E-Mail This Article to a Friend Battling Bush (continued)

AMONG SHELL-SHOCKED liberals, the people who seem most upbeat are those already busy with activities designed to affect the next election. Few were more distraught on November 2 than Renner Wunderlich. He and his wife, Margaret Lazarus, run Cambridge Documentary Films, which makes and distributes social-issue videos, including the 1993 Oscar-winning anti-domestic-violence short "Defending Our Lives." Wunderlich recalls sitting at his dining-room table shortly after the election, thinking about what Bush’s policies would do to the environment.

"I grieved so much, I just began to cry. I burst into tears," he says. "I think about the oilmen and the industrialists lining up, I think of them, like, lining up to gang-rape the environment, you know, and I just can’t get that image out of my mind." As he figures out what to do in the election’s aftermath, Wunderlich is considering a future Cambridge Documentary project about the environment.

Other concerned liberals also refuse to lose heart. Instead, they are focusing on local initiatives with the potential to change minds down the line. "We had before, and we have after the election, a long-term agenda that is rooted in the fact that we have permanent organizations in 75 cities around the country, including Boston and Providence," says Steve Kest, executive director of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Kest believes that ACORN’s neighborhood roots can help transform national politics. He points out that ACORN alone registered 1.1 million voters in this election, and then systematically nagged them and other voters to show up at the polls.

Furthermore, ACORN’s work for better schools, affordable housing, immigrant rights, and workers’ conditions is paying off at the local level, and may provide both hope and "backbone" to national Democrats. "It’s also significant that voters overwhelmingly supported economic-justice issues [in the recent election]," says Kest, who is based in Brooklyn, New York. He says ACORN gathered nearly one million signatures to put the minimum-wage-increase question on the Florida ballot, and it passed with 72 percent of the vote.

Bluestone, director of Northeastern’s Center for Urban and Regional Policy, says this localized approach is a key challenge for progressives. "The way the Republicans really built up their power after 1964 was to concentrate very much on local and state issues: quality of schools, issues around economic security in local communities," he says. "I think it will be really important for us, in rebuilding a strong base, to work hard at the local state levels over issues that really matter to people."

His point of view is shared by Rebekah Gewirtz, a 27-year-old Somerville resident. She is an organizer for the Commonwealth Coalition, a Massachusetts reform group; two years ago she helped found the Progressive Democrats of Somerville. The Somerville progressives were among a coalition of other organizations that helped Carl Sciortino defeat 16-year incumbent state representative Vincent Ciampa in the 34th Middlesex District. Sciortino, who is young and gay, is the kind of politician who, at the local and state level, can begin to change the dynamic of the presidential election, Gewirtz says.

"We are really trying to take a page out of the playbook of the right — they got on ward committees, town committees, city councils, and methodically put their message out there," she says.

Her mother, Nancy Gewirtz, was a legendary Rhode Island activist who helped found the Poverty Institute research organization at Rhode Island College School of Social Work. Nancy Gewirtz also helped craft a progressive approach to Rhode Island welfare reform in the 1990s and was an organizer of the One Rhode Island coalition, through which liberal groups successfully presented a unified agenda to the legislature. She was interviewed for this article shortly before her death on November 14.

Gewirtz acknowledged that a state approach to social reform is a change of tactics for progressives, who hadn’t seen a states’-rights strategy as savory or inspiring in earlier struggles. "We always depended on the federal government in civil-rights issues" she said. "Clearly, you know, we’ve really resisted the devolutionary concept of back-to-the-states. But I think there is a lot you can do at the state level."

SENATOR JACK REED started small, serving in the Rhode Island Senate before winning election to the US House and then to the Senate, where he is among the minority party’s key players on several issues, including defense. Reed believes that the next election will have little in common with this one, which he says was shadowed by the 9/11 terror attacks and influenced by Bush’s personal appeal. "For reasons that some people can’t fathom," he says, "in the heartland, George Bush is a very popular person. But that popularity is non-transferable. And, you know, four years from now, it’s not going to be George Bush. And so that in itself is going to change the dynamic."

Reed also says that the electorate will look significantly different from the one that voted this year. There will be more people with Hispanic, Asian, and African-American backgrounds, and their concerns may differ from those of the white evangelical voters who received so much attention in this year’s post-election analysis. "The notion that this is all over — forever — just disregards the dynamic nature of the American public," Reed notes. Also, he doubts that grassroots America was as enthusiastic about the right-wing agenda as the election results indicated. "There are ideologues, but most Americans aren’t — they are pragmatic. They made a choice, but I don’t think the choice was for endless deficits, a daunting and perhaps indecisive long-term conflict in Iraq, air pollution. They didn’t vote for that."

Further, Reed and others note that because it now controls the sweep of government, the GOP will have to contend with enormous problems — the deficit, the war, and Social Security — and voters may not like how the Republicans handle these issues. "Be careful what you pray for," Reed says of the GOP’s increasing hegemony.

John Miller, who teaches economics at Wheaton College, in Norton, believes that many of Bush’s proposals will hit the working class hard, including the president’s push for tax changes. "The literal undoing of the income tax — the only progressive tax in our tax system — would have a disastrous effect of pushing more and more of the financing of government onto working people and taking it off the investor class and the well-to-do," he says. Similarly, he notes, possible Bush proposals to "privatize" Social Security by allowing some workers to invest retirement funds could cost "a couple of trillion dollars."

This is why Barney Frank says one of the liberals’ major tasks will be to make sure that the public understands that the coming bad news is Republican news. In large part, he expects the word to be passed by community groups who work for reforms on the local level in areas such as health care, elder issues, and affordable housing. "Your job is to document the harm that they are doing," Frank says he told a group of housing advocates in his Massachusetts district soon after the election. "You’ve got to explain to people who are the beneficiaries of your programs and others that it’s conscious policy choices that are making it harder. We have, to some extent, to connect the dots."