 
Don't Move to
Canada
, Move to
Iowa
By David Swanson
www.opednews.com
Those desperate enough to
consider moving to
Canada
to escape a nation headed by George W. Bush may want to consider an easier
option that could deny Bush's Republican successor the presidency: moving
to
Iowa
.
We spent upwards of $300
million trying to elect John Kerry ($241 million through the campaign,
another $80 million through other organizations).
We turned out every anti-Bush voter we could find.
But there weren't enough pro-Kerry voters to put Kerry over the
top. The majority of
Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction, but a
majority of voters, or at least something close to it, voted for the
incumbent. We didn't offer
people a real choice. Kerry
was a lousy candidate.
Both candidates supported
an illegal war, corporate trade policies, private health insurance, the
war on drugs, an ever-growing Pentagon, and an expanding prison industry.
Kerry played to the Republican base, hunted ducks, and packed his
stages with veterans, but he lost the election to rural voters, religious
voters, and veterans, because they were Bush's base.
The Democratic base –
urban voters, the less religious, the non-veterans, working people (all
majority groups), plus racial minorities – voted for Kerry, but not with
large enough turnout or by a wide enough margin.
Why? Because he was
not our candidate. Kerry was
the candidate of 100,000 mostly white, rural, church-going Iowans.
We would not have had
such an uphill struggle in this election, and the heart-felt and tireless
labor of hundreds of thousands of us would not have gone to waste, if the
Democrats had had a candidate, if the candidate of urban
America
had not been chosen by 100,000 Iowans, residents of a state that then
voted for Bush.
But here's the good news.
If you become a resident of
Iowa
and register to vote 10 days before the next
Iowa
caucuses, and agree not to vote anywhere else, you can nominate the next
Democratic candidate for president. If
you move there earlier, you can help influence some of your fellow Iowans.
Does it sound like I'm
putting down Iowans or proposing something undemocratic?
I beg to differ. To
begin with, I'm not suggesting that any other state would necessarily have
done a better job than
Iowa
. The reason that only the
first state counts is the same as the reason why
Iowa
got it wrong: uninformed obedience to the media and a confusion of the
role of citizen with the role of pundit.
After
Iowa
, the next 49 states, with very few exceptions, obeyed the media's command
to vote for the candidate possessing an entirely mythical substance called
"momentum." Similarly,
Iowans – conceiving of themselves as media-informed political
strategists – voted for the candidate possessing a fictional "electability."
What we need in
Iowa
are not just thousands of residents of safely blue states and of isolated
blue cities in hopelessly red wastelands.
We need activists and educators in media-rebellion.
The Democratic party
leadership will always obey the media's demand to act more and more
Republican. What we need is a
movement in
Iowa
to reinterpret this dictum. Republicans
force candidates to adopt their supporters' platform or face opposition
from within. Democrats tell
themselves that their candidates' platforms are "viable" and
"electable." We
must instead – indeed -- act like Republicans.
We know that the majority of Americans favor single-payer health
care, less corporate influence in government, protecting Social Security,
correcting the minimum wage, investing in education, taxing the wealthy
and corporations, and addressing global warming.
We know that the VAST majority of Democrats favor these things.
Why should we let the media tell us that the most popular positions
are not "electable"? And
why should we do so election after election, even as the "electable"
candidate consistently fails to get elected?
(And please don't mention
that guy from
Arkansas
who cost us the House, the Senate, and the state houses, because Perot
spoiled an election for him, so that he could destroy welfare, pass NAFTA,
and hand us the Telecom. Act that created the media giants that now push
our people around and twist their thinking away from democracy.)
Is it undemocratic to
move some thousands of well-informed citizen activists to
Iowa
? I would argue that is more
democratic than what we now have. One
state chooses for the other 49. Bribery
goes by the name of campaign finance, which we periodically
"reform." An
anti-democratic electoral college controls the general election and favors
rural states. A lack of
instant runoff voting or proportional representation shuts out third
parties. And the
Iowa
caucus goers do not look like
America
. If we were to bring
representatives of the other 49 states, and various racial and cultural
groups, into
Iowa
, we might make it more representative of
America
. The Democratic party is
unlikely to take away
Iowa
's first-in-the-nation status. Just
ask the Washington D.C. City Council. And
if a D.C. first-in-the-nation primary is taken seriously, our job will be
easier. African Americans are
already better voters.
We also might make
Iowa
a blue state, and even a model blue state.
After all, we are currently shut out of national politics.
We need to create a few model blue states with universal health
care, a living wage, paid family and vacation leave, free preschool and
college, protected natural resources.
We need to show the red states what they're missing.
Why not include
Iowa
in this project? Why not
organize the
Iowa
workforce, make
Iowa
a focus of a reborn labor movement following the AFL-CIO convention in
Chicago
next July?
We need a major effort to
educate Iowans and import new Iowans.
The cost of this is a drop in the bucket compared to what it takes
to run a doomed phony-Republican against a real Republican candidate.
We need to start voter registration in
Iowa
now. And we can begin this
project on a volunteer basis. Those
of you headed to
Canada
: please take a look at
Iowa
.
_______________________________________
David
Swanson (www.davidswanson.org)
served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich for President after serving
for three years as national communications coordinator for ACORN.
He is now media coordinator for the International Labor
Communications Association.
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