SHARPLESS' DRUG FANTASY

John Sharpless says he is a different kind of congressional candidate
and, after this week's foreign policy debate on the University of
Wisconsin campus, it will be difficult to argue the point.

The Republican challenger to U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin says he is
determined to compete with the Madison Democrat for the hefty student
vote that many believe tipped the 1998 election. And, as a UW history
professor who used to sport a bit of a ponytail, his outreach to youth
was going about as well as might be expected for a candidate of the
hipster party of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.

Then came Monday's debate in front of a crowd that included some of
the most engaged students on a campus where the burgeoning movement to
end corporate abuse of sweatshop workers got its start. In what will
surely go down as one of the more novel appeals ever advanced by a
supposedly serious candidate for elective office, Sharpless delivered
what appeared to be an anti-drug homily:

"Let me moralize for a moment. Throughout this country, there are
cultural and political elites who will lecture you on sweatshops,
T-shirts and tennis shoes; tell you that you shouldn't buy Nikes or
drink coffee at Starbucks. And after they finish that self-righteous
lecture, they drop their nose on the table and snort a line.

"They are directly responsible for the destruction of the social
fabric of South American nations. They are directly responsible for
the destruction of (the) political infrastructure of Mexico. As long
as the laws are there, people have to take responsibility for their
actions. A line of coke on the table is like buying a pair of tennis
shoes made in the sweatshops.''

Sharpless' statement was eerily reminiscent of the rambling rhetorical
flourishes of former President Ronald Reagan's latter days on the
public stage. In fairness to Reagan, however, he apparently was more
in tune with international solidarity activism and the sentiments of
college students.

Most students on the UW campus are not active in the anti-sweatshop
movement. But they are surely aware of it, and by all indications they
are generally supportive of efforts to ensure that Bangladeshi
children are not chained to poles and forced to produce soccer balls.
Why, I have even heard some self-professed "conservative'' students
agree that it was not all that cool for Reebok to have the local
dictator jail union organizers at its Indonesian factories.

But whether or not students support the movement to get sweatshop
products off campus, they surely know their classmates who are devoted
to the cause. The activist students are their roommates, their
friends, their teaching assistants. And even the most disengaged
students are amply aware that the young activists who built the
anti-sweatshop movement are, by every reasonable measure, a temperate
crew.

As someone who has covered the anti-sweatshop movement from its
infancy on the UW campus, I am forced to report that these young
people are not exactly the party squad. During the sit-in earlier this
year at UW Chancellor David Ward's office, they displayed a marked
tendency toward study of human rights reports and concerned dialogue
regarding international labor standards that would scare the wits out
of George W. Bush. "These are pretty serious students -- the kind of
students who would risk getting arrested in order to fight for human
rights and workers' rights in developing countries,'' explained former
Associated Students of Madison chair Adam Klaus.

Klaus was one of the 54 young people -- almost all of them UW students
- -- arrested in and around Ward's office during protests in February
against the school's refusal to take a leadership role in the battle
against the corporate abuse of women and children working in
sweatshops. He's now working for Tammy Baldwin, a role he sees as a
continuation of his social justice activism.

Baldwin's lucky to have Klaus on her side. A native of Watertown with
impeccably good manners and an inspiring earnestness, he's one of the
smartest, hardest working and most well-liked students on campus. When
I talked with him the other day, Klaus was drinking a can of
Coca-Cola. "It's the only Coke I do,'' he said, and it's tough to
imagine how any champion of students would doubt or disparage him.

Which returns us to John Sharpless.

Surely, the professor is not the first tenured academic to promulgate
a crackpot theory -- nor even a theory about crack and pot. But it is
a rare politician indeed who, as he seeks student votes, claims that
young people working for a just world are "cultural elitists'' who
mingle their activism with felonious substance abuse.