Battling Bush (continued)

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."

Frank is depending on activists like Matthew Jerzyk, a 27-year-old labor organizer in Providence who spent four years running Rhode Island’s Jobs with Justice program. Jerzyk doesn’t need any persuading to serve as a messenger, but he believes that progressives have not created an easy-to-understand agenda: "The conservative movement had clear demands, and the progressive movement now doesn’t." Instead, progressives tend to unload a very long and often-detailed list. Jerzyk, for example, says that if he had a seat at the national vision-statement table, he would look at immigrant rights, including use of identification certification from their original countries, and "card-checks" in union drives, which avoid the need for union-approval elections by workers if a majority simply signs up for union representation — hardly a coherent or easily summarized platform.

Academics are similarly at a loss for pithy slogans. Wolfe, of Boston College, says liberalism is "one of the greatest political philosophies ever invented," and that liberals’ appreciation of the concepts of freedom and progress in American history are relevant to Bush voters. Asked how that might be expressed succinctly, Wolfe candidly admits: "I’m not a bumper-sticker type."

But if they don’t seem to have their slogans in place yet, many progressives are certain that grassroots campaigns can get the message across. Jerzyk says he knows what it takes to build a movement at the district and ward level — something he says his union, District 1199 of the giant Service Employees International Union, has been doing in Rhode Island. In the past year, the local has sought to unionize 1300 women who operate day-care centers out of their homes, by declaring them state workers. That’s touched off a big fight with Republican governor Donald L. Carcieri, who so far has blocked the effort in court.

Still, Jerzyk claims that the unionizing initiative is making strides. His union belongs to a coalition that helped reverse Carcieri’s proposals to cut state funding for child care, and it supported the successful campaign of day-care provider Grace Diaz to Rhode Island’s General Assembly.

"The key to winning is to set yourself up for small, gradual, and continual victories," Jerzyk says. "Every three months, we are winning a victory. And granted, we haven’t won the major victory. But, you know, we are getting there."

WHILE BUILDING a sturdier foundation for the liberal movement, Democrats face two national obstacles: the need for an attractive, popular leader, and the fact that Republicans have the power to out-muscle the Democrats in Congress

"What the party lacks is a real charismatic leader," says Bluestone. "I’m old enough to remember the days of John F. Kennedy, and I don’t see anybody around quite like that."

Following the election, the Democrats’ most frequently mentioned future presidential candidates were New York senator and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; Howard Dean, the Vermont governor who excited the Democratic base but crashed in the primaries; John Edwards, the defeated vice-presidential candidate; and, of course, John Kerry.

Whether these candidates can overcome their obvious weaknesses is an open question. Kerry, Edwards, and Dean are certified losers, and Clinton has a permanent contingent of Hillary haters who evolved during Whitewater and the sex scandals of her husband, former president Bill Clinton. As for Dean, he has made something of an early start for 2008, having founded a political-action committee, Democracy for America, after he got knocked out of the primaries. On the phone from Democracy for America’s headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, spokeswoman Laura Gross was upbeat as she described the group’s activity after the election: "Our Web traffic has tripled, our blog traffic has tripled" and supporters were phoning in, wanting to know what to do next.

"We can’t have this woe-is-me attitude," Gross says. "You know what? You get about a day or two off just to relax, to recover — then it’s back to work. We can’t look at these elections as something every two or four years."

AS IT SEARCHES for star power, the liberal left is also girding for a series of nightmares it fears may come true during the second Bush administration. The most obvious worry is an expected string of conservative appointments by Bush to the already right-leaning Supreme Court, possibly resulting in a reversal of abortion rights. Other liberal fears include a continuation of tax polices that shift the burden of financing government from rich investors to wage-earning workers; a failure to guarantee access to health care; more death and destruction in the Middle East; further weakening of unions, with an attack on public-sector unions; a worsening of the environment; and underfunding of schools, affordable housing, and other programs as the deficit consumes an ever-larger share of federal dollars.

But perhaps their gloomiest fear is of government repression rivaling that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Increased surveillance measures introduced in the Patriot Act and homeland-security programs, and the way terror suspects have been handled at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, already have eroded liberties, they say. Joseph Gerson, a staffer of the American Friends Service Committee, in Cambridge, speaks of having to look for inspiration to historical role models who weathered slavery, Jim Crow segregation, McCarthyism, and the rise of Hitler.

"As we go into a dark time," says Gerson, "remember that other people have been in dark times in this society and culture before, and certainly internationally. They didn’t give up, and they held their ground and sought new openings." Now more than ever, he says, progressives must fight the urge to hide or stay silent. "It means that we hold our meetings, we hold our demonstrations, and we hold our ground. I really think this is first and foremost. I think people need to talk with one another, kind of break the silence, get past their fear."

It’s a thought shared by veteran Rhode Island activist Richard Walton, who long has worked on anti-war issues and a range of social projects, from working one night a week at a homeless shelter to serving as MC at a folk-music series. "If you pull back because of fear, that only encourages those who would encroach on your liberties," he says. "You have to say this: these are my rights, and I’m going to exercise them. And if you want to prevent me from doing it, you are going to have to take actions that are obvious to everyone."

Renner Wunderlich, the Cambridge filmmaker, says that right now, the liberals have just cause to feel mauled by the right. "We all have a right to be depressed," he says. "We got our faces slapped, our butts kicked, or whatever. And be depressed — you should be depressed. We didn’t do enough, I didn’t do enough."

But Wunderlich, who once suffered a severe leg injury and went through a long rehabilitation, says some injuries lose their sting and do heal. And he echoes Barney Frank’s advice to the politically wounded. "Feel bad, and then get over it, because there’s no other way around it," he says. "You’ve just got to get over it and then go to work."

Brian C. Jones can be reached at brijudy@ids.net.