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

UNCONVENTIONAL POLITICS

While The Two Big Parties Are Having Their National Conventions, Arianna
Huffington Will Be Throwing Shadows.

WHEN THE MAJOR political parties hold their presidential conventions, they,
in essence, place a sign on their backs that says, "Kick me." The media
complains the conventions are highly scripted, no-news,
gabfest-coronations--except for the moment the veep selection is unveiled
or leaked. (Such gripes are, of course, accurate.

But if the conventions offered long, in-depth, primetime debates over
policy issues--say, the U.S. relationship with the World Trade
Organization--it's doubtful the broadcast networks would be eager to shove
aside their game shows and desert-island soap operas for such fare.) And
while the media moans, various advocacy groups often stage press
conferences or protests to criticize the party or its nominee, hoping to
attract a few of the gazillion journalists present who desperately need to
fill inches or airtime.

This election year, a collection of public interest groups are trying to
rise above the usual low-level and less-than-organized sniping by mounting
what they bill as the Shadow Conventions at the Republican gathering in
Philadelphia and the Democratic get-together in Los Angeles. For four hours
each day, while the deep-pocket funders, delegates and pols are recovering
from the previous night of speechifying and parties, the Shadowers will
discuss issues MIA at the main events: campaign finance reform, poverty and
the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, and the failure and
awful consequences of the war on drugs.

Big-name talent has been recruited.

Senator John McCain is scheduled to speak at the opening Shadow session on
the night of Sunday, July 30, as his fellow Republicans assemble in
Philadelphia. Presumably, he will earnestly lash both parties for being
polluted by special-interest money. (Then two nights later, he will stride
to the podium inside the GOP convention, praise George W. Bush, who has
broken records in campaign fundraising, and urge the Republican Party, with
its soft-money-filled coffers, on to victory.) Senator Russell Feingold, a
Democrat who has teamed up with McCain to press for reform legislation, is
slated to show at the opening night of the L.A. alternative convention two
weeks later.

Jesse Jackson, Senator Paul Wellstone, Warren Beatty (who flirted with a
progressive run for the presidency last year), Green Party presidential
candidate Ralph Nader, and Representatives John Lewis, Jesse Jackson Jr.,
Dennis Kucinich, and Jerrold Nadler (all Democrats) have committed to
appearing.

So have a few prominent GOPers beyond McCain. New Mexico Governor Gary
Johnson and Representative Tom Campbell, who is running for Senate in
California, are on the bill. Both are Republicans who have assailed the
draconian War on Drugs and proposed that get-tough drug enforcement be
throttled back, while drug treatment is revved up. (The conveners plan to
try to corral conservative columnist William Buckley and former secretary
of State George Shultz, who each have criticized the war on drugs.)

At the center of the Shadow Conventions ( http://www.shadowconventions.com/ )
is Arianna Huffington. Some might recall her standing by her California
Republican husband Michael (now her ex), as he spent a record $5.4 million
in 1992 to buy a seat in Congress and then spent $30 million--another
record at the time--losing a Senate bid in 1994 to Dianne Feinstein. Or she
might be remembered for being a Newt cheerleader in the early days of the
so-called Republican revolution, when she also served as a conservative
pundit. But as she saw more of Gingrich--who claimed he was interested in
her ideas about combatting poverty--she was repulsed. "I was completely
fooled," she now concedes.

She became a Gingrich foe and a passionate declaimer of a thoroughly
corrupted political system that is, in her words, "under the thumb of a
small corporate elite" that uses "its financial clout to control both
parties' political agendas." She came to realize a fundamental truth: Why
does this political system not place ending poverty at the top of its to-do
list? Because the poor have no money to contribute to the politicians.

In her recent book, How to Overthrow the Government, Huffington served up a
Naderesque critique--"American politics is broken"--and called for the
public financing of elections, Seattle-like protests, more civic activism,
and a boycott of corporations that do not donate to people in need. Besides
blabbing and writing about the dire condition of representative democracy
in America, she has done the grunt work, collaborating with various public
interest groups--Mass Voters for Clean Elections, the Nader-founded Oaks
Project in California, the anti-poverty, church-based Call to Renewal--to
help them gain attention and support.

After years on the right, she has become a neo-progressive. "I'm a
recovering Republican," she says with a chuckle. "I'm trying to atone for
spending all that money in 1994." To follow up on her book and her recent
activism, Huffington decided to concoct an alternative to the conventions.

She drew up a budget of $500,000, raised several hundred thousand dollars
from foundations--including billionaire George Soros' Open Society
Institute--and enlisted good-works outfits as convenors.

Their leaders tend to eschew the term "left," but they hail from
progressive fields.

Common Cause lobbies for campaign reform such as a ban on soft-money
contributions (those large, unrestricted loophole-donations from
corporations, millionaires and unions). Public Campaign promotes
clean-money laws that provide full public financing to candidates. United
for a Fair Economy was formed by activists from the labor, civil rights,
women's and anti-poverty movements to highlight the growing gap between
rich and poor in America; it urges shifting the tax burden back to the
well-off. (Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte have helped the group.) The
National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support calls for increasing the
minimum wage so it can support a working family, ending workfare, and
creating public jobs programs in areas of concentrated poverty.

The Call to Renewal advocates a national anti-poverty program that would
include a living wage, government subsidies for child care, and health
insurance for all. The Lindesmith Center pushes alternative drug policies,
such as ending mandatory minimums, expanding drug treatment, restricting
the use of assets forfeiture, and permitting the medical use of marijuana.

These groups, which are responsible for most of the content of the Shadow
Conventions, hired Mike Dolan, a key organizer of the anti-WTO activity in
Seattle last year, to pull together Huffington's policy-and-politics parties.

At a recent press conference at Common Cause HQ in Washington, Jim Wallis
of the Call to Renewal explained the mission: "It's a real simple question.
Who's on the agenda and who's not. I hear candidates talk a lot about
Soccer Mom." But, he added, somone else is being left out of the picture.
At a Burger King not too long ago, Wallis noticed that a woman working the
drive-in window was rushing back and forth to several kids seated in a
corner booth.

She was, he learned, helping her children with their homework. Someone like
that, he noted, "is put forward as a success story of welfare reform and
there's nothing else to do for her. Burger King Mom and her kids are not on
the agenda in this election so far. One out of five kids are still in poverty."

Other convenors pointed to troubling societal markers that will grab no
attention at the conventions. Two hot-growth industries these days, United
for a Fair Economy's Chuck Collins observed, are prison construction and
gated residential communities. Ethan Nadelmann, the director of the
Lindesmith Center, noted that in 1980 50,000 people were in prisons for
drug law violations; today it is almost half a million--which is more than
the entire prison population of Europe. "We want to focus on the people who
have suffered," Huffington said, "like this 10-year-old child whose mother
is in jail for life on a non-violent drug offense."

Huffington is trying to push the Shadow Conventions beyond the confines of
all-policy-all-the-time. That's no surprise.

In 1996, she and comedian Al Franken provided commentary on both
conventions to cable television's Comedy Central. (They presented their
reports while sharing a bed on screen.) Now she has lined up her comic
friends--Franken, Saturday Night Live and Spinal Tap alum Harry Shearer,
and Politically Incorrect's Bill Maher--to bring their stylings to her
conventions. And when the party conventions are underway at night, veteran
comedy writers will annotate the proceedings with satirical subtitles on a
real-time video feed that will be shown in the Shadow venues and perhaps
broadcast over the Internet. Rock the Vote has been assigned the task of
rounding up star-power musicians, who can draw notice to the festivities.
(Any chance McCain will share the stage with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch
Nails?) The Shadow Conventions may preview excerpts of a new Michael
Douglas film related to the War on Drugs. Lewis Lapham, the wry editor of
Harper's, is set to lecture on satire as a political tool.

Huffington's assemblies are ambitious projects that will be occurring while
others are waging street protests.

Veterans of the demonstrations at Seattle and the World Bank are drawing up
plans for repeats in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, the
activists hope to mount a convention of homeless, a march on the opening
day of the convention, and an anarchists' conference. In Philadelphia,
plans call for marches for economic human rights and for death-row inmate
Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as a direct-action attempt at disrupting the GOP
convention. A July 30 demonstration there has been endorsed by various
unions, NOW, the NAACP, church groups and gay rights advocates.

These events--unless they turn nasty or surprisingly large--are not the
sort of activity that draws the mainstream press.

Huffington--media-savvy as she is--has knit together two confabs that have
the potential of competing with the acts in the center ring. (The
organizers of the Shadow Convention are hoping C-SPAN will air the
proceedings.) After all, it's not often that an event brings together Ralph
Nader and a Republican governor to lambaste the established order, albeit
different portions of the established order.

Perhaps Huffington, who's always been a whiz at winning attention for
herself and her causes, has hit on a formula--in-your-face policy
challenges, edgy satire and celebrity--that will prompt some media and some
citizens (maybe even some politicians?) to pay heed to matters locked out
of the balloon-filled conventions.

The Shadowers' aims are not conventional politics.

They are not out to influence the party platforms or affect the veep picks.

They merely want to cast light into the darker corners that are ignored
during the hoopla and high-donor fundraisers. By the way, the Democratic
and Republican nominees have not been invited to the Shadow Conventions.
"Well," Huffington says, "they have their own forums."