http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/49/powerlines-meyerson.p ...
ORLANDO, Florida — I have seen the present, and it works — I think.
I have spent the past week observing the official Democratic Party and
unofficial 527 field operations in the battleground states of Ohio and
Florida. And I have found something I’ve never before seen in my 36 or
so
years as a progressive activist and later as a journalist: an
effective, fully
functioning American left.
Those liberal organizations that already knew how to do politics — the
AFL-CIO, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and a few others — are
doing it better than they have before. Those liberal groups that stayed
aloof
from elections or phumphered ineffectually are now playing the game
like
seasoned pros. New organizations have arisen to mobilize sometime
voters; the
largest of them — America Coming Together (ACT) — will have 12,000
staffers in each of the three biggest battleground states
(Pennsylvania, Ohio
and Florida) on Election Day.
The AFL-CIO inaugurated this program in three states last year — not
coincidentally, Florida, Ohio and Missouri. The goal was to open a line
of
communication with the nonunion white working class, and by the
evidence of
the AFL-CIO’s numbers and my Garfield Heights walk, the goal has been
reached and then some. The three Ohio canvass operations have recruited
541,000 members — a clear majority of whom support John Kerry,
according to
the federation’s polls. In Garfield Heights, fully half the persons
listed
on the SEIU’s walk sheets were Working America members (the other half
were
either regular union members or retirees). Though it was just
midafternoon, a
number of working-age men were home. Asked what issue mattered to them
most,
they said jobs; asked their candidate preference, they said Kerry. Take
Ohio’s unemployment rate, add the activities of ACT, Working America
and
other such groups, and you understand why this is one Bush-2000 state
that
won’t be Bush-2004.