, Could you guys get me every veterans' bill that's come before Congress in the last year and a half?" says Woodruff. "They'd meet that Tuesday and Thursday night and pull it together."

"Last year, if you had an Internet connection and a computer and two friends, you had an organization," says America Votes Ohio director Scott Nunnery. "I talked to a woman on the phone the other day, and she was offended I didn't know who she was. 'I'm the chairperson of GAG,' she said. I'm like, 'What's GAG?' She's like, 'Grandmothers Against George!'"

In Ohio alone, dozens of the groups started during or immediately after the 2004 campaign, like the Perry County Democratic Forum and Upper Arlington Progressive Action, are still going strong. With so many different organizations, effective coordination has become essential.

To stave off chaos, last year the small, sparsely staffed group America Votes was given the job of playing "traffic cop of the progressive community," in the words of its president, Cecile Richards. "By the end of the election," she says, "people really did give up their own institutional program and their own identity to throw in together."

That's probably a bit of an overstatement, but America Votes did have one unambiguous triumph: All (well, nearly all) of the members of the coalition used the same voter file, known as the ACT VAN, entering information procured by canvassers and phone bankers about which way voters were leaning and important issues for the undecided.

This meant that when election day came around and it was time to divvy up GOTV tasks, everyone was working from the same information. The ACT VAN might be last year's most concrete achievement, and it could serve as a cornerstone for a kind of permanent shared voter file for progressive organizers.

"Data and voter files are to politics for the next ten years what media have been for the last twenty," says Rosenthal. But other than the ACT VAN, the coordination was weak. Except for volunteer contacts and membership lists -- which the coalition partners were loath to share -- the overwhelming majority of America Votes members had little local capacity to contribute to a field or GOTV effort. Many of the America Votes partners didn't even start talking to one another until a week before the election.

But the failures of coordination as much as the successes convinced many strategists of the need for a permanent platform for collaboration at the state level. "It's a totally different way of approaching the work," says Richards. "Campaigns are by necessity short-term-focused and completely tactical. They're like the circus -- you set them up, you do the show and then you tear them down."

So even though in the last election America Votes was dwarfed by the size and scope of ACT, it has managed, improbably, to outlive it. There are now America Votes directors in three states whose sole purpose is to coordinate the legislative, electoral and organizing strategies, and the organization is looking to expand to ten states in 2006.

There are signs that these small steps toward an integrated approach are bearing fruit. At the state level, groups are collectively writing blueprints for building progressive majorities and implementing progressive policy changes. Because these blueprints require some groups to backseat their particular issue while devoting resources toward an initiative more likely to build political power, it's "where the rubber meets the road," says the SEIU's Kraig. "Right now, the level of coordinated planning among all the various elements of the left is entirely unprecedented. It's gone well beyond what happened in 2004."

There's a school of thought that believes the entire nonparty, noncandidate mobilization last year was a disaster, a useless duplication of effort perhaps made necessary by McCain-Feingold, but one that should be left in the dustbin of campaign history. To critics in this school, everything carried out by the America Votes coalition and its allies should be done by the Democratic Party itself, and outsourcing it can only create confusion and inefficiencies. (Indeed, in a strange twist, DNC chair Howard Dean, never known as a strong advocate of grassroots organizing before his presidential campaign, has become its most visible advocate. He has pledged to hire organizers and staff for the Democratic Party in every state. That may not sound novel, but for the DNC to make any investment in organizing in a nonpresidential year is unprecedented.)

To the extent that progressive organizations function, as ACT did, as mere surrogates for the Democratic Party, this criticism is probably on target. The real potential of the developing infrastructure -- that word again! -- isn't that it can more effectively elect Democrats; it's that it can serve as the foundation for a progressive movement.

Unlike a political party, which exists for the sole purpose of winning elections, a movement consists of an infrastructure and a worldview, a vision of political and social order more just, more humane and more democratic. There wasn't a whole lot of time spent fleshing out the progressive worldview last year, because the overriding goal, from both a strategic and an ideological perspective, was defeating Bush. But the challenges now for the progressive movement, if it is to live up to that grandiose title, are as much ideological as they are organizational.

What common vision do wealthy Manhattanite liberals, union members in depressed industrial areas, urban service employees, immigrant small-business owners, racial and ethnic minorities and university-town academics share? These days the answer, too often, seems to be simply: beating the Republicans.

Last year's hard-fought battle has produced among some progressives a vision of politics as a color war in which "our team" tries to beat "their team." In a recent In These Times essay, my colleague David Sirota identified this tendency as "Partisan War Syndrome," which "leads the supposedly 'ideological' grassroots left to increasingly subvert its overarching ideology on issues in favor of pure partisan concerns."

Building political power requires compromise and strategic tradeoffs. But with no vision of what you want the country to look like once you've won, it's impossible to distinguish smart compromises from self-defeating ones.

"If a Democratic candidate gets elected on tax cuts," says Kraig, "the campaign professionals celebrate at the bar and go home. But from a movement perspective you've just made it even harder to fund public services and public schools, so it harms the movement. You want to win in a way that builds public infrastructure long-term for the purposes of changing society. So your tactics start to be affected by broader considerations."

Chris Glaros, a Columbus attorney who founded a network of progressive grassroots groups in Ohio called Blue 88, told me he'd spent a lot of time "trying to figure out what it is that unites all these folks I talk to, all of whom have different pet issues they're concerned about. And the one thing I can come up with is that for all these folks there's a real and immediate sense that the very fabric of our democracy is imperiled."

If last year's presidential election revealed anything to the thousands of new grassroots activists, it was just how undemocratic our Republic has become. Voters in only a handful of states determined who would be President; barely more than half the voting-age population turned out despite the millions spent to get them to the polls; and no more than a dozen or so Congressional seats were competitive.

It was the great achievement of the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to radically democratize a country that had slipped into oligarchy: Progressives rewrote state constitutions to increase access to elected representatives and institute state referendums, they dismantled unaccountable political machines and they amended the Constitution to provide for direct election of senators and suffrage for women.

These Progressives recognized that to achieve a more just state and society, power had to be redistributed in a structural fashion. The same is true today. Our dysfunctional policies are largely the result of a dysfunctional democracy. Here is where ideology and strategy meet: If progressives are to democratize the country, they must first democratize their politics.

There are two small but revealing items affixed to Ohio's 13th District congressman Sherrod Brown. On his lapel, he wears not an American flag, but a pin of a yellow bird in a cage. On a Thursday morning in October, as we leave his office to walk to the Capitol for a committee meeting, Brown hands me a bookmark-sized slip of paper that explains: "The canary represents the struggle for economic and social justice." It recounts how miners once took canaries into the mines so that when the birds died, they knew the air was too toxic to breathe. "Miners were forced to provide for their own protection. No mine safety laws. No trade unions able to help. No real support from their government. … It has been a 100-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us."

Clipped to Brown's belt is a small blue pedometer, one of a pair worn by him and his wife Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He walks, or perhaps more accurately, stalks all over Capitol Hill, leading with his chest pitched forward just slightly in a gait that is halfway between a bounce and a prowl. "He never takes the elevator," his spokesperson Joanna Kuebler tells me as we wait for Brown to emerge from a meeting with a group of scientists advocating for nuclear disarmament. When it's time for a vote on the Hill, he eschews the underground subway that whisks members from their office buildings to the Capitol.

Handsome, with a slightly weathered face, curly hair and a deep, warm voice, Brown is universally described as "down to earth." In person he's as unposed as any politician I've ever met. "Those are the columns my wife wrote that won the Pulitzer," he says, dumping a pile of papers into the lap of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, who's waiting for the underground shuttle as we trot past. "He's a Republican," Brown whispers as we walk away, "but I like him. How could I not? He represents Cooperstown."

Brown, a huge baseball fan and an avid athlete, will to need to marshal every last bit of his considerable energy in the next year as he seeks to be become the first Democratic senator from the state of Ohio since John Glenn retired in 1998. He faces a primary challenge from Iraq war veteran and Internet darling Paul Hackett; if he wins the primary, he'll face Republican incumbent Mike DeWine, a senator with some of the lowest approval ratings in the country, but a seat that the Republicans will zealously defend. With Ohio still the nation's premier political battlefield, the race will be one of next year's most-watched campaigns: If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling "class warfare" is a non-starter for the Democrats.

But Brown's decision to enter the race after first saying he wouldn't prompted paroxysms of recrimination and anger in the blogosphere. "Brown's indecision created an ugly and totally unnecessary scene," wrote blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, one of Hackett's most prominent online supporters. "If he'd declared in the first place, Hackett probably wouldn't have challenged him for the nomination. Now, there's probably going to be a nasty little primary and lasting bad blood amongst Ohio Democrats. These are very real costs that Brown chose to inflict on his party."

Hackett, whom many bloggers treat like the local boy made good, and who was recently the subject of a glowing profile in Mother Jones titled "The Democrat Who Fought," provides the blogosphere an opportunity to prove, unequivocally, its own influence. "The reason to support Hackett over Brown is simple," wrote Beyerstein, "if Hackett wins (and he can win), the progressive blogosphere makes history."

Blog opinion on the race is by no means uniform. Many support Brown, but it's a strange feature of the blogosphere that a newcomer to politics like Hackett is widely considered a known quantity, while Brown, who's spent his entire adult life in public office, is a mystery. One skeptical blogger on the Web site Swing State Project summed up his reservations with a post titled: "Who is Sherrod Brown?"

Brown lacks the national profile of colleagues like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, but for the duration of his six-and-a-half terms in office, he has been one of Congress's most stalwart progressives. "I've known him for many years," says Sanders. "What's very clear is that Sherrod Brown knows which side of the struggle he is on." And when Brown's friend John Ryan, executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO, says, "Sherrod Brown is one of us," he means it in the literal, familial sense. Brown's older daughter Emily is a union organizer for SEIU. When I met Brown, Emily had just lost a union election in a New Jersey nursing home. "She was crushed," Brown told me. "I mean, it's horrible. Have you ever sat and watched an election? They count the votes publicly and you can tell within 15 votes what's going to happen, and the workers are scared. … It's pretty depressing for the organizer but it's more depressing for the workers."

If Brown had announced a decision to enter the U.S. Senate race over the summer when he was being recruited by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, he likely wouldn't be facing a primary challenger and the "netroots," as progressive bloggers have taken to calling themselves, would be four-square behind him. But Brown demurred. His first marriage had ended in divorce, and he was aware of the strain that a campaign can place on a relationship, particularly a new one. After spending most of his first year of marriage in D.C. organizing against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), he and Schultz had not even moved in together. Brown was preparing for Emily's wedding and sending Schultz's daughter Caitlin off to college. And there were also questions about how a Senate candidacy would affect Schultz's job at the Plain Dealer.

Some Democrats, frustrated with Brown's dithering, are convinced that he was reluctant simply because he wasn't sure he could win. "I think he's cautious," says one Democratic Hill staffer who knows Ohio politics well and supports Brown. "I think that's the real reason. He values the seat he has and he's only willing to give it up if he's got a really good shot at winning."

On August 17, Brown posted a letter on his Web site GrowOhio.org, announcing he wouldn't run for Senate, and since 17th District Congressman Tim Ryan had also declined to run, it looked like the Democrats might have trouble finding a candidate. That's when Hackett stepped in. The 43-year-old attorney gained national attention this summer when he returned from a tour of duty in Iraq to his suburban Cincinnati home and ran in a special election to replace the 2nd District's Congressman, Rob Portman, who'd been appointed United States Trade Representative.

At first Hackett, who'd never held an office higher than city council in a small suburb, escaped the attention of the national media and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But his campaign was followed avidly by blogs, and Democracy for America, which together raised more than $500,000 and pushed him into the national spotlight. Hackett's credibility to talk about the mistakes in Iraq, coupled with his tough-talking demeanor (he called Bush a "son of a bitch" and Rush Limbaugh a "fatass drug addict") made the netroots swoon. It was like Howard Dean in uniform. Hackett ultimately lost the August 2 election in an overwhelmingly Republican district by just four points. A star, of sorts, was born.

In mid-September, Hackett started to lay the groundwork for a Senate run and paid Brown a call at his D.C. office. Brown had supported Hackett during the special election, paying the salary of online organizer Tim Tagaris and loaning Hackett his trusted political organizer Dan Lucas. Hackett says that in the meeting Brown spoke "in a general way" about supporting him in the Senate race; Brown says it was clear that he gave no endorsement. In either case, the take-away was that Brown wasn't getting in the race.

But three weeks later, Brown changed his mind. Schultz was able to make sure his candidacy wouldn't jeopardize her job at the Plain Dealer; Emily was married; Caitlin had gone off to college; friends and colleagues kept urging Brown to run; and as Schultz put it, "We moved into a really new house where we could open a window without a hammer, and we both said, 'There is a real danger here of getting too comfortable, and we didn't work this hard to get too comfortable.'"

In early October, Brown called both Hackett and DeWine to let them know he was in. "Telling those two guys," he says, "it wasn't the most fun day of my life."

Born to run

Sherrod Brown was born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1952, the youngest of three sons. His father Charles was a physician. His mother Emily hailed from Georgia and was an early supporter of the civil rights movement, introducing her boys to political activism at an young age. Sherrod was elected president of his high school student council. "He caused people a lot of headaches because he was such an activist," says his mother. "The principal didn't really care for him at all."

In 1970, he and his friends organized a march in Mansfield for the first Earth Day. "We did this really cool march and we had a really big crowd," says Brown with pride. "But we get down to the square and none of us had thought about what you do when you get down there. We didn't have any speakers, and it was like, 'Oh, shit.' So we just disbanded."

Brown enrolled at Yale, where he split his time between Russian Studies and campaign work for liberal candidates, including George McGovern. He so impressed Don Kindt, his local Democratic County Chairman, that the next spring, when Brown was back at Yale finishing up his senior year, Kindt called Brown and asked him to run for state representative. "I remember him calling me," says Sherrod's older brother Charles, who was in Yale Law School at the time. "'You just can't believe this, this is the most exciting news. Don Kindt wants me to run!'"

Sherrod graduated and moved back home, where his father, a Republican, was initially skeptical. "My dad says, 'I'm not voting for you, you're too young,'" says Sherrod. "But he helped a lot." Mrs. Brown recruited neighborhood kids to lick stamps and stuff envelopes in the basement of their house, and Charles spent nearly the whole semester in Mansfield running the campaign. By the time the election rolled around, Sherrod had knocked on 20,000 doors, nearly half the households in the district. In a stunning upset, he beat the Republican incumbent. She never saw it coming.

In 1982 at age 29, after eight years in the state House, Brown was elected Secretary of State. He spent two terms in Columbus, where his signature effort was voter registration outreach. He convinced McDonald's to print voter registration forms on their tray liners. "You could see voter registration cards with ketchup and mustard on them," he says, "and we accepted them."

Brown's first electoral defeat came in 1990, at the hands of a Hamilton County Commissioner with a franchise name: now-scandal-ridden governor Bob Taft. Taft's media consultant was none other than one-time Nixon aide and current head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Brown says, "It was the worst campaign I've ever run." By all accounts the race for governor was brutal and the ads vicious. At one point, Brown showed up at Taft's campaign office and confronted him. The scene quickly devolved into a shouting match.

After the defeat, Brown moved back to northeastern Ohio and jumped into a crowded primary for an open congressional seat near his old home district outside Cleveland. He won the primary and immediately began a district-wide bike tour that passed through every township. It worked to great effect. He reports in his first book, "Congress from the Inside," that in a debate with his opponent late in the race he challenged her to name the high schools in the two largest towns in the district. She couldn't. He also made a series of promises, including a pledge to pay for his own health care out-of-pocket until Congress passed universal coverage. For the past 13 years, he's kept that pledge, turning down the insurance offered to members and purchasing his own, until recently, when at the cajoling of his wife, he joined her plan.

A Capitol story

Brown entered Congress at a heady time, one of 110 freshmen in the most diverse House class in history. Bill Clinton had ended the Democrats' exile, and for the first time in more than a decade the party had control of both the White House and Capitol Hill. Two years later, of course, after Clinton's health plan had gone down in defeat and Gingrich had assiduously laid the groundwork for an insurrection, 54 House seats swung from Democrats to Republicans, ending 40 years of Democratic control. Brown barely survived that year's anti-incumbent sentiment to return for a second term to a Congress in which, as he wrote in "Congress from the Inside," the "sometimes chaotic, no-one-seems-to-be-in-charge days of the Democratic majority were over. A hierarchical, military-like style with one man in charge was in place."

The "man in charge" has changed from Newt Gingrich to Tom DeLay, but for the last decade, life as a Democratic congressman has been frustrating if not downright depressing. "It's Kabuki theater," says Kuebler. "I stand over here and make a speech. You stand over there and say a speech. Then we pass what the Republicans want." The majority rarely allows amendments or opposition bills to come to a vote, and any Democratic changes to legislation that do make it out of committee are promptly gutted before reaching the floor. Perhaps most maddeningly, House Republicans now hold votes open two to three hours past the customary voting period while they break enough kneecaps to win. In a 2003 op-ed about the Medicare vote, Brown described one Republican hiding in the Democratic cloakroom to avoid the bullying of DeLay's enforcers. These votes are, "always in the middle of the night," Brown wrote. "Always after the press had passed their deadlines. Always after the American people had turned off the news and gone to bed."

Despite all this, Brown seems to relish the legislative process. When I ask him if he ever feels that being a minority-party congressman is an exercise in futility, he says "Well, the one thing about this place is that if you focus on an issue, particularly one that other members don't know anything about, you can really get something done."

One such issue is tuberculosis, the global scourge that infects one third of the world's population and kills 2 million people every year. After Joanne Carter, the legislative director for the NGO Results, first broached the topic of TB with Brown in 1997, he began using his position as ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Health subcommittee to lobby for increased funding. He traveled with public health advocate Paul Farmer to Haiti and visited Siberia, where rates of multi-drug resistant TB are frighteningly high. "It was an issue that was dying for lack of attention," says Carter. "He saw that as an opportunity. It was kind of an ego-less thing. It wasn't about 'this is my issue,' it was more: 'Who can I work with to get more resources for this and make sure the resources get better spent'" In 1997 Congress appropriated no funds for combating global TB and today it budgets more than $90 million. "He certainly deserves some of the credit for that," says Carter. "He helped create attention for this out of nothing."

Other than public health, the issue for which Brown is best known has been his energetic and sustained opposition to the free trade agreements pushed by both the Clinton and Bush White Houses. In his second book, "The Myths of Free Trade," Brown argues that "[a]n unregulated global economy is a threat to all of us," from "the child in Avon Lake, Ohio, who eats raspberries grown in Guatemala by poorly paid farmers who use pesticides banned in the United States," to "the Chinese prison camp laborer."

As wages in the United States have continued to stagnate and the trade deficit explodes, free-trade agreements face stiffer opposition among Democrats. While NAFTA passed with support from 40 percent of Democrats in the House, CAFTA passed with the support of only 7 percent.

For almost all of the last year, Brown was in D.C. coordinating the effort to block CAFTA, which will create a NAFTA-like "free-trade" agreement between the United States, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. While corporate America pushed the bill hard with talk of opening markets, Brown pointed out that the combined purchasing power of the countries included in the agreement was roughly equivalent to Columbus, Ohio. He argues that it was cheap labor that CAFTA's corporate supporters were really after. The agreement was also loaded with intellectual property protections for big American corporations, but included no serious labor or environmental standards.

In an op-ed published on July 24, four days before the vote, Brown predicted, "If the House of Representatives passes the Central American Free Trade Agreement, it will take place in the middle of the night, the normal 15-minute roll call will be extended to about three hours so that House leaders can twist arms, and the legislation will pass by one or two votes." He was exactly right: The bill passed 217 to 215, in an extended vote that gaveled closed just three minutes after midnight. One hundred eighty-seven Democrats voted against the bill, joined by 27 Republicans. (According to The Hill, the 15 Democrats who voted for the bill have since reaped their rewards. Pro-CAFTA business interests have hosted more than a dozen fundraisers on their behalf.)

'A nasty little primary?'

One online organizer familiar with Hackett told me that if primary voters thought the race was going to be decided by Iraq, they'd be inclined to vote for Hackett, whereas if they thought it would come down to domestic issues, they'd vote for Brown. Hackett's recent service does give him undeniable credibility on Iraq. But Sherrod Brown is no John Kerry when it comes to the war. He has been an outspoken critic from its inception, and he voted against granting the president authority to wage it. In early 2003, as the United States massed troops and U.N. inspectors were allowed to return, Brown co-wrote a letter to the president, signed by 133 other members of Congress, affirming their belief that the "U.S. should make every attempt to achieve Iraq's disarmament through diplomatic means and with the full support of our allies."

Inspired by a biography of John Quincy Adams that described his practice of reading letters of constituents opposed to slavery, Brown took to the House floor nearly every night to read letters from constituents opposing the war. As the war has dragged on, he voted for some supplemental funding, but repeatedly called for a fuller accounting by the administration of both the mistakes leading up to the war and the billions of dollars that continue to be unaccounted for. He's currently a co-sponsor of a bi-partisan bill calling for the president to present a plan for withdrawal by December 31 and to begin removing troops by next October.

Hackett says that because Brown voted for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which expressed "the sense of Congress" that the United States should "support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" and "promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime," Brown voted for the war. "How do you do regime change without invasion?" Hackett asks. "Did he think Tinkerbell was going to come down from outer space and wave her magic wand? I don't think so. Guys like me have to go in and do that. Sherrod Brown voted for regime change; he voted for military intervention in Iraq."

But the text of the bill itself explicitly contradicts that logic. "Nothing in this Act," it reads, "shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of United States Armed Forces" with the exception of training and weapons for Iraqi opposition groups. If Hackett's standard is to be applied, then Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, who both voted for the bill, and Ted Kennedy and the late Paul Wellstone, who were in the Senate where it passed unanimously, are all pro-war.

Brown could hardly believe Hackett's assertion. "Paul's failure to make a distinction between something like that and a vote to attack a sovereign country shows either his inexperience or his willingness to say anything to get elected," Brown said. "My position on the war has been consistent. Over the last three months, from his congressional race to now, he's had three positions. I think he's decided the only way for him to win is to be the most antiwar candidate, but he's danced too much for that."

During his campaign in the 2nd District, Hackett firmly opposed calls for withdrawal, saying, like Bush, that the United States could not "cut and run." On October 19 Democracy for America sent out an e-mail from Hackett asking recipients to sign a pledge that they would only support candidates who "[a]dvocate for a responsible exit plan with a timeline." Yet when I interviewed Hackett in early November, he called congressional requests for a mandated timeline "absolutely ludicrous," and said instead it was the role of Congress to "pressure the executive branch to issue the order to the Pentagon to develop the plan to withdraw the troops."

More than substantive differences on the issues, those supporting Hackett seem most seduced by his blunt manner. "I'm sure Brown would win my support if it were based solely on a checklist of issue positions," wrote one commenter on Beyerstein's blog Majikthise. "But the thing about Hackett, besides the merely neat and cool netroots stuff, is that the guy's got pizazz. I mean it. Pizazz counts. PH is a straight shootin', hairy chested, bare knuckled, 'bite me' war vet [sic]."

Brown, who's been intimately connected to the progressive grassroots for the entirety of his career, evinces more than a little bafflement at the portion of the new blog constituency that has been lobbing rhetorical hand grenades in his direction. "My wife says it's like when you have a cold sore, you keep running your tongue over it," Brown says. "I keep telling her, 'Connie, stop reading the blogs!' But she can't help herself."

But Brown's a shrewd campaigner, and seems to grasp the potential of online organizing. Back in June, he started GrowOhio.org, a "community-based project with the goal of empowering the grassroots of Ohio's Democratic Party." Upon entering the race, his campaign took out blog ads announcing his candidacy on all of the top progressive blogs. He also hired Jerome Armstrong, formerly of MyDD, and one of the original netroots gurus. He even posted a help wanted ad on the blogs seeking a campaign Web manager. "Hackett started out with an edge in the blogs," Brown tells me, "but we should have that neutralized soon."

Part of the reason for all of the rancor in the early stages of the primary is that the eventual opponent, two-term Senator Mike DeWine, seems so tantalizingly beatable. Survey USA ranks DeWine in 97th place among senators, with a 45 percent approval rating. In June, DeWine's own party's voters offered him a stinging rebuke, when his son Pat finished fourth in the Republican primary for the special election for Ohio's 2nd District. Many observers viewed this as fallout from the base's anger at DeWine for his role in the so-called Gang of 14, who stopped the GOP from carrying out its threat to use the "nuclear option" to get rid of the filibuster. In a recent Columbus Dispatch poll, Brown was ahead of DeWine 35 to 31. In the same poll, Hackett was down a point in a head-to-head match-up with DeWine, but earlier polls, without Brown, also had Hackett beating DeWine.

Hackett argues that with his military service and pro-gun stances he will be immune from the God, guns and gays campaign that Republicans pull out of the drawer for every race against Democrats these days. "2006 won't be the year of musical chairs for career politicians," he says. "At the risk of sounding overly impressed with losing the race in the 2nd District, I demonstrated I can cut deeply into Republicans and independents."

Brown believes his long progressive record will help rather than hinder. "For 10 years I won in a congressional district that was slightly Republican," Brown says. "I think that voters that don't agree with me on some issues will still say, 'Brown's on my side.' On economic issues I'm clearly not just in the mainstream, but in the great majority. The overwhelming number of people think the drug companies, the oil companies and the insurance companies rip Americans off. They don't like the Medicare bill, they want a minimum wage increase and they think our trade agreements hurt our country. On every one of those issues, I beat DeWine."

"I'll debate those with anybody."

Journalist and historian Rick Perlstein's new book, The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, begins with a "political parable" about the rise and decline of the American airplane giant Boeing. Founded in 1917 with a singular vision of cheap, accessible commercial air travel despite its huge risks, Boeing ultimately became one of the country's most successful companies by sticking to its ambitious vision through thick and thin. In the '80s, just as they were abandoning this long-term thinking for the quarterly profit-driven tactics approved by Wall Street, the upstart Airbus came onto the scene with their own long-term vision of the superjumbo. Boeing thought it folly, but it now appears that Airbus will get the last laugh--their new plane, the world's largest passenger aircraft, made its maiden voyage in April. For Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, this story serves as an analogy for the fortunes of the Democrats, who abandoned their own long-term project in the centrist '90s to please the "stock ticker" of the next election. Perlstein took time away from work on his forthcoming sequel to Before the Storm to talk about why Democrats must recommit to a long-term vision and stop playing by stock ticker rules.

You have this analogy between Boeing's multi-generational devotion to building the first jumbo jet and the Democratic Party's multi-generational commitment to insuring economic security. How have successive generations of Democrats built on the same project?

Take something like federal aid to education. That was an idea Democrats had ever since the New Deal. It never succeeded for various political reasons, but they just kept at it and by 1965 Lyndon Johnson finally passed the thing. By that time, everyone knew what the Democrats were about: They were the party that supported federal aid for education. Compare that to when the Clintons proposed their health care plan in the early '90s. He ran and won on the idea that he was going to deliver health care to all Americans, and for various complicated reasons he lost that battle. But instead of saying well, this is what the Democrats are about, we're going to stick to it despite the setback, Hillary Clinton very explicitly said: What I learned was that you have to do things in small steps and incrementally. She specifically backed off the marker that the Democrats laid down, that we are the party defined by our pledge to deliver health care to everyone.

I like this term 'marker.' What's it mean?

It's a gambling term. A marker basically is a commitment to pay. In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit would say, "that guy holds my marker." It's something you can't back out of, on pain of getting your knees broken. The marker that Republicans have is that everyone who runs for office has to sign a pledge--it's enforced by their own knee-breaker, Grover Norquist--that on pain of political death they're not going to raise taxes.

My thesis is that a commitment that doesn't waver adds value by the very fact of the commitment. The evidence is that even though the individual initiatives that make up the conservative project poll quite poorly, they've managed to succeed simply because everyone knows what the Republicans stand for. And the most profound exit poll finding in the last election had nothing to do with moral values, it was all the people who said that they disagreed with the Republicans on individual issues, but they voted for George W. Bush anyway because they knew what he stood for.

He'd given them a marker.

Exactly. The world is an uncertain and scary place and there's value just in making credible demonstrations of fortitude. Now the amazing thing about this is that it's a virtuous circle for the Democrats. Not only can we increase the devotion of an electorate that looks at Democrats as piddling and feckless, it just so happens that when you poll the public on what they want, it looks much more like the Democratic agenda than the Republican agenda.

Okay, but if our superjumbo is "Big Government," many Democrats say that plane won't fly anymore. The project is intellectually bankrupt, we need a new one. What do you say to that?

Well, first of all, I'm a historian and the only time Democrats have been able to pull together a new majority and to grow was when they laid down these markers, pledges to ordinary Americans that the government would protect their economic interests.

The other thing is, there's a story about economic history of the recent past that historians will find us strange for not speaking about more often, and that's the stagnation of incomes for ordinary Americans. What could be more contemporary? What could be more timely than programs that address that crying need? Between WWII and the '70s the real incomes of Americans doubled. People who used to have outhouses were able to afford vacation cottages. Well, that's dropped off a cliff. If it makes me an old Democrat to try and restore what the Democrats of the '40s, '50s and '60s accomplished, which was running the country, sue me. I'm an old Democrat.

The most common analysis of why Democrats have strayed from this project--as one New Deal congressman whom you quote says "Freedom Plus Groceries"--points to corporate money. Today's Dems are feeding at the same trough and they can no longer take on the insurance companies, etc. But in the latter half of the book, you provide a fascinating psychological account of why the Democrats strayed from this project, which was sort of born out of the conflict of the '60s.

Yeah. The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats--and I'm 35--have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats. People of a certain age are terrified that the electorate is going to associate them with the excesses of the '60s, but most voters are too young to remember that stuff. The Republicans keep trying to paint the Democrats as the party of the hippies and punks who burn the flag.

In fact, we just got a new flag-burning amendment.

Yeah, but there's really less juice you can squeeze out of that orange every year.

So then how much do you think the political situation has changed since November? Do you see any positive movement forward?

With Social Security, where they've said "this far and no farther," could that be leveraged into something a little more ambitious?

Democratic politicians have done one thing very well this year. They've drawn the line on Social Security. It's been not only morally imperative, but enormously successful politically. The popularity of congressional Democrats has kept going up and the president's popularity keeps going down.

Now think about this: We're talking about a 70-year-old program. They're still drawing on the capital that Democrats bequeathed them 70 years ago. Isn't it their duty to work towards bequeathing some capital for Democrats 70 years from now to draw on? To me, the answer is obvious: Every American needs guaranteed health insurance. Unless these guys create a reason for people to identify with the Democratic Party, they have to work so hard every two years to squeeze out that 51 percent of the vote.

I want to make your job easy, guys. Do you really think that if the Democrats could make a credible pledge to Americans--vote in enough Democrats and you'll never have to pay another health care bill--people would still be voting on gay marriage?

We do have a timid bunch of folks in the Democratic Party, but that doesn't mean all is lost. Timid and cautious people can often express their timidity and cautiousness by being swept up in a tide. We've got to provide the tide and let them surf it.

It's hard to think of a state outside the Deep South where the Democratic Party has been more thoroughly whupped than Ohio. For over a decade, Republicans have controlled the governor's mansion and all statewide constitutional offices and had near two-thirds majorities in both state legislative chambers. Both US senators are Republican, as are twelve of eighteen Representatives.

The sad fact is that the GOP has encountered precious little resistance on its path to hegemony; Democrats have been out-fundraised more than 2-to-1 and fight each other harder than they fight their Republican opponents. Lucas County, around Toledo, has two tribes of Democrats--the local press refers to them as Team A and Team B--whose members regularly battle each other for local office.

"The Ohio Democratic Party is so terrible and ineffectual," a friend who worked on the campaign in Ohio last year recently told me, "it ought to be taken into receivership."

But things might be about to change. Thanks to the arrogance and corruption of the state GOP and the tireless investigative journalism of the Toledo Blade, every day Ohio voters are learning more about "coingate," a scandal at once farcical and outrageous, that touches nearly every prominent elected Republican in the state and could finally pave the way for a Democratic resurgence.

The scandal starts back in 1997, when the state's Bureau of Workers Compensation, which provides workplace injury insurance for Ohio's workers, decided to start an "emerging managers" program that would allow outside managers to invest some of the fund's $18 billion in assets. With then-Governor George Voinovich's direct appointee at BWC calling the shots on who got the money, the $500 million set aside for the program offered a jackpot of prime contracts that could be doled out to supporters. In all, one hundred fifty-four fund managers were contracted to invest BWC money under Voinovich and his successor, Bob Taft.

Enter Thomas Noe, a GOP rainmaker (and Bush Pioneer) from the Toledo suburbs who, along with his wife, Bernadette, has contributed more than $200,000 to Republican candidates over the past fifteen years. Noe made his fortune in the rare coin business and somehow convinced the BWC that it could do the same.

In 1998, he got a contract to invest $25 million of state money in coins, with 80 percent of the profits supposedly going to the state. It was an unorthodox deal: not a single other state invests in the completely unregulated rare coin market, and there was no supervision of Noe, who acted as the main assessor of the collection's value and kept the coins stashed in warehouses around the country, all but one of which state overseers never visited. When the contract was reviewed in 2000, a state auditor immediately recognized the potential for self-dealing.

Noting that Noe and his associates "could potentially be realizing profits on sales of coins to the [fund]" he warned, "such a situation presents a conflict of interest and potentially exposes both the managers and [the bureau] to allegations of improper activity."

Not only did then-Republican State Auditor (and now Attorney General) Jim Petro ignore this warning, Noe was rewarded with another $25 million. The Blade's reporting has revealed that the auditor's concerns were well-founded: 121 precious coins have disappeared, including two worth $300,000 that were "lost" en route to a business partner of Noe in Colorado named Mike Storeim, who's since been accused of scamming the fund. Noe wrote off $850,000 of debt owed to the coin fund by another partner who had served a year in federal prison for laundering drug money, and after much prodding, Noe has now admitted that he can't account for somewhere between $10 and $12 million in state money--cash that investigators suspect he stole.

As an added wrinkle, the FBI is currently investigating Noe for violating federal campaign finance law by distributing cash to associates to donate to Bush at an October 2003 fundraiser. This suggests that the entire enterprise was functioning as a closed loop of cronyism: Republicans gave Noe access to state money, some of which he then skimmed for himself and some of which he funneled back into contributions to Republican candidates, up to and including the President of the United States.

Once reporters and investigators started looking into the BWC management, Noe's coin shenanigans turned out to be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The BWC also lost $215 million (!) in a high-risk hedge fund and recently the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the BWC continued to allow another fund manager, Alan Brian Bond, to manage $50 million for eighteen months after the New York money manager had been indicted in a high-publicity kickback scheme. This prompted Democratic State Senator Marc Dann to craft a bill requiring BWC administrators to Google the investment managers once a month to make sure they haven't been indicted.

With its ever widening circle of misbehavior and Maltese Falcon trappings of rare gold coins and sketchy collectors, the scandal has captured the public's imagination. "I walked in the Memorial Day parade and people were handing me coins," says Dann, who represents suburban Youngstown. "When I go into Speedway, the coffee lady asks me every day about the individual developments in specific detail."

So far the state's prominent Republicans have been remarkably tone deaf in their handling of the fallout. At first Taft insisted the coin investments had outperformed the stock market and lashed out at the Blade for its "vendetta." Then amid calls for the state to file suit against Noe, Petro dragged his feet for fifty-one days, potentially allowing Noe time to move money around and hide assets. Now each day brings a new revelation of misdeeds and the states' Republicans are, in Dann's words, "arguing about whether they're incompetent or corrupt."

It's beginning to take a political toll: The head of the BWC has resigned, Governor Taft, whose second and final terms ends in 2006, has an approval rating of 19 percent, and Petro, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and Auditor Betty Montgomery, all of whom hope to succeed Taft, are working furiously to distance themselves from Noe, despite having all been beneficiaries of his largesse.

But will this all add up to Democratic gains in 2006?

Pete Giangreco, a Democratic political consultant who's worked in both Illinois and Ohio, says there's good precedent: In 2002 Illinois Dems swept to power, capturing the governor's mansion for the first time in twenty-six years in the wake of a licenses-for-bribes scandal swirling around then-Governor George Ryan. "I was in Columbus yesterday and was talking about how similar Ohio in '06 is to Illinois in '02. It's déjà vu all over again," Giangreco says. "Two things did it in Illinois, and it looks like the same dynamic: Pretty serious economic problems brought on by a GOP administration and a huge scandal and corruption in completely Republican-dominated state government."

"The public knows the problem is not just the people in power but the system itself," says attorney Chris Glaros, who recently co-founded the grassroots group Blue 88 to bring Ohio back to the Democratic Party. But unless Democrats get behind clean elections legislation, he adds, "disgust with the current scandal will not translate into trust that Democrats can do better."

"Democrats," Glaros says, "are going to win by arguing for real reform rather than making the case that they're inherently more trustworthy."

Last fall, I spent seven weeks in the suburbs of Madison, Wis., canvassing undecided voters for John Kerry. Driving back one day from a long session pounding the pavement, our car passed two young Mormon missionaries on bicycles. They were dressed in their standard garb: grim but oddly stylish black suits, white shirts, skinny ties and backpacks, all of which were getting soaked in the rain as they struggled up a hill, standing on their pedals for extra leverage.

"Now that," said a fellow organizer sitting in the backseat, "is canvassing."

Going door to door was hard enough. My pulse would quicken at each door, and after three hours tromping through numbing subdivisions I invariably got the urge to fill in numbers on my walk sheet, grab a soda and wait for the carpool to pick me up. And all we wanted was three minutes of someone's time to ask a few questions, give a short pitch and hand out some literature. A missionary who approaches a stranger's door is seeking nothing less than a complete reconstitution of that person's worldview. One imagines a lot of door slamming, unpleasant words and icy stares.

And yet the improbable fact about missionary activity is that it works, regardless of the faith's specific dogma. Mormons are the fastest-growing church in the country. Evangelical protestant congregations make up 58 percent of all new churches in the United States. Globally, Islam continues to reach into new and unfamiliar lands, experiencing explosive growth in China. Religions that actively proselytize – Pentecostals, Mormons, Muslims – grow, almost without exception.

There's a corollary to this in politics. Yale political scientists Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have found in numerous studies of voter contact that face-to-face canvassing is far and away the most effective means of persuasion: Roughly one out of every 15 voters approached at the door will add their vote to your tally.

In a speech accepting his new position as chair of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean stressed the importance of reaching out to unbelievers through retail politics. "People will vote for Democratic candidates in Texas, and Utah, and West Virginia," he said, "if we knock on their door, introduce ourselves and tell them what we believe."

Five months after the election, progressives' efforts have largely shifted away from people's doorsteps, toward saving Social Security, opposing reactionary judicial appointees and reining in the administration's foreign policy. But I can't stop thinking about those Mormons on their bicycles. What are progressives doing to win conversions to our faith? Where are our young people on bikes approaching unfamiliar doors? How are we preaching the good news?

The True Political Nature of Americans

In all the ink spilled post-November about "What We Need To Do Now," precious few answers to this question have been put forth. Commentators seem to think either (a) we don't need to convert people because they already have fundamentally progressive values, or (b) converting voters is impossible, so the Democratic Party should just become more conservative. Both views are misleading and counterproductive; they divert attention from the crucial work of expanding the reach of progressivism.

Joe Conason, in his book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (published before the election), offers a succinct articulation of the first theory: "Whether they now describe themselves as liberal or not, most Americans remain strongly progressive in their views about taxation, health care, education spending, Social Security, environmental protection and corporate regulation."

There are heaps of polls supporting this claim, but before concluding that the Democratic Party's recent misfortunes are the result of mass confusion or false consciousness, these polls must be considered alongside other evidence that suggests something deeper is at work.

Over the past several decades, the Democratic Party's traditional advantage in party identification has evaporated. Equal numbers of voters now consider themselves Democrats and Republicans. In 1977, upward of 45 percent of the population identified themselves as Democrats. Even more dramatic are the percentages of "liberals" and "conservatives" in the electorate. In exit polls from 2004, 34 percent of voters identified as conservative while only 21 percent identified as liberal.

Then there's the fact that both the government's policies and the electorate's voting behavior have shifted dramatically to the right in the last 30 years. Common sense would suggest that the best explanation for this is that most voters are conservative and the Republicans are the conservative party. If this is true, we cannot continue to imagine there exists a slumbering progressive majority waiting to be awakened with the right trumpet call. We cannot cling to the fiction that conservatives have somehow hypnotized the electorate, hoodwinking them into voting for Republicans and reactionaries while leaving untouched their internal worldviews, which somehow remain fundamentally progressive. It is important that we stare directly into the sun on this point. The right has fundamentally reconstituted the way Americans view government, politics, policy and the public sphere. We need to change it back.

In contrast to Conason, and others who have faith in the innate progressivism of the American voters, are Beltway strategists who take the polity's rightward turn as a given and subscribe to thesis (b), that conversion is impossible. Democrats can revive their party, they argue, only by changing their positions so that they more closely represent the conservative electorate.

Members of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its founder Al From adhere to this line of thinking. Within the DLC are two groups: One says Democrats need to win back white working-class voters by moderating on social issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.), while another seeks to poach socially-moderate, suburban, Christine Todd Whitman-like Republicans by promulgating an even more slavishly pro-business, free market platform.

Such repositioning can easily be self-defeating. In politics it's often more important that you stand for something rather than what you stand for. Like clockwork, every two years the DLC urges the Democrats to "move to the middle" during campaigns. Then, when candidates take their advice and the inevitable failure ensues, Al From & Co. chide the party for not having gone far enough. The most common complaint I heard while canvassing in Wisconsin was that voters didn't know what Kerry stood for. And a recent Democracy Corps poll reported that twice as many people thought that the Republican Party knows what it stands for. Diluting what little there is left of the Democratic brand seems a poor marketing idea.

In other words, when someone proves initially unreceptive to an evangelizer's pitch, the young missionary doesn't then say, "Well, would you be interested in converting if you didn't have to believe in Jesus?"

Good Cop, Better Cop

There's a deeper philosophical question, though: What profit a party if it gain a majority and lose its soul? Even if it were true that a kind of neo-Clintonian Democratic majority is the best that can be achieved in the short term, the ultimate goal for progressives is the implementation of policies that promote social and economic justice, a more robust safety net, greater opportunity for all and the democratization of corporate power. Which is to say, electoral victories are means to ends.

Too often, we view the goals of winning elections and implementing a progressive agenda as inherently contradictory, when they can actually be parallel and mutually reinforcing. Creating more self-identified progressives accomplishes both: It creates more Democratic voters and builds a constituency for progressive policies.

Currently, a dysfunctional division of labor exists between Democratic politicians and the progressive base, in which the base spends much of its energy attempting to stop Democratic politicians from selling out core progressive principles, while it is left to the politicians to reach out to those in the mushy middle.

Ideally progressives should be giving candidates cover to implement a progressive agenda by doing the reaching out and convincing themselves. Kerry and Bush won liberals and conservatives by equal margins, respectively, but with conservatives outnumbering liberals five to three, Kerry's nine-point margin among moderates wasn't enough for victory. "Given the big conservative edge over liberals, that was the election," observed E. J. Dionne in The Washington Post. "Unless liberalism can refurbish itself, it will continue to be a drag on Democratic opportunities."

If a political party's job is to win elections by doing what is politically expedient, the activist's job is to make doing the right thing politically expedient. The GOP base hollers and screams about judicial nominations, while senators like Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch present themselves as voices of moderation, but the overall outcome has been a significant and scary rightward lurch in the federal judiciary. I've interviewed right-wing activists who rail against the GOP for selling them out on judicial nominees, but at some level they know they're winning, slowly but surely.

Over the years, progressives have used this bad cop-good cop dynamic to great effect: The tension between labor led by John Lewis (bad cop) and Franklin Roosevelt (good cop) produced the National Labor Relations Act. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement (bad cop) and LBJ (good cop) brought about the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

The lesson is that political parties are empty vessels. A party without a sufficiently militant base will end up standing for very little, and voters would rather vote for something than for nothing. At the same time, however, a party too tightly controlled by its base will likely pull the party toward electoral failure. Only by the productive interchange between activists and the party hierarchy can electoral success and long-term implementation of an ideological vision both be achieved. The challenge is to reach out without selling out. Today, the Democratic Party is failing to do the former while succeeding in the latter. It's the worst of both worlds.

Rick Perlstein, in his marvelous Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, writes of a young, ambitious Brent Bozell surveying the prospects for conservatism in 1959. As opposed to fellow Republicans, "who simply assumed a bedrock majority of Americans thought just like them," Bozell argued there was no conservative majority in America. "A conservative electorate," he wrote after Democratic victories in the 1958 mid-term elections, "has to be created."

Since Bozell wrote those words, he and his allies have succeeded in building that electorate largely by making more people into conservatives. The operative question for building a long-term progressive majority is not how we stitch together 51 percent of the voters into the Democratic quilt, nor how we wake people up to their own elusive progressivism. It is how we make more progressives.

Points of Access

Getting my hair cut the other day, my hairdresser, a gay man in his 40s who just went back to school to become a social worker, told me about his family's politics. "I can't even discuss politics with my siblings," he said. "My sister is a born-again Christian and my brother is the second-best Army recruiter in the nation." He paused for effect. "And they say my lifestyle recruits."

That accusation is one of the loopier bits of right-wing slander, but it's part of a larger narrative that claims the entire left is scheming non-stop to seduce and indoctrinate the unsuspecting. This is a comical bit of projection because it is the right that has so effectively created institutions to preach conservatism and win converts.

Examples of right-wing outreach abound, not the least of which are the numerous evangelical churches that became functionally indistinguishable from the Republican Party during the last election. Right-wing talk and Christian radio dominate the airwaves. The "pro-life" movement has created organizations like Feminists for Life and blackgenocide.org that seek to draw in those who don't initially self-identify as conservatives. Under Karl Rove's guidance, the GOP has aggressively courted Latinos through business and professional associations and African Americans through black churches. Conservative think tanks have funded right-wing undergraduate publications and groups that bring conservative stars to campus. The Federalist Society – a club of right-wing lawyers, many of whom played key roles in the Clinton impeachment and now populate the federal judiciary – distributes literature and hosts events attended by almost every first-year law student in the country, many of whom don't realize the group, with its innocuous-sounding name, is essentially a training program for conservative movement lawyers.

As the right has actively pursued a program of evangelization, it has simultaneously sought to infiltrate, discredit or destroy any institution that exposes people to progressive thought.

Consider a baby born in 2005 to a conservative family anywhere in America – that is anywhere outside of a major city where the very particles in the air are liberal. How might this child become a progressive? Her first possible exposure to a progressive worldview would be through children's media: books, videos and television shows. Conservatives patrol this border vigorously. Every several months or so, it seems James Dobson or Jerry Falwell is in high dudgeon railing against the perversions of some innocuous children's television character, from Bert and Ernie to SpongeBob SquarePants. Most recently, conservatives targeted Buster the cartoon rabbit, whose visit in one episode of his PBS show to a lesbian couple in Vermont prompted an angry rebuke from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

Next, the child will likely attend public school, an institution conservatives have sought to control by taking over local school boards in order to introduce creationist textbooks, establish abstinence-only sex education and excise any lesson plans tolerant of homosexuality. And while activists seek to influence local curricula, right-wing think tanks advocate fully dismantling public education through vouchers and other ruses.

If our hypothetical student goes to college she will finally, for the first time, come face to face with a progressive worldview. Higher education stands as the only institution in American life today with a significant progressive presence. In classes, in clubs and in dorms, students are exposed to progressives and their views. Not surprisingly, Kerry won college-educated women by nine points, and all voters with post-graduate degrees by 11 points. And while he lost college-educated men, the trend lines are promising. He managed to do four points better than Gore.

Since college enrollment continues to climb, and the economy increasingly puts a premium on post-graduate degrees, this bodes well for Democrats. Conservatives realize this chink in their armor, which explains why their attacks on higher education are so ardent. David Horowitz's latest anti-university gimmick is Students for Academic Freedom, a web site where disgruntled conservative undergrads can post complaints, like this one, about unfair treatment from liberal faculty: On the last [paper], I wrote about how family values in the books weve [sic] read aren't good. I know the paper was pretty much great [sic] because I spell checked it and proofred [sic] it twice. I got an [sic] D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its [sic] okay to be gay.

Absurd as this is, Horowitz remains a serious threat. Currently eight different state legislatures are considering the Horowitz-authored "Academic Bill of Rights," which, unsurprisingly, would revoke academic freedom by making the government enforce some ill-defined "diversity." (Critics have pointed out that, as the bill currently reads, it could become mandatory for the underrepresented political views of, say, al Qaeda to be more widely taught.) There are already numerous conservative influences on contemporary campuses: business schools, well-funded publications, economics departments and major corporations that partner with universities in research. With the attacks of Horowitz and others intensifying, we must defend the independent progressive character of American undergraduate education with every arrow in our quiver.

Let's say, though, that our hypothetical youngster doesn't go to college, and instead enters the workforce. If her job is unionized, she will immediately be exposed to progressive ideas about fairness and workplace democracy, but the odds are overwhelmingly against her holding a union job. Over the last 30 years, unionization has fallen from more than 35 percent to less than 12 percent of the workforce due to, among other things, a sustained attack by Republicans on the right to organize. From the instant the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935, the business class has recognized that unions are the most direct means by which working-class voters are brought into the left. Being in a union has an even more dramatic effect on voting behavior than college. Kerry won two-thirds of union members, and among working-class white voters, a group Kerry lost by 24 points, he won a majority of those in a union.

In fact, when you survey the trend lines in the Democratic coalition, you see an odd but altogether predictable trend. College-educated voters are increasingly moving to the left while working class voters are moving to the right. A host of ideas have been put forward to explain this, but the erosion of labor unions and the progressive character of the academy accounts for much of it.

Outside of school, work and friends, the only other real entry point for our hypothetical subject is the Internet and blogosphere. And while these are invaluable resources for people who have no other access to progressive ideas, they don't ring your doorbell or leaflet your local supermarket. High-profile groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Sierra Club and People for the American Way don't help much either. Though they fight tooth and nail for progressive causes, they are essentially self-contained, devoting little energy toward recruiting non-progressives. Organizations like MoveOn and Democracy For America have revived grassroots, meeting-based membership organizations, but they serve chiefly as a means of coordinating existing progressives rather than pulling new people into the fold. How would moderates, conservatives or those with little in the way of fixed politics ever find themselves interfacing with MoveOn other than a TV ad?

Growing the Flock

Andy Stern, the controversial head of the nation's fastest-growing union, Service Employees International Union, likes to say that he's a "radical about growth." He's recently made waves in the labor movement by pushing for radical restructuring of the AFL-CIO, with an eye toward focusing the movement's efforts on organizing new workers and bringing millions more under labor's tent. He points out that while unions poured unprecedented resources into the 2004 presidential campaign and did an impressive job of getting their members to the polls to vote for John Kerry, there simply weren't enough union members to swing the election.

The same could be said of progressives in general: We can mobilize all we want, but if we are mobilizing a shrinking group of people, it's worth little.

In order to grow, progressives need to systematically expand the universe of access points to the progressive worldview and actively recruit people into the fold. There are three main ways this can be achieved: the development of a vibrant progressive mass media, a revived labor movement, and the organizing of large-scale grassroots social movements in regions and among constituencies that are currently estranged from progressivism. Many astute commentators have written extensively about the first two, so it seems wise to focus here on why the third part of this strategy is important, and what it might entail.

Once upon a time, organizing meant more than coordinating e-mail petitions or hosting house parties to raise money and awareness. It meant something much closer to what we now think of as missionary work. A union would send an organizer into, say, a small mining town in Pennsylvania. He would reach out to the miners, get to know them and their families, and tell them what a union was and how it could help them. He would try to convince them to risk their livelihoods by banding together and demanding a safer workplace and better wages. This was difficult, often bloody work. But when it worked – and often it didn't – it effected a transformation of the miners who joined the union. They now had a new identity. Even if they had joined solely for higher wages or a mine less likely to kill them, after suffering lockouts, harassment and possibly beatings, they would have an entirely new perspective on bosses and power. They would be more progressive.

This is what social movements at their best do. They pull back the curtain on power and expose its workings. They politicize those without political engagements by transforming personal grievances in the workplace, at home and in society into political issues. Before the labor movement, a dangerous workplace, low wages and arduously long workdays were just crappy things about a person's life. Before feminism, stifling your personal ambitions in favor of doting on your husband was just a drawback to being a woman.

And here's one point of access that conservative policies are inadvertently expanding: the moments of personal crisis – unmanageable debt, hospitalization without health insurance, lack of mental health services, sudden unemployment – that reveal to Americans that the right's ideology of "personal responsibility" masks the destruction of a social safety net for middle-and lower-income workers.

Movements draw people into something larger than themselves and show them who their friends and enemies are. A union organizer once told me, "I do this work for the three or four times a year when you look in a worker's eyes and you see she realizes what she's up against."

Through opposition and conflict, movements introduce their participants to a broader political ethos, one that may have a host of specific ideological commitments that are initially foreign. In What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank highlights how this works on the right. The working-class Kansans he describes who became involved with Operation Rescue because of a strongly held religious belief in the iniquity of abortion didn't start out with a position on the inheritance tax, school vouchers or energy deregulation. But to join the "pro-life" movement is to join the conservative movement as a whole. Quickly members learn who their enemies are – liberal elites, college professors, Hollywood, feminists – and through a sort of ricochet reasoning set their politics on other issues in opposition. Unions work in a similar fashion. When you learn that the boss's interests are, in many cases, diametrically opposed to your own, you start listening to what positions the boss takes and then take the opposite.

Taking on Creditors

So what would a newly evangelical kind of progressive movement look like in 2005 and beyond?

Here's an idea. One thing that nearly all Americans share is debt. Building a movement around credit reform – through the formation of local "debt clubs" that would be part of a national campaign, for example – would be one way for progressives to reach out to non-believers.

Almost one in seven households have declared bankruptcy. Many middle class families that took out second mortgages during the '90s refi craze are now skating on thin ice. The average American family saw its credit card debt rise 53 percent during the '90s. Credit card companies have dramatically raised late fees – revenue from which increased fourfold between 1996 and 2001 – while reducing minimum payments.

The result is that people stay in debt longer and pay more. Using an industry standard 2 percent minimum payment, a $5,000 balance will now take 32 years to pay off, at an interest cost of almost $8,000. In the last decade, more than 14,000 payday lending establishments have sprung up across the country wherever there are working and poor people living paycheck to paycheck (including military bases). Their short-term, high-interest loans, which are easily rolled over, can approach annual rates of 450 percent.

Young people today are beginning their adult lives already buried in debt: The average college student now graduates with $18,900 in student loans, the bulk of it non-subsidized debt at commercial interest rates. The interest costs of these loans are likely to increase as Republicans seek to cut federally-subsidized Stafford loans and Pell grants.

We have a moral obligation to do something about this. Fighting against usury and the persecution of debtors has a long religious history as well as a social justice lineage. If there is one value that progressives should stand for, it is the democratization of capitalism, and few things are as inherently undemocratic as a society where large numbers of middle- and working-class people are at the mercy of a small group of unregulated creditors. Building an anti-debt movement would also be an appropriate strategy for these post-industrial times, when consumers are exploited for their purchasing power just as workers are for their cheap labor. As our economy gets riskier by the day, we need policies that mitigate that risk, not exacerbate it.

Organizing around debt makes a lot of political sense. It hits families with children especially hard (a group Kerry lost by a 19 percent margin). It unites a wide swath of the electorate – urban, rural, black, Latino, white – and has special resonance in places where Democrats fare worst. The 10 states with the highest bankruptcy rates are all red states – Utah, Tennessee, Nevada, Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio, Mississippi and Idaho.

A movement for credit reform also has the potential to drive a wedge between cultural and fiscal conservatives, weakening the coalition of conservative interests while building the progressive "brand" by re-associating progressives with fairness, justice and populism. There's ample precedent. During his famous Cross of Gold speech in 1896, populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who in many ways forged the 20th century Democratic Party, asked: "Upon which side will the Democratic Party fight – upon the side of 'the idle holders of idle capital,' [i.e., the banks], or upon the side of 'the struggling masses'?"

The moment is also right. The criminally venal bankruptcy bill just passed in the Senate (with the votes of 18 Democratic senators) caught the attention of the progressive blogosphere, which helped launch an unsuccessful bid to derail it. Ultimately that effort failed because there was no national, grassroots movement made up of debtors. Creating one should be a top progressive priority.

America Coming Together (ACT), a massive voter organization group, could, in a future incarnation, select 100 red counties in red states with high bankruptcy rates and pay for two organizers and an office in each. The organizers would use the extensive e-mail lists of groups like MoveOn and Democracy for America to recruit volunteers from among local progressives, and reach out to people in the area who are in serious debt through canvassing, fliers and other means.

They could form these local debt clubs that would offer an opportunity to share experiences and get practical advice about consolidating debt, the best strategies to avoid foreclosures and how to file for bankruptcy. These clubs might next begin to target local predatory lenders or payday lending outfits, demanding that municipalities change zoning laws to stem their growth.

At the same time as organizing and outreach is happening on the ground locally, ACT could begin a national media campaign around a "credit reform" platform that would reregulate the credit industry, empower those filing for bankruptcy, cap annual interest rates and outlaw predatory lending practices. Groups like MoveOn, TrueMajority and progressive blogs could promote the cause and solicit membership dues from all over the country, the proceeds of which would go to support those who were victims of particularly egregious practices. Progressives nationwide could target the purveyors of the worst practices for a boycott.

Success would build on success. As local groups discovered that credit reform is possible, the agenda might expand toward healthcare reform, since so many bankruptcies are caused by healthcare crises, or debt forgiveness for developing countries suffering from similar fates as American debtors.

With enough time, hard work and resources, one could imagine the development of a real, broad-based and politically powerful constituency in favor of an economically progressive agenda.

Many community groups, like ACORN, are doing work in this vein. But they don't have the resources of ACT or the Democratic National Committee. And most important, due to their tax status, they are unable to bring their leverage to bear in the electoral arena. The "central challenge for progressive politics," Paul Wellstone wrote in Conscience of a Liberal, is "how to build the local victories into a strong national and international presence that can crucially define the quality of life."

In tandem with local organizing, then, the local debt clubs would also need to develop a muscular political program and electoral organization that is independent of, yet operates within, the Democratic Party. Volunteers would be trained as campaign managers and canvassers, and leaders would be groomed for campaigns for local office – alderman, city council, state rep – and campaign on credit reform.

Wellstone's own Senate campaigns fully embodied a successful hybrid of community organizing and electoral politics. As a liberal college professor, he would seem to be the ripest possible target for any number of right-wing smears. Yet he won statewide office in the swing state of Minnesota twice. Much of his success rested on his base of support among poor and working-class rural voters whom he had been organizing for more than a decade prior to his first campaign in 1990.

Clearly, organizing around debt won't by itself revive the Democratic Party. It is just one possible example of the kind of issue that can anchor evangelical grassroots organizing. There are a number of other issues with similar potential – healthcare and a universal living wage both come to mind – and there is no shortage of other avenues to pursue. Progressives must articulate a coherent foreign policy that is non-imperialist, non-militaristic and non-corporatist, but vigilant in its commitment to security and the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad.

The efforts to build a real progressive mass media are also vital, since they provide another possible entry point for those isolated from progressivism. Universities and higher education must be defended from reactionary attempts to enforce state-dictated political orthodoxy. The labor movement must be revived by any means necessary.

What must be avoided at all costs is a tendency to hunker down and commiserate over how embattled we are. We must be outward looking, expansionist and evangelical in our every move.

I recently attended a meeting of a local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ where the club's president screened a 10-minute video intended to get people excited about evangelizing. It was a blurry digital video featuring college students answering the question: "Would you be interested in a conversation about God if your friend brought it up?" Uniformly, the students in the video said, yeah, sure, why not. The video ended with an exhortation that is as relevant to progressives as it is to young Christians:

"They're willing to listen," it said. "Are you willing to tell?"

Here's something to consider: It's a concrete possibility we will wake up one morning and there won't be a single American labor union left. For 30 straight years, American organized labor has been hemorrhaging members, power and influence. [Fifty years ago, 35 percent of workers belonged to unions, today just 12 percent do (and only 9 percent in the public sector).] There are already 22 states in which "right-to-work" rules effectively outlaw collective bargaining; the National Labor Relations Board, entrusted with the sacred duty of protecting the human right to organize, has been turned into just another way station for GOP corporatist hacks; and the American manufacturing sector, once the backbone of the movement, has been eviscerated by globalization.

Faced with the possibility of permanent irrelevance, different factions of the AFL-CIO have recently been engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight over what is to be done. Despite occasional coverage in the mainstream media, this has drawn just a smattering of attention in liberal publications and the blogosphere. But progressives everywhere need to realize that they have a powerful stake in its outcome: Without the American labor movement there is no American left, and the debate taking place right now could very well determine if the movement survives.

So for those of you who've spent the last year following electoral politics (and subsequently sitting shiva for the republic), what follows is a guide to the key points of contention, the major players and what to expect in the months to come.

So what's all this hubbub about the AFL-CIO possibly breaking up?

Last summer Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest and fastest-growing union in the AFL-CIO, threatened to leave the AFL-CIO unless the federation undertook drastic structural reforms – by merging smaller unions to form larger ones and strictly enforcing jurisdictional lines. The announcement caused a stir, not the least because it happened during the heat of the presidential election, when labor was supposed to be presenting a united front. After SEIU made its announcement, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) announced that it would leave the federation if Stern got his way, so the AFL-CIO stands to lose either SEIU or the Machinists, or – if things go badly enough – both.

Stern's announcement seems like it came out of nowhere; had SEIU hinted before that it was dissatisfied with the AFL-CIO?

Yes. The current dissension actually began back in 2003 when, as reported in these pages by David Moberg, the heads of five unions (including Stern) formed the New Unity Partnership (NUP) (see "Organize, Strategize, Revitalize," Feb. 16, 2004). The NUP argued that the union movement was dangerously close to extinction, and needed to make drastic changes. In a strategy memo leaked to the press, the NUP envisioned a labor movement radically altered in structure. As in the trade-union system in Europe, they proposed that each union "be assigned a unique occupation and/or and industry sector(s) to concentrate its growth efforts." The NUP called for the AFL-CIO to sharply focus its efforts on "strategic growth," and called on unions to devote 77 percent of their resources to recruiting new members.

How did the labor movement react to the NUP proposal?

While some hailed the NUP for its bold leadership, the proposal also triggered a backlash. Labor leaders didn't take too kindly to five union presidents appointing themselves as labor's saviors. Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, who derided them as "five guys sitting around and talking," said, "They don't represent the labor movement."

In general, people had a hard time figuring out what exactly the five union heads – Stern, Doug McCarron of the Carpenters, Bruce Raynor of the textile workers (UNITE), John Wilhelm of the hotel workers (HERE) and Terrence O'Sullivan of the Laborers – had in common. They weren't all the biggest unions, they weren't in the same industry and they didn't share the same politics: While Stern ended up endorsing Howard Dean, McCarron gave his support to Bush. Stern said they were all "radicals about growth," but many saw it as an alliance of convenience designed to unseat AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and seize the reins of the federation.

But whatever unions thought about the merits of NUP's proposal, it lit a fire under a labor movement that desperately needed it, and set the terms for much of the current debate about structural reform of the AFL-CIO.

What's happening now?

In November, Sweeney sent a letter to all of the federation's affiliates, requesting they submit a list of issues they felt must be addressed, as well as proposals for reform. So far, about a dozen unions have sent responses, with many more on the way. Both SEIU and the AFL-CIO have posted these proposals on their web sites along with commentary from union members.

What was once just a debate about the pros and cons of the NUP platform has now morphed into a tangled landscape of proposals, alliances and rivalries. The NUP has officially been disbanded because, Stern says, "We all don't agree on our proposals." This all comes in the lead-up to the AFL-CIO's quadrennial convention, which will take place in Chicago in July. There have been whispers for some time that someone from the NUP coalition would challenge Sweeney for the presidency, but as of yet, no one has declared his candidacy. (For a while, Wilhem, co-president of the recently merged UNITE HERE, was rumored to be the guy, but he recently denied he'd run.)

So what does SEIU want to see happen?

The agenda is spelled out most precisely in SEIU's 10-point plan "Unite to Win." It features a number of suggestions that are fairly non-controversial: The labor movement should launch a campaign to unionize Wal-Mart, it should focus political energy on resuscitating enforcement of statutes that protect the right to organize, and it must build strength in regions of the country historically hostile to organized labor.

The signature proposal – inherited from the NUP, and also the most controversial – is to drastically reduce the total number of unions (from the current 58 to about 15) and to organize each of these new mega-unions around a single industry or sector. It's not a new idea. Once upon a time, Teamsters drove trucks, United Auto Workers built cars and Steelworkers worked with steel. Today Teamsters are truck drivers, but they're also bakers and industrial printers. Social workers in Chicago belong to the UAW and the majority of the Steelworkers don't work with steel. This creeping "general unionism" is largely a result of the fact that as the unionized workforce has shrunk and the legal protections have been eviscerated, unions have sought to bolster their sagging numbers through mergers with other unions outside their core sectors and organizing campaigns in far-flung fields.

"Frankly, there is no rational process here," says University of Illinois at Chicago's Bob Bruno, associate professor at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. "Everybody's going after everyone. If you breathe and you have a job, then we'll organize you and that hasn't proven to be a very efficient way of doing things. It hasn't built power and it certainly hasn't raised class consciousness."

Stern and others think this diffusion of worker power across various institutions, particularly within a given trade, makes it impossible to leverage industry-wide power to properly fight today's massive global corporations. Stern points to the current labor crisis in the airline industry where unions representing pilots, flight attendants and machinists are often pitted against each other to "vote in contradiction to interests of the other workers to cut pensions." Stern notes that "under the current system there's no way for workers to fight back together unless the institutions they belong to are willing to band together."

In addition to competition during contract negotiations, unions are also competing to organize the same pools of workers, particularly in the fast-growing healthcare sector, where more than 30 unions are active. SEIU notes, "In 13 of the 15 major sectors of the economy there are at least four significant unions, and in nine of those sectors there are at least six unions."

SEIU itself has reorganized, replacing metropolitan locals with members from disparate trades with regional locals composed of members from a single industry. The union has had success leveraging this collective power within an industry to reach a kind of density "tipping point," after which they're able to secure representation for a large number of workers. And, as they never fail to point out, with 800,000 new members in the past eight years, SEIU is the nation's fastest-growing union, so they must be doing something right.

That sounds like it makes sense. Why is it so controversial?

Well for one thing, fewer unions mean fewer union presidents, and leaders aren't about to merge themselves out of a job. More substantively, it's unclear just who gets to decide which unions merge. The idea of arranged marriages isn't very popular. American Federation of Teachers President Edward J. McElroy put it this way in an interview with Business Week: "Making decisions about mergers is a democratic process that deals with members of unions. For any organization, the AFL-CIO or individual unions, to point a finger and say, 'This union or that should merge,' strikes me as totally antidemocratic. Those are the kinds of decisions individual workers should make. To say to those people, 'This union is not functioning the way we think it should be,' that isn't right."

You'll notice that McElroy used the phrase "antidemocratic," which, if you start reading the literature of SEIU critics, is one of the most common complaints. Those who have taken up the mantle of "union democracy" argue that SEIU's approach, both in its own practices and in what it's proposing, is top-down, technocratic and fundamentally inimical to the values of bottom-up representation that the labor movement should embody. They ridicule Stern for wanting to mirror the structures of the very corporations the movement is fighting (which Stern himself says is one of his aims), where directives are issued by executives and passed down the hierarchy to those at the bottom.

At a conference at Queens College last year, Gregory Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), a small, specialized union that would cease to exist under SEIU's proposal, offered this thinly veiled critique of SEIU and its agenda: "My members are not chess pieces to be maneuvered, nor marionettes waiting to be mobilized. These are real people, and it's their union."

Stern says the rank and file has voted for every strategic move SEIU has pursued, but critics point out that members at locals in San Francisco and Rhode Island started decertification drives after controversial mergers backed by the International were pushed through.

In response to a reference to "union democracy," Stern posted the following to SEIU's blog: "Workers want their lives to be changed. They want strength and a voice, not some purist, intellectual, historical, mythical democracy. Workers can win when they are united, and leaders who stand in the way of change screaming "democracy" are failing to understand how workers exercise the limited power they have in a country where only 8.2 percent of the private sector are in unions."

It's rhetoric like this that pisses a lot of people off. Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), who has a legendary beef with Stern, says "Andy put his foot in his mouth [when he spoke about AFL-CIO reform during the Democratic National Convention last summer], and I thought it was a disgrace." Stern generally tends to inspire strong feelings among both supporters and critics. A typical anti-Stern tract on the web is titled "Why the SEIU's Andy Stern is Full of Shit."

So what do the unions who disagree with Stern say should be done?

It varies. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) recommends setting up voluntary coalition bodies that can serve the purpose of industry-wide organizing while avoiding forced mergers. The Machinists say the AFL-CIO should start its own TV network to get labor's message out, and create a centralized database of health claims to drive down costs. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) focuses its platform on making unions more responsive to their current members, increasing training for shop stewards and increasing strike capacity by providing more funds to pay striking workers (something the Steelworkers also endorse).

CWA organizer and writer Steve Early, who has probably been one of Stern's most vocal critics, maintains that only by reinvigorating participation and militancy at the local level can the movement grow. In other words, where Stern argues that rapid growth is a necessary precondition for meaningful union democracy, Early argues that meaningful union democracy is a necessary precondition for rapid growth.

AFSCME, on the other hand, takes the position that becoming more politically effective is the key to reviving the movement. "Whether you do mergers or not, whether you reassert jurisdictional lines or not, whether you have 15 or 50 members of the Executive Committee, those things are important," says Paul Booth, an assistant to the union's president, Gerald McEntee. "But they don't make as much of a difference as winning or losing in politics makes." AFSCME wants the AFL-CIO to focus its efforts on the one thing it's been undeniably successful at: political mobilization of its members. Under Sweeney, labor has increased turnout of union household voters in each of the last three presidential elections.

What's clear is that while NUP and SEIU have successfully initiated and framed the debate, one that even critics such as Booth call "healthy, stimulating, appropriate and welcome," they no longer own it.

What happens next?

In mid-February and early March, the AFL-CIO Executive Council will discuss the various proposals. In the spring, they are expected to issue recommendations, which will likely be voted on at the convention in July.

What's going to happen at the convention is anybody's guess. Sweeney says he's "looking at the issues that are common in a number of these reports as potential areas where we could start early to build a consensus." (In a 15-minute interview, Sweeney, who has the unenviable job of refereeing the impending fracas, used the word "consensus" almost a dozen times.) There are some basic agreements. The parts of the AFL-CIO constitution that are designed to enforce jurisdiction and stop unions from poaching each other's workers are totally dysfunctional, and it is generally agreed that the AFL-CIO needs to focus its mission and play fewer roles better.

The threat of an SEIU exodus still hangs over the convention, but while many fret about the impact of a split in the house of labor, or a high-visibility, rancorous battle at the convention, the real danger is too much consensus and complacency at the cost of change. For all the enmity that the NUP and Stern have inspired, were it not for them, there would likely be no concentrated discussion about the future of the movement. Sweeney, to his credit, has lowered the temperature and quieted talk of an insurgency by moving the debate inside the AFL-CIO's tent. But while everyone pats themselves on the back for "having the debate" and builds alliances for floor votes, the original sense of urgency is slowly being lost, replaced by quibbles about the fine points of AFL-CIO bureaucracy. "It's converted from a debate about substance to a debate about something like the per capita tax," says Cornell labor professor Rick Hurd.

The worst possible outcome is one that seems increasingly likely: watered-down reform, palatable to all the parties involved. That might be the only way to keep the AFL-CIO together, but keeping the AFL-CIO together is not the point. Revitalizing the labor movement is.

For inmates around the country, every opportunity to call friends and family is a mixed blessing. While phone calls provide a much-needed lifeline to the outside world, the exorbitant fees charged for collect calls by phone companies place a further burden on their loved ones.

But relief may soon be coming to relatives and friends of prisoners in North Carolina. State officials earlier this month requested proposals for a new phone contract in which vendors would provide inmates with the option of setting up debit accounts to pay for calls.

"The debit features that we have specified were based on the fact that we wanted to offer inmates and their families other options for paying for calls," says Patricia Deal, telecommunications manager for the state's Division of Prisons.

Under the current contract, inmates' friends and families can pay as much as 51 cents a minute, plus collect surcharges that can be as high as $2.25. For poor families and public defenders, the cumulative cost of collect call surcharges can quickly become a significant obstacle to staying in touch.

"For a decade it has been just a very serious problem for the families of inmates and for inmates themselves," says Michael Hamden, executive director of North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services. "The inmates have difficulty maintaining ties because it's ruinous to call repeatedly collect at these exorbitant rates, and the families are in the position of being extorted."

Despite repeated complaints from prisoner advocacy groups nationwide, reform has been difficult. Many prisons, both private and public, negotiate exclusive contracts with phone carriers and then take a percentage of revenue as commission. This gives prison officials an incentive to squeeze as much money out of the calls as they can. Prisoner rights advocates argue that this system of financing effectively amounts to subsidizing prison costs out of the pockets of the families of the imprisoned.

For families of inmates serving in private prisons, sometimes thousands of miles from home, the costs are even more onerous, given phone calls represent the only means of routinely staying in touch. In March, a number of prisoner advocacy groups filed a petition supporting an earlier request that the FCC stop private prisons from signing exclusive contracts, require open competition among multiple carriers and allow inmates to set up debit accounts to avoid the markup for collect calls.

North Carolina's prisons are public, and the state's Department of Corrections receives a commission on all collect calls originating from prisons. This netted the DOC about $5 million last year. Deal says reductions in phone revenue could imperil prison services such as education opportunities, indigent inmate funds, and religious and leisure activities. But she's hopeful that by giving prisoners the ability to pay through a debit account, more calls will be connected.

"It allows inmates to make calls [to people] that normally would not accept their calls because they can't afford to," she says, "so that could increase our revenue."

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

The crowd lined up outside the Cooper Union great hall on March 25 for a gathering called "Where's My Democracy?" did not look like your typical participants at a political rally. There were no suits and ties, no pleated khakis or Izod shirts, no signs or buttons -- not even a single baby to kiss. No, this crowd, which formed a line that snaked around Astor place onto Lafayette, was garbed in American Apparel t-shirts, thrift store blazers, and the hyper pointy-toed shoes that are currently standard issue for women south of 14th Street.

"A week ago we'd only sold 200 tickets," said Elana Berkowitz, a member of Downtown for Democracy, the group organizing the event, as the crowd of impatient hipsters pressed to get in. "I can't believe we gave away tickets for free to try to fill the place!"

The packed crowd of over 900 had paid a minimum of $50 a head ($10 for students) to listen to readings from some of America's finest writers, including Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag and Jhumpa Lahiri. The event raised $75,000 towards D4D's ultimate target of $3 million, attracting the politically and literarily-minded alike. "When we saw this combination of writers and the cause, it's what we're into right now," said Libby McGuinness who lives in Chelsea and works in publishing. "I actually ran into someone I work with, a much younger person than we are, and you know she works two jobs to get by and ... I can't believe she got together $50 bucks to come here. To feel so strongly for her to give 50 dollars is great."

Though most of the writers read from non-political works in progress, nearly every one of them had something to say about Bush. "I want to speak at this moment sans hyperbole" said Michael Cunningham, author of the The Hours. "I've never known of an election that mattered this much and darlings, I have lived through Nixon, Reagan and Bush #1!"

The event, which featured a voter registration table right next to a table hawking sleek D4D tee shirts, exhibited D4D's novel approach to political activism, a combination of edgy creativity and hard-nosed politicking -- Lou Reed meets James Carville.

But marrying innovation to pragmatism isn't just limited to this one group. With the John Kerry the clear Democratic nominee and the battle lines for the general election firmly drawn, a number of small, independent groups like D4D are coming up with innovative ways to maximize their electoral impact.

Swing State Spring Break, which sends college kids to swing states to canvass, and IMPACT, which trains law students to monitor polls on election day -- in addition to D4D -- are all seeking to tap the potential of specific constituencies, and leverage their abilities, talents and resource to maximum effect. While Bush has inspired a profound and energetic opposition from progressives and even many moderates, the fact remains that no matter how passionately an undergraduate, or artist, or law student feels about unseating Bush, they only have one vote. The challenge for progressives outraged at the Bush administration's abuse of the public trust is to convert depth of sentiment into breadth of influence.

On the Downtown Train

"Our goal is to invigorate progressive politics and defeat George Bush!" said D4D founder Erik Stowers, kicking off the reading to enthusiastic whoops from the crowd. "By mobilizing all those Americans who share our progressive values but don't actively participate in politics, D4D raises funds through contributions and cultural events like this one in Democratic safe states like New York and we spend the money in battleground states where this election is going to be decided."

D4D is the brain child of Stowers and his friend Mike Bullock, who works at the interview magazine Index. The two initially discussed starting a group called Downtown for Dean back when the Vermont Governor was the front runner for the nomination, but ultimately saw the group as "being much longer term and bigger than just the Dean campaign" and decided to file with the Federal Election Commission as a Political Action Committee (PAC).

Stowers, who spent several years working for New York's Working Families Party and the progressive advertising firm Avenging Angels, says he and Bullock saw a huge opportunity to harness the talents of their friends in creative circles for political ends. "There was a long-term permanent need for an organization that would provide a means of access into political activism for people in the culture community," Stowers says. "You do have these people who are culturally very liberal. If you sit down and talk to them they are down the plank: Electoral reform? Yes. The environment? Yes. Women's rights? Yes. But they don't participate in politics."

"Where's My Democracy?" was D4D's second fundraising event. The first, an art auction, raised $130,000, with 85 percent of the donors at that event never having donated to a political campaign before. Over the next seven months, D4D hopes to eventually raise millions of dollars, which they'll funnel to 527s and PACs operating in swing states, as well as to progressive congressional candidates like Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama.

Aside from fundraising, the group also plans to mobilize the "downtown" constituency of creative folks in the swing states. "We want to hit young, mostly urban voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania," says Stowers. "In the summer we're going to have launch events across Ohio and Pennsylvania, probably most of them will be concerts. The months following that will be about registering voters, getting their names in a database and building up a volunteer pool. And then in the few weeks before the election it will switch into GOTV [Get Out the Vote] to make contact with those people again and try to ensure that they get out and vote. What we're thinking about doing for the night of the election is having parties across Ohio and Penn where you can only get in if you voted."

Spring Break Madness

Like D4D, Swing State Spring Break is run out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, though unlike D4D, which has an office in a converted industrial building, Swing State is headquartered in Sharif Corinaldi's apartment. Corinaldi is a computer programmer by training who had lost his job at a firm in the tech crash. He says he'd never done much political work -- but has been burning to dump Bush since the 2000 election. "I've just been doing nothing but eating, sleeping and shitting getting Bush out of the White House," he says. "I could either write a check for x number of thousand dollars to the DNC and they could put their own TV ads out there, or I could do something with this program and I could essentially get my own volunteers and do something that's more face to face."

The idea for Swing State Spring Break actually originated with two friends who tossed it out one night in a conversation about politics, but were too busy to follow up. Corinaldi then took the initiative, emailing nearly every College Democrats and Generation Dean chapter in the country, putting up a website and committing himself to the project full time. "We get kids to sign up and donate time to us and indicate where they'd want to do work against Bush or for Kerry," says Corinaldi. "We plug them in with a place that's near or at where they wanted to work and we find them housing; we get them a place to stay; sometimes we even subsidize travel costs. It's supposed to be an ultra convenient way for anybody who doesn't want Bush to be president to sign up and get involved and get active."

Over spring break, the group sent 80 students to swing states where they volunteered for 527s like America Coming Together. This summer, Corinaldi plans to send 150 students, possibly more. "It's all field stuff," he says. "Registering voters, fraud checks to make sure petitions signings are working. In Miami they're doing a minimum wage ballot initiative because that's supposed to boost turnout. We're doing huge canvasses in Philadelphia where they're registering huge numbers of progressive voters."

"I went to Philadelphia and I worked with ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] and it was like this amazing experience," says Emily Farris, a 21-year old journalism student at the New School in Manhattan. "The first day they sent me to Norristown which is a suburb of Philly... I actually ran out of registering cards. People were hugging me and welcoming me into their homes."

Farris said she hasn't been politically active in the past, but now she's hooked. "I think I was almost staying away from politics until the time was right and the time is now. We have to do something. George Bush has got to go." She had lined up a writing gig for the summer that paid well, but in light of her experience in Pennsylvania she says she's quitting that job to devote herself to the election. "I am going to single-handedly swing Missouri this summer."

Watching the Polls

While many groups like Swing State and D4D focus on registering voters and then turning them out in November, IMPACT, a group started by students at Columbia Law School, believes that "there is not enough done to protect and empower individual voters prior to and during the election."

To rectify this, IMPACT will send law students to monitor the elections at polling places in swing states where there has been a history of confusion or intimidation. "What we really want to do is get well-trained and effective law students at the polls on election day in the areas where they're going to be able to help the voters who are undergoing the most confusion," says IMPACT co-founder Maggie Williams.

A second-year law student at Columbia, Williams, says that the idea for IMPACT was born out of frustration over the voting debacle in Florida during the 2000 election. "The more I found out about what actually went wrong in Florida ... I just felt really powerless," she says. "On the one hand I feel like in those situations there are three options. One is just to sit back and to think well there's nothing really I can do, it's too complicated, I'm just going to cast my vote on election day. The other is to do something on a personal level and go poll watch on your own and the other is to start to talk to people and wonder why is this so intimidating? Why is this so complicated?"

Unlike D4D, which is officially a PAC, and Swing State Spring Break, which is in the process of incorporating as a 527, IMPACT is a 501c(3) which means it is officially non-partisan. The groups' members might have personal political objections to Bush, but in their capacity as IMPACT officers they say they are only interested in seeing one thing happen: making sure everyone has their votes counted.

After gathering interested students at Columbia, IMPACT has reached out to other law schools, attempting to put in place a national infrastructure for election day. They have joined the Know Your Rights Coalition, a consortium of groups dedicated to election protection (including Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, Brennan Center and People for the American Way), and are currently researching potential problems -- election-day complications that might result from the 2001 the Help America Vote Act.

IMPACT's operations' director Doug Jaffe says that while HAVA does provide some useful voter protection provisions (provisional ballots, for example), some of the new regulations might cause massive confusion on election day, as each state interprets the law in a different fashion. "Some states are giving a lot of discretion to turn away voters to the individual poll workers," he says, "which may not be such a great thing."

In order to effectively safeguard voters' rights, IMPACT plans to train 3600 students from law schools around the country in poll monitoring and electoral law. These law students will then be sent to the 50-100 highest risk polling sites in each of the 12 swing states in which IMPACT will operate. "There's a lot of work that has to happen beforehand," says Williams, who notes that the reception from other schools has already been enthusiastic. "To really do this well and effectively you need a lot of different groups who really know what they're doing and work together."

As John Nichols in the The Nation and Mary Lynn Jones in this publication have reported, there is no shortage of groups, large and small, serious and humorous who have dedicated themselves to unseating Bush this year. But what's particularly striking about these groups is that they are completely organic, born out of the passion of a few people, and incredibly shrewd and strategic in their approach. It is organizing that starts small, but by focusing on electoral pressure points, has the potential to make a huge impact.

In this way, they have more than a passing resemblance to the thousands of MeetUp-enabled groups that flowered during the short-lived Dean campaign. One-time Dean campaign manager and founder of ChangeForAmerica.com Joe Trippi says he sees the Dean campaign as the laboratory for much of the DIY-style activism that these groups embody. "I kind of think there's this great awakening going on," says Trippi. "The Dean campaign was the like the wink of the eye; it's going to be seen as so primitive five years from now, given all these groups that are doing things... These groups are the harbinger of much bigger things to come and we're just sort of at the early moment of it all."

By giving people an outlet for their anger and frustration with the current administration, all three of these groups seek to obliterate the obstacles that separate citizens from affecting political change. Most importantly, though, they help create a norm of political engagement that frowns upon idle complaining and pontificating.

Emily Farris, who canvassed for Swing State Spring Break in Pennsylvania, says she was motivated to get involved in part due to the chiding she received from a bartender at her neighborhood pub. After she had started drunkenly trashing Bush, she says "The bartender said to me, 'You're not doing anybody any good in here. If you want change, go out and make some change, instead of bitching to a bar full of drunken Democrats.' And I was like, he's right! The next week was when I saw the listing from Sharif. And I thought: this is the beginning of the end!"

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

On March 8th, a group of 25 handpicked Iraqis signed a constitution that will become the law of the land when the United States transfers sovereignty over to the Iraqi Governing Council this June.

The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) is nearly twice as long and significantly more complicated than the U.S. Constitution. It is also, ironically, far more progressive. Despite the right-wing ideologues behind the regime-change experiment, the TAL institutes principles that liberals in American only dream about.

Here are a few highlights:

Article 12: "All Iraqis are equal in their rights without regard to gender, sect, opinion, belief, nationality, religion, or origin, and they are equal before the law."[ital added] The Civil Rights Act bans gender discrimination in the United States, but gender equality is nowhere enshrined in the Constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment would have done that, but after passing the Senate and House in 1971-72 it failed to clear enough statehouses to be ratified.

Article 13(H): "Each Iraqi has the right to privacy." Such a right is not specifically mentioned in the Fourth Amendment, but two centuries of jurisprudence have interpreted it as granting such a right, culminating most controversially in Roe v. Wade. But to this day, Supreme Court justices such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and members of the Federalist Society call it a fiction.

Article 14: "The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security." Nothing even approaching such a right exists in the U.S. Constitution, but for millions of kids in failing schools and the 43.5 million Americans without health insurance (me included), the idea of requiring government to provide adequate services is appealing.

Article 15: "No one may be unlawfully arrested or detained. ... Every person deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall have the right of recourse to a court to determine the legality of his arrest or detention without delay. ... Civilians may not be tried before a military tribunal. Special or exceptional courts may not be established."

We do have those rights in our Constitution, kind of. But the U.S. Constitution explicitly allows for habeas corpus to be suspended in "cases of rebellion or invasion." The Bush administration has used that loophole to detain hundreds of suspected terrorists, including two American citizens, without the right to an attorney, due process, or the possibility of appeal or recourse.

Article 17: "It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law." Our constitution leaves open the possibility of regulating arms, but the NRA and others have fought any regulation, advocating that the Constitution countenances nearly unfettered personal arms use and ownership.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's official line is that the constitution was "written by Iraqis for Iraqis." But it's hard to ignore that it was written by 22 men and three women handpicked by the CPA and that the process was overseen by Paul Bremer, who, as head of an occupying power, had final say. Given that, how does one explain its progressive character?

It is true that many of the articles cited above -- the ban on detentions without charges, for example -- are clearly Iraqi responses to the brutality of Saddam's regime. But the benefits of the TAL's democratic provisions to the Bush administration are equally clear. Now that the retroactive causus belli for the war has become the "liberation"of Iraq, it is vitally important that the United States establish a liberal democracy -- and fast. So with no WMD in sight, and the United States desperate to get U.N.'s help, the CPA has helped produce a constitution that even Dennis Kucinich could love.

But more importantly, since the TAL is operable only until an elected Iraqi government formally drafts a constitution (projected to be about a year from now), it hardly matters how ambitious it is, or what rights it grants.

What's more, despite its progressive provisions, the TAL isn't particularly democratic. It sets up tri-partite presidency composed of one Kurd, one Shiite and one Sunni, and a complicated federalist structure that greatly empowers unelected local councils and allows regional blocs (such as the Kurds) to veto any new constitution.

There is no shortage of noble constitutions in the world. Haiti has a perfectly good constitution, but it hasn't prevented an endless string of coups. Afghanistan has a new constitution, but it hasn't stopped warlords from imposing Taliban-like brutality. Even China's 1982 state constitution proclaims citizens "enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration."

Ultimately, a constitution is only as good as the process by which it's produced and the institutions that exist to support it. Right now the only secular institution in Iraq is the Pentagon -- and it's not equipped or designed to create a stable democracy ex nihilo.

So despite all the attractive provisions in the TAL, I'd still choose our flawed but durable Constitution. Though a right to health care would be nice.

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

So the Vice President's former employer has been in the news a lot lately. Bilking the U.S. government for millions in Kuwaiti oil imports to Iraq, turning the other way as employees take bribes, overcharging the Army for food served in mess halls. It gets to feeling like the whole "reconstruction effort" is just some bloated, corrupt muddle of patronage and war profiteering.

But then comes February's "Rebuilding Iraq: Small Business Subcontracting Opportunities," convened near O'Hare Airport outside Chicago. Sponsored by the Small Business Administration (SBA) and featuring speakers from -- you guessed it -- Halliburton, among others, the daylong seminar was intended to show that profiting from the Bush administration's foreign policy is anyone's game.

"We are literally here at the direction of the president of the United States to make sure that each and every one of you has the opportunity to be involved in one of the truly major business undertakings of this century," said Gen. Patrick Rea, regional administrator of the SBA. And it's some undertaking. The total value of contracts, Rea assured, "could move to the figure of a half a trillion dollars."

Reducing the Iraq war and subsequent occupation to a business opportunity is disconcerting enough, but far more bizarre was the subtle yet consistent message that Iraqi reconstruction constitutes a comprehensive domestic economic policy agenda. "We're all looking for what are those 21st Century jobs," Rea told the crowd. "You're sitting in a room where they're going to unfold by the thousands."

Rea's right -- there's an awfully large potential for profit. Both the conquest and occupation of Iraq have been the most heavily privatized military ventures in U.S. history. Thanks to an initiative implemented in the early '90s by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the U.S. military now contracts out almost every possible aspect of its work, from food preparation to janitorial services to camp design and construction.

Now this very same approach is being applied to reconstruction, as the government bids out contracts on everything from school construction to power plant design to water treatment. In the last round of contracts alone, $18.6 billion was awarded to about two dozen companies, the majority of which are American mega-firms -- only companies from "coalition member" nations are allowed to bid.

But the Bush administration is committed to spreading around the wealth. It requires that all subcontractors partner with Iraqi firms for work on the ground. And the policy seems to be working. Newsday recently reported that firms associated with Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, the administration's bag man in Baghdad, have raked in $400 million in contracts.

So while big-time entities like Halliburton may get the massive original contracts, they don't do most or even much of the work. "We don't intend to swing the hammers ourselves," Halliburton KBR Small Business Liaison's Kimberla Fairley told the crowd. "We're going to subcontract out all the work."

This is where small businesses come in, at least in theory. Under the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) procurement guidelines, 10 percent of contract dollars must go to certified small business subcontractors. The CPA's guidelines are modeled largely on the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), an 1,800-page volume that details the statutes guiding federal government procurement: issuing requests for proposals, evaluating competitive bids and auditing performance. For anyone who hasn't negotiated this terrain, the process can be daunting. And as Jeannie Houston, program manager for Bechtel's Supplier Development and Diversity Program noted, competition is fierce.

During the first phase of reconstruction, she said, Bechtel put up a Web portal for businesses interested in subcontracting. The response crashed the servers. "We had 11,000 people in two months register online," she said.

The ostensible purpose of the conference, then, was to give attendees the inside scoop on beating out the competition. But representatives from Bechtel, Halliburton, Parsons, et al. had precious little in the way of advice to offer, outside of suggesting that firms register on a centralized database, encouraging owners to be persistent and instructing that they partner with Iraqi firms if they seek to complete work on the ground.

It was beginning to look like the Iraqi reconstruction contracts were structured exactly like the Bush tax cuts: While the wealth redounds overwhelmingly to the very richest recipients, the administration argues they're dealing everybody in.

With panelists offering the same warmed-over advice, it was hard, in fact, not to think the conference was just another cynical ruse by the Bush administration to obscure its ties to corporate friends even as it works directly on their behalf.

Now to be fair, the conference did accomplish two key goals: By delivering a group of 500 eager beavers to Halliburton and Bechtel, it made it easier for the prime contractors to fulfill the mandated small business quota, and by increasing the number of small businesses competing for the same pool of contracts it likely drove down the price of winning bids.

At some level, the crowd suspected they were being taken for a ride.

When Sam Artis, the small business liaison for Washington Group International, mentioned during the afternoon panel that Iraqi contracts are exempt from the Buy American Act -- meaning businesses could buy products overseas and ship them directly into the Middle East -- he was met with a hostile response. "Doesn't that sort of undermine U.S. manufacturing?" asked one woman. "I came into this thinking it was to help U.S. small businesses."

"Well," Artis stammered. "I think that they've carved it out fairly equitably among a number of different players."

With Iraqi reconstruction representing one of the only signs of life in an otherwise dead economy, desperate small business owners, these walk-on players not already selected for Team Bush were frantic to be drafted.

After Bechtel's presentation, Sal Hassanien, an Arab American small-business owner from Detroit, stormed to the mike as representative for a group of exile engineers who moved back to Baghdad to take part in reconstruction. "I've been trying to contact Bechtel. I've been trying to contact Parsons and it's impossible," he said. "[We] send e-mail, they never respond, call them by phone, they never respond."

Outside the conference hall, Hassanien voiced frustration with the trivial amount of money trickling down to small firms. "You get a contract that is worth, I don't know, let's say $100," he said. "You know by the time you give it to the Kuwaiti companies, it's $50. By the time you get to the real guys, the Iraqis who are actually doing the work, they get about $10 out of that. Everything else, $90, is going to administration, subcontracting and subcontracting and so on. It's really screwed."

Referring to prime contractors like Halliburton that participated in the day, Hassanien laughed and continued, "The big boys, yes, have put up a dog and pony show."

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

When the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve, 20,000 home healthcare workers in Illinois had an extra reason to celebrate. Thanks to a new contract negotiated by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 880 and signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, homecare workers saw their hourly wage increase from $7.15 to $7.25. The raise, while small, was the second of a series that will bring the starting hourly wage to $9.35 by 2007.

"We've been fighting for the last 10 years for more money," says SEIU member Diane Cunningham, who has been a homecare worker for two decades. "I like working with elderly people, handicapped people. I've been doing this too long because I love it. I just don't like the money."

Illinois' 37,000 homecare workers may provide vital day-to-day care and assistance for 67,000 state residents, but the majority still make poverty-level wages and receive no health benefits. A study released by Local 880 in April showed that Illinois ranked 44th nationwide in pay rates for homecare workers, with a median hourly wage of $6.60. Nearly half have no medical insurance. And in a survey conducted by SEIU, 49.4 percent said that in the past year they had to choose between buying food and paying utility bills.

Homecare workers might seem unlikely candidates for unionization. There is no shop floor, office or cafeteria where workers can share information and hold union meetings. But homecare workers are exactly the kind of new and rapidly growing workforce that has become SEIU's priority. "It's one of the fastest segments of the labor movement becoming organized," says Local 880 organizer Cindy Boland. "What organizing has done anywhere is it takes an invisible workforce and makes it visible. That's what we're seeing in homecare."

Illinois homecare workers are paid through two programs. The Department of Rehabilitation Services (DORS), supervised by the Department of Human Services, provides homecare to people with disabilities. While workers can be hired and fired by individual clients, they are paid by the state. For 20 years, Illinois' Republican governors refused to recognize the bargaining rights of these workers, maintaining that their employers were their clients, despite the fact that the state was cutting the checks.

That changed this year, when Democrat Blagojevich signed legislation recognizing Local 880 as the bargaining unit for the state's 20,000 DORS employees. "The fact that Blagojevich was elected was huge for us," says Local 880 spokeswoman Marnie Goodfriend. "We've been organizing for 20 years and this is the first time we have a public sector bargaining unit."

The Community Care Program is Illinois' other homecare administrator. Run through the state's Department of Aging, it provides care to low-income seniors. Unlike DORS, this program is managed and administered by private agencies contracted by the state to connect workers with clients. The state pays these agencies $11.06 an hour, and requires that 73 percent go to the worker.

But "to the worker" includes such things as worker's comp, in-service training and even hepatitis shots, so the hourly wage often ends up being as low as $5.98. Having secured a new contract with the state for DORS workers, SEIU now is pressing for higher wages for homecare workers caring for the elderly through Community Care.

SEIU argues that investing more heavily in homecare workers in the Community Care program is not just the right thing to do, it makes good fiscal sense. Nursing home care currently costs the state about $28,000 a year per person, while homecare costs an average of about $4,000. Nikki Smith, a spokeswoman for the Department of Aging, says paying higher wages is in the state's best interest. "I mean if you really want to be cold about it, in the long run it saves money, because it keeps people out of institutions," she says.

The number of seniors in Illinois and around the country who will require homecare is going to balloon as baby boomers age. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that direct care worker jobs in long-term-care settings will grow by about 800,000 jobs nationwide, or roughly 45 percent, by 2010. "The baby boomer generation is used to independence," says Goodfriend. "They don't want to go into nursing homes."

Charles Johnson, director of the state's Department of Aging, agrees. "I've never met an older person who couldn't wait to get to the nursing home. People want to stay in their homes and I think it's good public policy."

In anticipation of the greater need for homecare, SEIU has significantly increased their homecare organizing efforts nationwide, with locals in eight states, including Pennsylvania, New York and California, where the union currently represents more than 180,000 home care workers. "There's a homecare division in SEIU now," says Boland, "that wasn't there 10 years ago."

"If you're thinking long term," says SEIU's Wisconsin political director Robert Kraig, "these are jobs that can't be exported overseas. The future of the labor movement isn't industrial workers, it's workers like homecare workers: people of color making seven dollars an hour with no health insurance."

Gloria White, a steward with Local 880 who cares for the elderly deacon of her church on the city's west side, says she looks forward to a day when homecare workers make a living wage.

"There's gonna be more homecare workers, and I would like to see them make at least 10, 11, 12, 13 dollars an hour," she says. "People forget that they're gonna get old one day and they're gonna need the help and they're going to want the best."

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer based in Chicago.