Swim against the Current by Jim Hightower & Susan Demarco

Author:Jim Hightower & Susan Demarco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Already, the effort is producing impressive results. Since 2004, there have been seventy-nine graduates of the Wellstone candidate schools elected in twenty states. The offices they hold are very diverse, ranging from Congressman (Keith Ellison of Minnesota, John Hall of New York, Dave Loesback of Iowa, and Tim Walz of Minnesota, all elected in 2006) to school board member, with sixty having been elected to state legislative seats.

These progressives tend to be younger, thirty of them are women, many have defeated old-line incumbents (including in primary elections), and many more are winning in suburbs and other areas once considered too conservative for progressive victories. “There’s a new wave of people stepping forward to run for office,” Blodgett reported. “They’re authentic, rooted in their communities, and not slick career politicians afraid to take a stand or say what they really think.”

With such quality candidates—backed by the skilled organizers, managers, and activists coming out of the Wellstone camps—policy changes are taking place. Look at Minnesota, where the earliest training sessions were held. In the 2004 and 2006 legislative races, twenty-two Wellstone grads were elected to the state House, thus turning control from Republican to Democratic.

Led by these energetic progressive newcomers, who’re not tied to the business-as-usual crowd, the House has been making some early headway, including expanding health care to more people and passing a program to produce 25 percent of Minnesota’s energy from renewable sources by 2025—one of the most ambitions programs in the country. All of this is being achieved by regular people, many of whom never considered running for office and most of whom could not have gotten there without the knowledge and the confidence building that come from training.

Even more significant than the candidates’ getting elected are the democratic networks that are being developed. People are learning that there’s no fairy dust in politics. It’s just old-fashioned community organizing.

Lorraine Bieber, a 2006 graduate of Camp Wellstone, is a thirty-four-year-old activist from Columbus, Ohio, where she’s been organizing a group that political pros disregarded as clueless and unconcerned—“youth.” But it’s nonsense that young people are unconcerned (you think little matters like war, wages, health care, and education aren’t on their minds?). Unfortunately, they’re largely unconnected, unappealed to, and unorganized. So Bieber has reached out to her young peers in the area through an innovative, youth-focused group with a spunky name: League of Pissed Off Voters.

A bumper sticker guaranteed to terrify any political establishment, national, state, or local: “We’re Pissed Off and We Vote!”

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