Note: Shadow Convention websites: http://www.drugpolicy.org/
http://www.shadowconventions.com/

THE ARIANNA SIDESHOW

The Activist And Socialite Has Plans For Two "Shadow Conventions" She Hopes
Will Roil The Establishment. What Are They Really About

IT'S NOT EASY GETTING A political convention off the ground – especially
when the convention is not really a convention but a "shadow convention,"
and especially when the politics being convened is not the old-fashioned
kind but a new, revolutionary kind of politics that will "transcend the old
categories of left and right." Arianna Huffington has been learning this
lesson the hard way all summer. While Americans across the country –
hundreds of them! maybe thousands! – eagerly await the twin spectacle of
the Republican and Democratic conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles,
the syndicated columnist and former Newt Gingrich confidant has been trying
to round up participants for a self-styled alternative – the Shadow
Conventions 2000, dubbed by sponsors as a "Citizens' Intervention in
American Politics."

"It's really exploding in ways I could not have imagined," Huffington says,
riding through downtown Philadelphia a few weeks before the Republicans are
scheduled to arrive. Today she has already held a press conference, visited
two newspaper editorial boards, met with a dozen area activists and scouted
the arena where the shadow revels are to be held. But the complications
never let up. An aide's cell phone beeps, and he hands it over. "Bill
Bradley," he says. Bradley has unofficially agreed to appear at one of the
shadow conventions.

"Bill!" she says, though in her heavily Greek-accented English it comes out
"Beeeel!" "How are you'?"

A long silence ensues.

"Oh, Bill, that's ridiculous," Huffington says at last. "No, no, no. He's
just trying to make trouble, Bill. It is false. He does not know what he is
talking about."

In time she hangs up, evidently having mollified Bradley. "He just saw Bob
Novak on Inside Politics," she explains, referring to the conservative
columnist and the CNN political show on which he regularly appears. "Bill's
worried because Novak says no one knows who is financing our conventions.
Novak says if people knew, they would not want to appear. This is false."
She sighs deeply. "But this is the kind of thing we will have to put up
with. The Establishment hates anything it cannot control. What it cannot
control, it tries to eliminate." Huffington and her colleagues are
convinced they have hit on a formula that will roil the muddy middle of
American politics, from Bushies on the one side to Gorites on the other.
Their plan is media-savvy and politically astute. Concurrently with the
party conventions, an assortment of activists, professional pols and
celebrities with populist pretensions (from stand-ups like Bill Maher to
superstars like Warren Beatty) will gather for four days of speechifying,
seminar giving and satirical merrymaking, all on the indisputable
assumption that the national press corps (and the public) will be so
starved for spectacle and spontaneity that it will lavish attention on them
– and their issues. CNN and C-SPAN have expressed interest in broadcasting
some sessions live.

"We want to throw light on the things that no one will be talking about in
the other conventions – and have a genuine debate, not an infomercial,"
Huffington says. She and her co-conveners – who include Scott Harshbarger
of Common Cause and antipoverty activist Jim Wallis – have whittled their
agenda down to three items. One day will be devoted to campaign-finance
reform, the next to the growing income gap between rich and poor, and the
third to "reforming" – read liberalizing – the nation's drug laws.

If all goes well, organizers hope, this trinity of issues will form the
nucleus for a "new politics," re-energizing the half of the electorate now
so alienated from the old politics that it no longer bothers to vote,
Campaign-finance reform is the thread that ties all other reforms together.
"It's no accident that the major parties aren't addressing the income gap
and are ignoring the failed war on drugs," says Harshbarger, "The
constituencies that are hurt by these issues aren't donating millions of
dollars to the political parties. Unless you fix campaign finance, you
can't move on to the other issues." Still, it seems a curiously arbitrary
trio of concerns – particularly the drug-war component, which scores
scarcely a blip in any catalog of the public's disenchantments. Why single
out drug laws instead of guns, for example, or the environment, or
educational policy, or any of half a dozen issues with greater populist appeal?

One reason – ironically enough, given the convener's hostility to big money
in politics – might be cash. A third of the convention's tab will be picked
up by organizations funded by George Soros, the international financier
whose passion for ending the drug war has made him an all-purpose bogeyman
for political establishmentarians everywhere. Other funding will come from
foundations and individual donors across a narrow span of the political
spectrum, from the center to the center left. "Transcending the old
categories of left and right," after all, is a favorite rhetorical trope of
liberals who are tired of being dismissed in a political culture that makes
"moderation" the pre-eminent virtue. Ideological taxonomists will find the
lineup of shadow convention speakers – from Jesse Jackson to Paul Wellstone
– eerily predictable and not particularly transcendent. All that's missing
is a candlelight vigil for the Scottsboro Boys.

The monochromatic ideology of the shadow conventions has proved to be
self-reinforcing as Republicans get skittish about signing on. John McCain
will open the gathering in Philadelphia with a call for campaign-finance
reform, but – here as elsewhere – not many of the party faithful will
follow him. Jack Kemp, originally publicized as keynoter, withdrew from the
conventions last week. "Jack just feels this isn't something he's
comfortable participating in," says a spokesman. "The more he looked into
it, there just didn't seem to be the balance and the genuine debate he'd
been hoping for." Kemp's retreat leaves Congressmen Tom Campbell and Chris
Shays as the only other two national Republicans participating – though by
week's end Shays' representatives said their man was rethinking his appearance.

Until recently, attracting Republicans has never been a problem for
Huffington. She has been a fixture in G.O.P. circles for a decade or more.
Born and reared in Greece, she attended Cambridge University, became
president of the Cambridge Union debating team and wrote several
well-received books before moving to the U.S. in the 1980s. She married
Texas oil millionaire Michael Huffington and helped guide his political
career, which ended spectacularly after one term in Congress when he spent
$30 million of his own money unsuccessfully running for U.S. Senator from
California in 1994. Her career flourished out of the ashes of his: Arianna
became a regular on TV gab shows, founded her own think tank (now defunct),
launched a syndicated column and settled in as a close adviser to Gingrich,
who was busily undertaking a revolution of his own.

Soon she divorced her husband – and, figuratively anyway, Gingrich too. "It
became, clear to me that Newt didn't care about the issues I cared about,"
she says now, "that all his talk, sometimes very eloquent, about poverty
and caring for the least among us was just window dressing." She abandoned
Washington for Los Angeles, where she shares an Italianate mansion with her
two preteen daughters. She is impatient with her old Republican friends who
say she has moved to the left (those old categories again). "I have become
radicalized, but it's not as though I'm suddenly praising the Democratic
Party. Both parties are equally bankrupt, equally at fault."

If it sounds a little vague – well, that's how movements often begin. No
one should underestimate Huffington's powers as a publicist for the causes
she champions. Says Wallis, a veteran of radical politics: "We've waited
years for someone like her." Her enthusiasms are worth taking seriously.
"She doesn't so much evolve as have incarnations," says an old colleague.
And the incarnations are invariably suited to the politico-sociological
moment. She has an unerring sense for the next big thing. In the early
1970s, she wrote one of the first anti-feminist manifestos – The Female
Woman, a counterpoint to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch - anticipating
the backlash against feminism before there was a hint it. Her next book,
After Reason, called for a commingling of politics and religion just as
American evangelicals roused themselves from decades of political apathy.
During the era of Reaganite glitz, she settled into the life of a New York
author-socialite, the celebrity biographer of Maria Callas and Pablo
Picasso. When the Gingrich revolution seemed a far-fetched pipe dream, she
signed on as Madame Defarge, and had the sense to decamp when it collapsed.

Now she anticipates yet another new politics, born of a wide and deep
disgruntlement with the status quo. Her evidence for the coming revolution
is thin. The low voter turnouts she and her shadow conveners bewail as
signs of disgust might just as plausibly be taken for the sleepy
indifference of a fat and happy populace. But her larger charge – that the
two parties, in thrall to a self-satisfied elite, have become homogeneous,
to the detriment of a robust political debate – is far more plausible.
Anyone who doubts it should be forced to explain the difference between
George Bush's "compassionate conservatism" (or is it "conservative
compassion"?) and Al Gore's "pragmatic idealism" (or is it "idealistic
pragmatism"?) in 300 words or less. With both parties staking claim to the
same territory, she sees room for something new and, of course, for herself.