The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement.

The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement Edited by Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey Westview Press. 400 pages. $18.00.

Americans do not ask much of Democratic candidates for the Presidency, and this electoral reality is not lost on the people who run the party. In fact, top Democrats they were so aware of the low expectations for their party that--with a slight assist from five members of the Supreme Court--they bumbled the Presidency into the lap of George W. Bush.

Al Gore and his handlers felt certain last year that they could feed the American people a junk food diet of vaguely populist rhetoric and compromised policies and still narrowly prevail. As a result, they missed every opportunity to win the sort of commanding victory that is in the offing for any Democrat who convincingly stands for the simple putting-people-first principles that through much of the twentieth century made the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman so dominant.

In the course of three separate interviews with Gore during the 2000 campaign, I asked the Vice President about the anti-globalization protests, the farm crisis in the upper Midwest, the mass outcry over genetically modified foods, and a host of other fundamental issues. Gore refused, at every turn, to go near policy positions that posed any significant threat to Wall Street--even though such stances would have made his candidacy far more attractive to the nearly three million voters who supported Ralph Nader's Green Party challenge and the tens of millions of citizens who simply did not cast ballots.

Constrained in his rhetoric and his platform by the chains of corporate contributors and polling data manipulated by the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, Gore simply would not speak the words that could have ignited his campaign. For all the blame that pundits and pols attempt to place on Nader and his Green hordes, or on Katherine Harris and her minions, that is the fundamental explanation for the loss of a sitting Vice President to a failed Texas oil speculator who was the dim bulb among his father's thousand points of light.

Amazingly, tragically, dangerously, however, some of the people who pleaded with Gore to address progressive issues now attempt apologies for his pathetic campaign. They don't seem to get that Gore didn't get it--and that this is why he lost.

Witness this strange passage from the introduction to the new book The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement: "The Presidential election of 2000 was expected to be a listless replay of the centrist consensus," write Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future and former Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg. "But the campaign confounded the predictions of the experts. Americans wanted the election to be about the major questions facing the country.... Al Gore gave impetus to his campaign by putting forth a detailed agenda, and taking on, with strong populist language, the `powerful interests' and specific industries that stood in the way of prescription drug benefits, of a patient's bill of rights, of gun control, and so on. A dramatic turning point in his campaign was his speech to the Democratic Convention, in which he detailed an agenda directed toward America's `working families' and pledged to fight for them.... The campaign thus offered the country a remarkably clear choice of direction."

Huh?

If Campaign 2000 offered America a remarkably clear choice of direction, why couldn't most working Americans be bothered to vote?

Why did others decide to cast their ballots for Ralph Nader--despite the thorough trashing of the Greens' campaign by Democrats and the national media?

And why did millions of citizens--including an estimated 300,000 Floridians--who identified themselves to exit pollsters as Democrats cast their ballots for George W. Bush?

The answer, put best by my friend Terry Fritter, a meatpacker and union stalwart at an Oscar Mayer plant, is this: "Gore lost it. Don't feel bad for the bastard, and don't feel bad for the bastards who tell us that Gore is as good as a Democrat gets. Because if he is, Democrats are going to keep on losing forever."

Despite the scratch-your-head revisionism on display in the introduction to The Next Agenda, most of the contributors to this flawed but necessary collection of essays should not be consigned to Terry Fritter's bastard battalion. Some chapters of The Next Agenda are, in fact, inspired statements; many of the academic and activist contributors meet or exceed the standard established by editors Borosage and Roger Hickey for "the expression of an ongoing public dialogue among activists and policy experts working to challenge the current limits of American politics."

Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, turns in a well-reasoned yet politically adventurous proposal for providing economic security to working moms and their children. She recognizes that "even if women had full reproductive rights and a complete menu of family care supports, without equal pay in the workforce, women's long-term economic security would still be compromised."

Packed with easily understood charts and graphs, Hartmann's chapter is the most useful in The Next Agenda, and it features a fine roadmap to the high ground progressives should stake out in the Bush era. It is particularly exciting to see Hartmann push for shortening the work day, and her suggestions for strengthening retirement benefits for women form a vital and politically viable alternative to proposals for privatization.

Roger Hickey, a founder of the Economic Policy Institute, complements Hartmann's contribution with an able call for countering rightwing attacks on government programs with concrete and potentially popular proposals for expanding America's social safety net.

Borosage and William Greider masterfully argue for placing globalization issues on the domestic agenda. If only they could have gotten Gore to pay attention during the campaign.

And the Brookings Institution's Bruce Katz joins Joel Rogers, co-author of last year's important public policy text, America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (Basic Books), to focus attention on urban America with predictable clarity and refreshing passion.

After weaving together a platform featuring proposals for investment in older communities, ending government subsidies that promote sprawl, a new commitment to public housing initiatives, and a radical reworking of local economic development practices, Katz and Rogers ask, "Are we dreaming. No, counter the authors. "Parts of our new urban agenda may be disputed in some quarters, but the larger portion of it is not new and its desirability is not in dispute," they assert. "Sprawl would be reduced, planning capacity would rise, wages would increase and inequalities decrease, neighborhoods would become less segregated and safer, public goods would be more abundant, and democracy would more evidently show its contribution to the economy."

Frustratingly, the editors of The Next Agenda fail to match the Katz-Rogers call to arms for cities with an equally effective action agenda for rural America--the part of the country where Democrats most frequently turned on Gore and his centrist platform last year. In the midst of the most devastating agricultural depression since the 1930s, rural issues are--with the exception of a paragraph in a broader piece on economic issues penned by Jeff Faux--virtually ignored.

The gap is dramatic and disturbing.

There is simply no way that progressives will reassert themselves nationally without a unique outreach to rural America on farm, transportation, health care, and economic development issues.

And it is highly unlikely that progressives will ever gain sufficient traction among suburban voters without integrating food safety issues--especially proposals for the labeling and regulation of genetically modified foods--into their program.

Some contributors to The Next Agenda appear to have lost faith in the ability of the left to effectively advance bold calls for change. Jonathan Oberlander and Theodore Marmor, in their essay on achieving universal health care, betray this in their argument entitled, "Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good (Or Why Canadian Single-Payer Insurance Is Not the Only Answer)." Neither Oberlander, an assistant professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, nor Marmor, a Yale School of Management professor, has drifted into the insurance industry's absurd Canada-bashing camp. But they do seem to have accepted that corporate America's campaign of lies against "socialized medicine" has been so effective that the left should probably cede the fight in favor of "pragmatic universalism."

Al Gore, who specifically denounced sweeping health care reforms during last fall's debates, would have found comfort in the Oberlander-Marmor line. And, certainly, the Republicans and their insurance industry paymasters will not be perturbed with the fuzzing of the debate that comes with a shift toward incrementalism.

But progressives should be troubled.

Since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been seen by great masses of Americans as an imperfect yet necessary bulwark against the worst excesses of corporate capital. Al Gore eroded much of what remained of that faith. And those who attempt to find virtue in his centrist campaign, or who counsel pragmatism in response to Republican dominance of the White House and Congress, misread the American people as grievously as did the Democrat whose compromised candidacy failed to avert a Bush Presidency.

John Nichols is Editorial Page Editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.