THE UNLIKELY CRUSADER

Arianna Huffington is a glamorous, opportunistic, media-savvy, heavily
accented Queen Bee who has undergone more re-inventions than Al Gore, but
still, she might have a point.

"Politics is now an orgy of money," she says in a Zsa Zsa Gabor voice over
the telephone, "and it's reached the point where there might not be enough
air time for all the ads that can be bought with the money that's been
collected. And as a result, more and more people are feeling
disenfranchised. They're not even voting. And that's a crisis in democracy
and, of course, neither party is going to be addressing it."

This is the Armani-suited, auburn-haired Huffington speaking, the same
Greek-born writer who made her name with The Female Woman, an attack on
Germaine Greer's feminism. The same one who skipped from London to the
United States to become the daaarling party hostess for conservatives in
the early 1990s, the confidante of "Contract with America" Republican Newt
Gingrich.

The same one who was once the carnivorously ambitious spouse of
right-winger Michael Huffington, who pushed him to spend $US30million on a
failed Senate bid, after which she dumped him. He announced he was gay last
year. It is the same Arianna Huffington who now has a bestseller with the
title, Overthrow the Government, and who is zipping around the country
drumming up interest for the shadow conventions, which will attempt to dog
the Republican and Democratic national conventions that begin at the end of
this month.

Huffington is the champion for the three shadow convention issues, which
she correctly maintains the major parties will blissfully ignore: the
growing disparity between rich and poor in the world's most prosperous
nation; punitive drug laws that will soon see two million Americans behind
bars; and the corrupting influence of special-interest money on politics.

It all strikes cynics as just another pose. "I used to debate Arianna on
(CNN's) Crossfire," the Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum told The
New Republic. "She was about as conservative as you can get, and suddenly
she's for activism and social conscience. I think she's just blown on the
winds of fads."

But the workers in citizen and consumer organisations, who put out
carefully-researched reports on the losers in the New Economy, and the
druggies in jail, and the links between donations to political parties and
stalled bills in Congress, look upon her, if not lustily, then with hope.
Celebrity and wealth are currencies that rule in the US and Huffington has
given the groups a kind of hitherto unknown mainstream respectability - not
to mention a contact book to kill for. Liberal grumps, such as writer
Christopher Hitchens, are converts, and actor Warren "Bullworth" Beatty
will speak at the convention in Los Angeles.

It is not as though there won't be any other protests at the Republican
convention in Philadelphia from July 31, or at the Democrat event in Los
Angeles in August. There's the homeless convention, the people's convention
and the mother's convention. But Huffington's has garnered the names and
publicity.

Her big coup is to get former Republican presidential candidate John
McCain, lumbering up to Philadelphia from Washington in his "Straight Talk
Express" bus, to open the Shadow Convention. The former POW gave the
presumed Republican nominee, George W. Bush, a fright during the primary
campaign and remains the most popular politician in the nation. He will
rail about his pet subject of campaign finance reform. It underlines
Huffington's case that McCain will then take the platform at the official
Republican convention where he has been told not to mention the subject.

Huffington's explanation of her metamorphosis from establishment figure to
a "politics-is-broken" megaphone is that she naively believed that the
Republicans actually cared about poor people. Then, while campaigning with
her husband, "we'd be at all these glitzy parties (and) one day, I was in
the inner city and the contrast stunned me. I saw poverty and pain under
this glittering facade and I realized that I had been the mouthpiece for
such hypocrisy".

Her analysis that the American people are deeply disengaged with a
political system that ignores their most vital concerns is hardly original,
but it resonates. "When you have 68per cent of the people in jail for drug
offences being African-American, when whites consume drugs five times as
much as blacks, which means that affluent whites get away with breaking
those drug laws and inner-city blacks don't, that's not sustainable in a
democracy," she says.

"The Shadow Conventions are going to spotlight people living in Silicon
Valley who have two or three jobs and can get no affordable housing, and
some of them end up sleeping on buses. We're going to spotlight children
whose mothers are in jail for 20 years, or in one case, for life, for
non-violent drug offenses. There is no spotlight on them, and there has to
be an awakened sense of outrage about what's happening, and the neglect of
millions of Americans who are not (party) contributors and are not voters."

THE big conventions are unlikely to dwell on these issues. Indeed, the
events that formally nominate the presidential candidates are now little
more than Oprah-style orgies of sentimentality and bland slogans Day one of
the Republican convention has the theme of "Opportunity with a Purpose";
day two: "Strength and Security with the Purpose"; Day three: "Prosperity
with a Purpose", and four: "President with a Purpose".

But why the complacency, Huffington asks, when only 20per of Americans aged
18 to 24 voted in the 1998 congressional elections? When nearly two-thirds
of Americans believe the US government is run for "a few big interests"
rather than "for the benefit of all", a reversal of opinion since 1964? And
when there is evidence that the number of working poor has actually
increased in the US over the past 30 years? "Isn't this worth discussing?"
she says.

Huffington pinpoints the role of money in US politics as the root of the
problem. For the November elections, members of congress, political parties
and presidential candidates are expected to raise $US3 billion for their
campaigns, a staggering record. The conventional conventions will cost the
political parties $85million alone.

Even the conventions themselves are now fundraisers. Donors of $5000 or
more to the Republicans will be invited to a "Convention Cup" golf
tournament, and a "Salute to the Senate" dinner buffet. There'll be a
fund-raiser at the Playboy Mansion, featuring flamingos and monkeys. Guests
will hear Playboy magnate Hugh Heffner's voice urging them to "have some
champagne".

According to polls, most Americans will pay little notice, partly because
the booming economy makes politics less relevant, and partly because of
their contempt for the political process. The traditional television
networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, have abandoned a substantial presence at the
conventions, leaving gavel-to-gavel coverage to cable television. The
population of the world's most proud democracy is barely interested and
indications so far are that voter turnout in November will be low again.

Huffington wants people to get angry about their stolen democracy, to get
involved to get it back. "If real change is going to occur in America, it's
not going to happen from within either party, it's going to happen by a
movement of aroused citizens, saying `enough is enough' - there has to be
fundamental change."