Virtual Dems

The Democrats have a secret contingency plan for convention protests

by Seth Gitell

When the Democrats converge on Los Angeles for their convention on August 14, organizers expect to be joined by anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 protesters, raising the prospect of Seattle-style chaos.

If this happens, the party has a plan: go virtual.

Officially, convention organizers aren't talking much about protest contingency plans. "We're preparing for every possible scenario," says Luis Vizcaino, press secretary for the convention. But sources say that if large-scale protests erupt in Los Angeles, the Democratic leadership is ready to let delegates stay safely in their rooms and conduct proceedings online.

"The DNC is prepared for it," says one Democratic insider. "We can have a virtual convention if we have to. The delegates can vote from their hotels."

They're hoping to avoid the fate of the World Trade Organization, whose Seattle meeting last fall was besieged for days by a loose coalition of trade unions, anarchists, and activist groups. Delegates were trapped away from the convention hall for hours.

That kind of disruption looms as a real possibility in Los Angeles next month. In addition to hosting the Democratic National Convention, the city will also be hosting the national gatherings of at least 11 other organizations -- from advocates for the homeless to animal-rights activists. This means a ready base of foot soldiers for potential protests.

Democratic organizers are banking on the lack of labor support for the demonstrations to help keep their scale small. "Given the closeness of the Gore-Bush race at this point, labor doesn't want to do anything to embarrass Gore," says Kim Moody, the director of Labor Notes. Of course, the rank and file might not feel this way. "There will be trade-union members who will join the protests because they're fed up with the Democrats, and the Republicans for that matter," Moody says. "You will find union people, but they won't be there officially."

In fact, in Los Angeles the labor leadership will be inside the convention -- not out on the streets, providing manpower and communications help for the protesters, the way the unions did in Seattle. This could be a double-edged sword for convention organizers: activists won't be able to rely on big labor's organizational skills, but neither will they have the AFL-CIO's mitigating influence in the streets -- which means that demonstrations in Los Angeles could get more outrageous than they were in Seattle or in Washington, DC, where meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank drew protest this spring.

Not everyone is convinced that there will be a large protesting presence at the convention. "LA is not a great city of protest. It's not like San Francisco or Seattle," says Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. "One of the problems the protesters will have is that there's no center of gravity in Los Angeles. The people who would protest are all on the Venice boardwalk. In order to have a protest movement, you've got to have a serious political culture. LA is a hedonistic city, not a political city."

Joel Kotkin, an LA-based senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, is more concerned. "You have several huge facilities . . . downtown," he says. "If you can get 100,000 downtown for the Olympics, you can get protesters downtown. In some ways, because it's not as dense as a typical downtown and there are places to hide, it might work to the protesters' advantage."

A footnote: no matter what happens at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia next week, the Bush campaign is already gearing up for its post-convention boost. It is planning an old-fashioned whistle-stop train tour across America. Unlike other recent campaigns that bused candidates across the country, as Clinton-Gore famously did in '92, the train tour brings to mind another era altogether in presidential campaign politics.

Aside from George W. Bush's vice-presidential pick, Richard Cheney, the big news heading into this week's Republican convention is how tightly Bush has the event locked down: there will be no unruly evangelicals this year to muddy up the Bush coronation.

If you listen to conservatives like columnist Robert Novak, this is a sign of Bush's strength. The Christian right, after all, fractured the past three conventions with speechifying and messy platform fights on the convention floor -- the most notorious example being the 1992 Houston convention that helped torpedo Bush Senior's re-election.

Not this year. "Going into next week's national convention in Philadelphia, George W. Bush is more firmly in control of the Republican Party than any of its presidential nominees over the past half-century," Novak wrote in his column in the Washington Post. "The Family Research Council and allied groups, complaining about Bush's meeting with Republican homosexual activists, have been shut out of contact with the presidential nominee." (The FRC is the Christian conservative group that was headed by the Reverend Gary Bauer until his ill-fated run for the nomination last winter.)

But Novak is missing the story. It's not that Bush is so strong -- it's that the Christian right is weaker than it's ever been. According to the National Review, which obtained a copy of an FRC fundraising letter, the organization is in deep financial trouble. The letter detailed the group's $3.2 million deficit and warned, "If this shortfall isn't eased, the organization will have no choice but to pare back its public policy efforts."

Like the FRC, the Christian Coalition is also in the midst of hard times. This year's Republican convention, unlike previous ones, will not feature a Christian Coalition "war room," which means no secret communications center, no high-tech polling, and no bitter convention battles. Not only has the group's young, energetic head, Ralph Reed, stepped down, but its last Washington lobbyist resigned in April, according to the Virginian-Pilot. "The Christian Coalition doesn't exist anymore," says one conservative insider.

"There's been a sea change politically," says Ken Weinstein, the director of the Washington office of the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based think tank. "The era of harsh partisanship is over. Armageddon-style battles are over."

In part, says Weinstein, the change reflects American attitudes. "The electorate is more socially libertarian, particularly on gay issues, than these groups would like to admit," he says.

But also at work is an internal divide between religious Christians. On the one hand are what Weinstein calls "Thou shalt not" Christians -- those whose beliefs are rooted in the strict moral prohibitions of the Old Testament. On the other are those who stress the New Testament's emphasis on "the gospel of love and redemption." So-called Old Testament Christians form the foundation for such groups as the Moral Majority, the Family Research Council, and the Christian Coalition. But with Bush the candidate putting more and more emphasis on "compassionate conservatism," they're being boxed out. "The tougher, more judgmental type of Christianity seems to be out of favor with voters," Weinstein says.

Larry Sabato, the director of the center for governmental studies at the University of Virginia, says the political clout of the evangelical movement may be at an end. "The Christian Right came to the forefront in 1980. They've had a good amount of time in the sun; they're showing some sunburn," says Sabato, who chronicled the Christian Coalition's electoral activities in a 1996 book, Dirty Little Secrets. "Their influence is on the decline."

Like Weinstein, Sabato sees Bush as staying true to his born-again leanings, but shunning anything that could be perceived as controversial. "Bush knows that the suburban swing voters he needs are scared away by these groups," Sabato says.

Finally, Elliott Abrams, another long-time observer of the Christian conservative movement, says the current weakness suggests that people made too much of these groups to begin with.

"There was a time when [people] told us that Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority were going to take over America," says Abrams, a former Reagan official who's now the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. "There was a time when they told us Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition were going to take over America. This shows how silly they are and how off their predictions have been. People who don't share that view should stop being terrified of religiosity in American Christians."

With both major political parties dominated by big money and taking a pro-business tack, candidates seem to have forgotten what was once a staple of American politics -- playing to the white working class.

Now comes a writing team whose goal is to rekindle interest in that group of voters. Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and Joel Rogers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have just published America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (Basic Books). In a book that has received its share of attention -- the cover of the Atlantic Monthly and praise from such conservative critics as Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard -- the authors trace the importance of the white working class in electoral politics, but then demonstrate how both major political parties are currently shutting this constituency out of the system.

"If one were to believe the bulk of news stories, the typical American voters these days are affluent white mothers (in 1996 they were called `soccer moms') and fathers, living in the suburbs and probably involved in the information economy (as `wired workers')," they write.

For all the talk about the "white working class," the authors hope to encourage cross-racial economic alliances. Teixeira, for example, believes that Ralph Nader's Green Party candidacy could speak to a working-class constituency that includes both white and black voters. "I think there are at least some early indications that [Nader] could pick up some support from this group," he said in an interview with the Phoenix. "Whether it goes beyond self-identified liberals is not clear to me."

Teixeira says he is encouraged by the fact that Steve Cobble, who favors class-based coalitions across racial lines, is working with Nader. Cobble, an informal Nader adviser and former Jesse Jackson strategist, is among those who studied the book in manuscript form. "I think there is a certain wind of change that rustles your hair that suggests we're in a transitional period right now," Teixeira says.

If this is a time of transition, the Republicans' "double oil tycoon" ticket of Bush and Cheney doesn't exactly represent a step forward into the new age. But perhaps someone or something else will emerge to speak to America's forgotten majority.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.