Ulusiimy, fnunpnsiliy. and, bullshit viz p x ^ u i CANDIDATE COMMONER By David Milholland Only 10 days before joining Barry Commoner on the northbound AMTRAK out of Salem, I was witness to the awesome array of power which accompanied incumbent Jimmy Carter when he visited the rowhouse complex which abuts my backyard in Buckman, SE Portland. A praetorian guard of Secret Service agents, augmented by treasury agents and Portland’s finest, gave a desperate edge to the otherwise calm and smiling Presidential sojourn. The sound of children hammering open an upstairs window to better view their leader immediately riveted the entire group’s eyes to a perceived threat. A veritable deluge of press and television crews, and a chanting assembly of schoolchildren, supporters and people “ sending him a message” (which included a large contingent of “ Communists for Reagan” ) made this backyard chat into an event that far overshadowed the man. Barry Commoner, by way of contrast, is traveling light. His only protection is an aide who joined the train in Salem, relieving the young man who’d accompanied Commoner from Eugene. As the interview makes clear, the C itizen ’s Party cand ida te launched an earnest campaign to establish an alternative and long-lived, party, only to find the national media focusing on their version of a third choice, a sanitized and very nonthreatening John Anderson. Commoner, whose academic credentials (he studied at Columbia and Harvard and is currently Director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis) and reputation as an energy visionary make him a highly creditable spokesperson on issues of national concern, has chosen to take on the gluteus maximus of our present system, corporate influence and abuse, to which he traces most of our pressing problems. Not since the candidacy of Progressive Henry Wallace in 1948, or the many efforts by Eugene V. Debs, has anyone running for President both proposed substantial changes in the way the nation conducts business and tried diligently to reach the mainstream of the American public. That Commoner has largely failed to capture public attention — his dream of garnering 5 percent of the national vote is dubious if not deluded — should not prevent us from taking the man or his message seriously. Commoner is traveling AMTRAK because he believes that railroads must play a central role in any hope for national recovery. We arrived in Portland to a train wreck and alcohol fire which impeded our reaching Union Station, and it forced many of us, including Commoner, to jump train and look for alternative transportation. The Citizen’s Party candidacy of Barry Commoner and LaDonna Harris might be just what the conductor ordered. We give you an uncommon Commoner. CSQ: What was your role in the founding o f the Citizen’s Party? Commoner: Oh, I was one of the small group, I suppose a half a dozen people, that looked each other in the eye and said let’s do it. CSQ: Had you been involved with another party before that time? Have you started another independent party? Commoner: No, the only direct political activity I had was in the Stevenson campaign. CSQ: What made you think that this was the time to start a new party? Commoner: Well, if you read the last chapter of my last book, I developed an analysis starting with the consideration of the energy question which led to the conclusion that .the basic reason for almost all of our difficulties is that the big corporations that govern what the country does have reached the point where their profit-oriented decisions are no longer in the national interest. Their p ro fi t-o r ien ted decisions have wrecked the auto industry, steel industry . . . have led to the importing of oil, led to inflation, they may lead to war, and it struck me that [resistance to] exerting social control over those decisions is something so deep and pervasive that it really hasn’t arisen in the country’s history since the abolition of slavery, which was also social governance of the means of production. If you look at the history of abolition you discover that for a number of elections before a Lincoln, the two parties —- the Whigs and the Democrats — were incapable of dealing with the issue and, as a result, you had nonsensical circuses instead of campaigns. The parallel with the present situation is very close, that the two parties clearly are losing the affiliation of the voters for the reason that they can’t deal with this new issue, and that a new party is needed, just as the Republican Party was needed to bring about abolition. That’s what brought me to the conclusion. CSQ: Anderson, in a sense, stepped into the hole that you had hoped to fill, he’s basically an opportunist. Commoner: Right; as usual, the establishment comes up with a way of co-opting positions, and Anderson was the establishment’s version of an alternative. But I think it’s clear; most people are beginning to see through that. CSQ: What do you hope to accomplish with this campaign? Commoner: Well, the campaign is the first campaign that the party’s conducted. We expect to put ourselves in position as a significant element in the country’s political future. And, in fact, I think we’ve already accomplished that. CSQ: You’ve talked a lot about 5 percent o f the national vote. Are you anticipating 5 percent? Commoner: It’s very hard to tell. I think we have a shot at it. The last poll I heard here in Oregon gave us 11 percent. We are 3 percent in Maine, somewhere between 1 and 2 percent nationally. What we are out to do is start a political party, start campaigning, raise the issue and, in fact, give the voters some sense that it’s worth voting. It’s expected that less than half of the voters will vote in November and, you know, it’s a disgrace; it’s evidence of what they think of the conventional candidates. Not much. CSQ: In many European countries and Third World countries there are many parties that actually have a play o f power. Would you like to see a change in the U.S. governmental structure to allow this kind o f minority participation? Commoner: I think there’s going to be a sweeping political realignment after the 1980 elections, and we’ll play a role in that. It’s hard to see how that’ll go: whether there’ll be two new parties created, two parties with really different political philosophies, whether there’ll be three, a multi-party system. But I think we’re in for a big realignment. CSQ: In the nineteenth century, a section o f the Whig Party became our present-day Republican Party. Recently there was a hope that a number o f people would defect from the Democratic Party. William Win- pisinger (the socialist president o f the 900,000-member Machinists union) at least made a move that way. Commoner: They have. We’re going to announce in the next two weeks of “ Democrats for Commoner- Harris.” CSQ: Are there any significant labor leaders that have joined? Commoner: There’s not any of Winpisinger’s stature, but we’ve got quite a few state legislators, county leaders, and so on. And a certain number of labor people. CSQ: Many people are concerned about the Reagan candidacy. I t ’s the classic thing; it happened with Goldwater. Again, the lesser o f three evils. Commoner: Remember, we elected Johnson and he put us into war. CSQ: Do you distinguish between the three candidates in any way? You say that you think this is a critical election, but how do you distinguish between them, i f at all? Commoner: Well, certainly I can distinguish between them. However, the big issue is this: There are two factors that ought to be involved in the election. One is, who do you elect. The second is the political environment in which that President has to operate. We have neglected the second factor. If the Citizen’s Party weren’t around, or if you vote for one of those three candidates, let’s say you’re a peace voter, and you vote for Carter because he’s the least likely to push the button, you have now thrown your peace vote away. He will never know he got a peace vote, no one in the country will know that there is a peace vote; it’ll just be a vote for Carter, who obviously doesn’t exactly have a peace position. The only way to record a peace vote in the 1980 election is by voting for the Citizen’s Party. The existence of that constituency — the significant vote for the Citizen’s Party — is far more important to protect the country from right-wing influence during the next four years than the question of who’s in the White House. We’re in for four bad years, no matter whether Carter, Reagan or Anderson is elected, and the judgment that you have to make is, what is the best way for progressives to use their vote? Is it Illustrations bs Tad Leflar 31
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