Boy, am I tired of this "evil of two lessers" debate. Do we prefer Clinton to Dole? (or in the old Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, people in Nazi-occupied USA debate about whether Goebbels or Goering is the lesser of two evils.) What a hard question, especially given all of the complicated results that can arise from an election: Alex Cockburn suggests that the 1992 election of Clinton (over greater-evil Bush) created the conditions for the 1994 "Republican Revolution," which in turn set the stage for Clinton's current more-rightist-than-thou campaign. That campaign threatens to make Clinton a worse evil than Reagan was when the latter was in office: consider the on-going effort to incarcerate all black youth who aren't squeaky clean, powered by such policies as the much-greater punishment for being caught with "crack" cocaine than with middle-class powder (a policy which Clinton endorsed enthusiastically). The fact is that Clinton -- or Dole -- will be less evil to the extent that there is a mass popular & progressive movement outside of the electoral arena, as there was during the late 1960s and 1970s, counteracting the baleful influence of the moneyed interests and the hard right. Clinton -- or Dole -- will sway to the left if the political wind is blowing to the left. Now, I don't have a plan to instantly conjure up a mass popular movement of the sort that pushed Nixon to be the last progressive president of the USA in recent memory (at least on domestic issues). However, the importance of such movements leads to a restatement of the question: how does voting for, or working for, Clinton (or for that matter, Dole) increase the size, depth, or weight of the much-needed mass progressive movement? Do either of the leading candidates have any track record of using high office to promote such movements? Frankly, it looks like I'm going to vote for Ralph Nader. -- Jim Devine
