The existential dilemma.

Here we are again--stuck with trying to figure out what to do about another Presidential election, another choice of a lesser evil in which the adjective gets cloudier and cloudier while the noun gets clearer and clearer. We all know the drill.

I voted for Clinton in 1992, and it was the most difficult vote I've ever cast. I stood in the booth for several minutes, trying to decide whether to do it.

On the one hand, Bush and Perot were at least as bad and certainly linked to worse, and I guess I was a little self-conscious about that Hubert Humphrey thing in 1968. I didn't want to feel that I'd help give the liberals a chance to whine some more about irresponsible ultraleftists aiding the Republicans.

On the other hand, I knew what Clinton was, what political forces he was aligned with, and that he would sell us out, though I didn't expect that he'd do it so soon and so thoroughly. So I toyed with not voting for a Presidential candidate at all and making Carol Moseley-Braun the top of the ticket--big statement that would have been! In the end, I voted a straight Democratic ticket, partly because not voting straight would have required more effort, partly because it seemed on balance necessary to elect even a nominal Democrat after Reagan and Bush.

But Bipartisan Bill has stretched the lesser-evil rationale to the border of absurdity. There's no need to rehearse the entire litany of his perfidies--just let NAFTA and the abominable "welfare reform" suffice.

The "welfare-reform" gambit is his 1996 version of Rickey Ray Rector. For those who have forgotten, or would like to, Rector was a hopelessly brain-damaged black Arkansan on death row in early 1992, and Governor Clinton flew home with great fanfare from the New Hampshire campaign trail to oversee Rector's execution. (When the barely articulate Rector was served his last meal, he saved the dessert, as was his habit--to eat later.) I wished then for a hell, so Bill Clinton could burn in it for that despicable sacrifice of another human being's life to his own ambition.

The Rector execution sent a message that most progressives who held out hopes for Clinton tried not to hear. If he would willfully kill an impoverished mental defective as an act of expediency in pursuing the nomination, how confident could we feel that he would cleave to any principle of justice or human decency? We got our answer: not at all. He won't.

Well, with the anti-welfare bill he may have hit a new low. It's bad enough he signed that abomination, which will do more gradually and impersonally to thousands what he did to Rector, but surrounding himself with former welfare recipients for the signing ceremony was a touch worthy of Goebbels.

His practice of staging photo-ops with black people to announce some hit on black Americans is repugnantly cynical, and shows him for what he is: an updated, smooth version of the southern cracker Democratic politician. He's the baby-boomer incarnation of the unctuous snake that's been the genteel face of white-supremacist politics for a century.

His trademark empathy, like most such psychobabble, is pro forma, a solipsistic plea for sympathy for himself as he screws over others. Lest we forget, he even begged our commiseration for how much he prayed and agonized over killing Rector.

Having said all that, it's important to note that hardly anyone who aspires to serious elective office in the American political system is going to be the kind of person you'd want for your brother-in-law or sister-in-law. Big Bill stands out from Dole and others only by the form of his pretense to be something else.

So this takes us back to the real issue at hand: how to approach the 1996 elections. Of course, this is an issue that goes beyond whether President Piggly Wiggly's reelection could make any difference for us. Most immediately, it involves the possibilities for getting rid of the Republican majority, at least in the House of Representatives.

Any spark of national Democratic opposition to the Republican agenda will come from Congress, particularly the House. (By the way, Minnesota's Paul Wellstone was the only Democratic Senator up for reelection who voted against the welfare bill: He's on top of the right's hit list and is being outspent substantially in a tight race. He's our only dependable voice in the Senate and needs all the support he can get.) A Democratically controlled House would at least block the worst of the GOP's initiatives and thereby exert a brake on Clinton's rightward slide.

True, House Democrats didn't acquit themselves terribly well when it fell to them to articulate a critical response and an alternative vision after the Republican Congressional putsch in 1994. When they tried to assert leadership as Big Bill and Newt were playing in the woods and discovering themselves to be long-lost twins, the Democratic House leadership came off as tepid, incoherent, and lacking substance. To some extent, that fumbling may have resulted from the shock of the election's outcome, though it no doubt also reflected the contradictions internal to the Democratic coalition: House Democrats include boll weevils and pure corporate stooges as well as more conventionally New Deal liberal types.

Nevertheless, in the world of real choices, the House Democrats are in the best position to conduct a successful holding action against a Republican program.

The Republicans plan to gut all government functions except lining the pockets of the rich, reducing the rest of the population's living standards, criminalizing poverty, and scapegoating immigrants, minorities, women, and gays. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), with apparent White House support, is prepared to join a Republican move to privatize Social Security after the dust dies down from the anti-welfare travesty.

It's possible that a new House majority would be made up of a better overall cohort of Democrats. In 1994, rightwing Democrats were the biggest electoral losers. This time, a number of good, solid progressives--for instance, Clem Balanoff in Illinois and Tom Fricano in New York--are challenging vulnerable first-term Republican yahoos around the country. These new campaigns could buttress the effort to hold back the juggernaut and maybe even more clearly affirm alternatives.

What of the Presidential race? There really are only three options: Vote for Clinton, vote for Nader, or don't vote for a Presidential candidate at all. (The last option includes voting for any of the various sectarian party candidates who'll be sprinkled across ballots around the country.)

In some states, mobilizing for Nader can be instrumentally useful for other, concrete objectives. In California, for example, the Nader candidacy could boost the California Nurses Association's Patient Protection Act, Proposition 216. This is an important ballot initiative that restrains corporate power and pursuit of profit in health care by safeguarding patients' rights to necessary services, barring conflict of interest for physicians, guaranteeing full disclosure of medical information to patients, protecting whistleblowers, and securing effective consumer oversight of the industry. It would also impose fees on companies that are closing hospitals or converting hospitals from not-for-profit to for-profit.

But apart from those local objectives, it seems to me that the decision about how to deal with the Presidential election is largely existential. Though my personal networks aren't quite representative of typical Democratic voters, in the weeks after Clinton caved in on the welfare bill, I talked with at least two dozen formerly staunch Lesser Evil-ites who said that was the last straw and that they aren't going to vote for him. I certainly don't see how I can, and since I'm not much on protest votes, I suspect I'll boycott the Presidential line entirely.

To be sure, it's probably easier to stand on moral outrage in that way because, as I write, the race seems not at all close; standing on pristine principle is less fraught with problems if others are more willing to compromise to avoid the worst outcome. The best practical argument the loyal AFL-CIO can muster for voting for Clinton is that his coattails may help the Congressional races, and that argument has some force, I suppose. Perhaps many of the Last Straw crowd will have a change of heart in the voting booth. If the race looks too close at that point, I may even falter--though I doubt it. It's one thing to vote for someone who will neglect us or sell us out; it's another thing to choose someone who will actively attack us.

His Bipartisanship took away the "think-of-the-courts" argument when he announced that this Administration has no desire to appoint liberal judges. And his record of appointments shows that he means it. The only practical virtue of a Clinton victory is that we wouldn't have to abide liberals who are so desperate to get the Democrats back to power that they'd do just about anything, as they did in 1992. The "keep-them-in" argument doesn't have quite the same force, especially not with the most Republican Democratic Administration of the century. Under the Clinton/DLC leadership, the Democrats are looking increasingly like the Whigs in the 1850s.

If Clinton wins another term, he'll be the prime candidate for the Labor Party Organizer of the Year Award. He has already done quite a bit for us.

The larger point, however, is that national elections, especially Presidential ones, aren't a venue where we can advance progressive politics right now. We have no voice and no clout on that terrain. We need to concentrate on the longer view, to focus on building a real political base from which to project a coherent agenda, not just candidates--an agenda with the muscle of a palpable, mobilized constituency behind it.

A recurring criticism of the Labor Party, for instance, is that we aren't running candidates for office. I remember hearing a passionate argument at a chapter meeting prior to the Founding Convention that it's unprincipled not to contest electorally in 1996 when we can see the dangerous drift in national politics. As if a fledgling political party with precious little resources and facing a concerted blackout in the mainstream media could have any impact whatsoever.

Somehow, a belief has spread through the left that we build support and get our message out by running candidates who get 10 to 15 percent of the vote if we're lucky. But there's no evidence that that strategy works, and it's an incredibly inefficient use of resources.

We have to face up to the fact of our marginalization in American politics and find ways to begin a conversation with those elements of the population who should be receptive to a progressive program. That means organizing, which is a sustained, face-to-face enterprise--one that fits neither the hit-and-run kind of contact nor the soundbites and slogans that are required by election campaigns. This kind of work cannot be yoked to the electoral cycle.

Sure, it would be good if we could have some influence over the 1996 Presidential race, but we can't. Therefore, we need to make whatever accommodations to the realpolitik that seem reasonable or that we can live with in this election year, but keep focused on the longer-term objective of building the national movement we haven't had for a generation. Once we do that, we'll shape electoral outcomes no matter who's running.

For those who think movement-building--or influencing elections, for that matter--requires running pointless electoral candidacies, recall the civil-rights movement. As in that era, we need to concentrate on the slow, careful processes of building from the ground up; otherwise, we don't have a chance to do anything. If we neglect this work, the ruling class, in its triumphalist spirit of the movement, will crush us and turn the society into a complete nightmare.