Pedalling Politics
By Billy Parish

I have butterflies in my stomach,” Charlie Pillsbury tells us, smiling
hopefully as he guides his bicycle into the street. In spite of his
silver beard, khaki shorts, and bike helmet, he speaks to the cluster
of reporters and carries himself in a way that reminds me of Gregory
Peck playing Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. The four of us
accompanying Charlie on the ride finish stretching, eager to begin.
Swinging our legs over the bicycle frames and settling into our toe
clips, we merge with the main street traffic on our way down the
Connecticut coast.

It is a perfect fall day. We bike by small pastures and crumbling stone
walls. The leaves on the maples and oak trees are just beginning to
turn, and the shade they provide has a mottled, rosy warmth to it. We
bike for miles without word or rest. Lulled by my enjoyment of the soft
hills and scenery, I almost forget we are riding for another purpose.
With 25 days until the election, Charlie Pillsbury is campaigning to
win a seat in Congress. A victory would make him the most powerful
Green Party politician in the nation, and as a candidate, Charlie has a
unique appeal. He has worked for 30 years in New Haven, the largest
city of the congressional district, as an attorney, an advocate for the
homeless, and the director of a community mediation center. He can even
claim some degree of national name recognition: His great grandfather
founded the Pillsbury Company, and college roommate Gary Trudeau
modeled Mike Doonesbury, the lead character of the Doonesbury comic
strip, on Charlie. And yet, there is something curious about this
campaign: Every one of us riding with Charlie knows he has no chance of
winning.

Even for a candidate who is unknown, inexperienced, and outspent,
there is one last-ditch populist ploy that can turn the tide: the
campaign tour. After all, well-run campaign tours have been responsible
for some of the biggest electoral upsets in American history. In the
1948 presidential election, every poll, every journalist, and even
Harry Truman’s own wife predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat him by a
landslide. After a 22,000-mile whistlestop campaign tour with hundreds
of speeches from the back of his train, Truman eked out a victory. In
1992, a relatively unknown governor from Arkansas upset a war-hero
president after a media-frenzied bus tour across the country.

In this tradition, Charlie is setting out on a 5-day, 160-mile
listening tour through all 25 towns in the district on his royal blue
Schwinn ‘Traveler’ 10-speed bicycle. Seemingly unaware of how perfectly
the tour fits most people’s stereotype of the hopelessly naïve Green,
Charlie proudly calls this his “good, Green Party idea.” He and his
campaign team have planned a number of press events and meetings with
community leaders along the way. But in American politics, it isn’t
easy being Green: In the 18 years since the party was founded, no Green
Party candidate has ever won a seat in Congress on the national or even
state level. Moreover, the incumbent, Rosa DeLauro, is the
second-highest-ranking Democratic woman in the House of
Representatives. Seeking her 7th term in office, DeLauro has raised
more than six times the campaign money Charlie has. So why did Charlie
agree to enter a political race he almost surely couldn’t win? What was
the purpose of this seemingly quixotic tour? I wondered if the Green
Party had a prayer of fulfilling their promise to, “regenerate
grassroots democracy in America.” The only one to respond to posters
that Charlie had put up at Yale, I committed to join the tour for all
five days to see if I could answer these questions.

At the end of our exhausting 40-mile first day, dominated by a trip to
a local high school, Charlie changes his clothes and has a quick bite
to eat before going to “candidate’s forum night” at Notre Dame High
School. Although he knows it is more productive to spend his time with
people old enough to vote, Charlie can’t turn down an opportunity to
talk to kids. “When you hit your mid 50s, you begin to realize your
days are numbered. I want to pass on the ethic of political engagement
my parents taught me,” he says. The dining hall of this all-boys
Catholic school has been converted into a small lecture space, and
local candidates are giving short speeches and answering questions from
the 75 or so students in the room. Richter Elser, the Republican
candidate, has shown up, but DeLauro is absent. Charlie begins his talk
with a question, “Who was the last third party candidate to win the
presidency of the United States?” “Roosevelt!” one boys yells.
“Washington,” says another. “No, nobody ever did that,” a third boy
responds. “Abraham Lincoln,” Charlie says, “When he was elected, the
Republican Party was a new third party, after the Democrats and the
Whigs. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?” This last thought is a
source of comfort for Green politicians, who happily point out that
Ralph Nader received almost 3 million votes in the controversial 2000
presidential election—over 2 million more than he had received 4 years
earlier.

The drizzle that began on the afternoon of the first day has kept up
for the whole night and continues into the morning of the second. The
sky is slate gray and the streets are spotted with puddles. The rain is
forecast to continue throughout the day. Our hostess for the first
overnight, a 90-year-old woman who used to baby-sit Al Gore in
Tennessee, shakes her head as we bustle around the house. “I’d wait
until next week,” she says, “the only message that will get sent today
is that it is cold and wet.”

We leave anyway and have our busiest day of the whole tour, full of
press events and meetings. The most important stop of the day is at the
Pratt & Whitney aircraft manufacturing plant in North Haven. The old
brick building is a single massive room with row upon row of humming
ceiling lamps. Below, heavy machinery lies in scattered piles, and
mountains of metal cabinets, workbenches, and chairs are arranged in
rough aisles. The plant closed a year ago, and today is the first of a
two-day liquidation sale. Anything that isn’t sold will be dumped in a
landfill, the sale manager tells me.

Charlie is here to meet with Kate Greco, the widow of a Pratt & Whitney
employee who died two years ago of glioblastoma multiform, an
aggressive brain tumor that strikes fewer than three in 100,000 people
each year. In March, the Connecticut Department of Public Health
confirmed 41 cases of the tumor in p&w employees in Connecticut (19 in
the North Haven plant alone). Ms. Greco claims the total count is now
at 80 cases statewide, and she has started an advocacy group called
Worked to Death for the families of the victims and employees of p&w.
As reporters from four Connecticut newspapers crowd to listen in on
Charlie and Ms. Greco’s conversation, Charlie says, “It is impressive
to me that Ms. Greco has turned her private grief into a public
service. She’s a hero.” “Thank you,” she says quietly, keeping her eyes
fixed on the ground in front of her. One reporter asks Charlie, “Are
you going to take any sort of stand on this issue? Is there anything
you can do as a candidate?” He looks pained for an instant before
tactfully ducking the question by explaining instead what he would do
if elected.

One of the central claims of the Green Party is that, by virtue of its
independence from corporate sponsorship, its candidates are more
inclined to tackle local problems and protect individuals. And yet,
with a few minor exceptions like Michael Feinstein, the mayor of Santa
Monica, California, Green politicians have been unable to get into
important offices. So, while getting four reporters to cover this story
is a start, as a Green who almost certainly won’t win the election,
Charlie is as powerless to help as anyone else.

Over breakfast on the third morning, we discuss the different methods
we each used to dry our shoes the night before. In my exhaustion, I had
forgotten to do anything, and Charlie is a little worried about my
feet. They are a translucent pale color and puffy from the full day in
waterlogged tennis shoes and are now unhappily stuffed in the same
soaking sneakers. Minutes later, though, we are all suffering equally:
It is steadily raining again. No press conferences or meetings are
scheduled for the third day. Paul and Dave, Charlie’s staffers, explain
that many labor and community groups won’t meet with Charlie because
they need to remain loyal to DeLauro and the Democratic Party. So
Charlie plans to make stops wherever he can find a group of potential
voters, a task made much more difficult by the rain.

Our first stop is at a behemoth shopping center outside of Waterbury.
We spend a few minutes waiting outside of the electric doors of a Sears
store, but the few customers not enjoying their Saturday morning dry
and at home seem to live outside the district, so we move on. Several
miles later, we stop to use the restrooms in Roller Magic, a roller
rink in downtown Waterbury. Charlie introduces himself to a group of
parents standing by the edge of the rink, watching their kids skate. He
discovers that they are from Watertown, not Waterbury, and are thus
just outside of the 3rd district. Across the room, Dave is changing
dollars into quarters to play air hockey. “Come on, Dave,” Charlie
shouts with an edge to his voice I haven’t heard before. “Let’s stay
focused on this campaign.” For the first time, I understand that
Charlie is still holding out hope that he can pull off a miracle. As
the day wears on, Charlie begins to yell, “Vote Pillsbury for
Congress!” to each person we pass. A few people turn their heads,
confused. Others trudge through the rain, oblivious to the small
bicycle caravan passing through.

It is not so much the intensity that is impressive, but the persistence
of the downpour that greets us for the third day in a row. Incredibly,
it is still raining on the afternoon of the fourth day of the tour when
Mark Kurber, a tall man in a plaid shirt and work pants riding a dirt
bike, joins us as we pass through Ansonia. Mark hesitates a moment and
asks, “Isn’t DeLauro a pretty liberal Democrat?” Charlie doesn’t miss a
beat in responding, “Well, liberal on issues like labor and the
environment, but not on war or universal healthcare. She voted well on
Bush’s resolution, but hasn’t committed to preventing a war against
Iraq. We need to keep pushing her on that.” But despite Charlie’s pat
answer, Mark’s question cuts to the heart of anti-Green sentiment in
the liberal ranks—a charge closely related to its reputation as a
“spoiler party,” especially after Ralph Nader tipped the election away
from the Democrat Al Gore in several key states in the 2000 election.
In this case, the minimal support for the Republican candidate means
that there’s almost no chance Charlie would play the same role. But the
question stands: Wouldn’t progressive voters have more success in
trying to influence the Democratic party from within rather than trying
to challenge it from without at the risk of throwing elections
altogether?

Recently, Charlie’s supporters have been giving him credit for
DeLauro’s decision to vote against President Bush’s Iraq war
resolution. Charlie himself has pointed out several times to reporters
along the tour that he has gotten DeLauro to debate twice already even
though she had only debated twice before in twelve years of office.
Forcing the Democrats to the political left and raising neglected
issues are valid objectives for a liberal third party, but for many
left-of-center voters, these benefits come at too high a cost.

Early in the morning on the last day, we meet in front of the Audubon
Society’s Research Center on Milford Point. The rising sun reflects
gold and green off the water and the tall grasses of the protected salt
marsh surrounding the building. After three days of relentless rain,
the sky is clear, and the roads are dry. It is still cold, but we are
so glad to see the sun that no one complains.

After lunch, several more supporters join us, and we are 15 strong as
we walk our bikes across the New Haven Green. Large tents are clustered
on one side, and people are stretched out in the sun. This makeshift
commune, called Tent City, has been housing between 40 and 110 homeless
people since the overflow shelter was closed a month ago.

Charlie walks up to a group of men standing by the tents and asks them
what he can do to help. “We need water,” the man says, “and some warm
clothes. It’s been raining for three days straight and there’s a bunch
of us that have gotten cold.” Charlie finds one of the men in charge of
the community and gives him $20 to get water. He confers with the rest
of the bikers and returns, promising to bring blankets and warm clothes
at the end of the day. I notice that Charlie hasn’t introduced himself
to the men, much less given them the stock greeting he used with
virtually everyone else on the tour. Doing practical, hands-on work to
help these people, the community mediator in Charlie has taken over,
submerging his political aspirations. I have not seen him so at ease
since he met with the students on the first day of the tour.

As we pull into the empty parking lot of the campaign headquarters, we
ride in a wide circle before coming to a stop. Standing by our bikes,
we look silently at each other for a few seconds, and then everyone
begins to smile and laugh. We exchange long hugs, in which, if only for
a moment, we forget that Charlie won’t win—or at least realize that
winning was never really the point.

On election day, Delauro took 66% of the vote, Elser 28%, and Pillsbury
5%.

Billy Parish is a junior in Morse College.

 

A Separate Peace
By Erica Franklin

A few weeks ago, I watched from a distance as an eclectic group of New
Haven residents bearing homemade signs and banners gathered on the
courthouse steps to file a war crimes indictment. Their list of alleged
war criminals included George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and
Colin Powell, and they were pressing for prosecution.

A greying, unassuming man clad in stained and faded jeans and an old
denim jacket addressed the crowd through a megaphone: “We are resisting
and showing our protest to the ones in power!” Standing in rows on the
courthouse steps, the participants clutched their anti-war banners in
silence, staring straight ahead solemnly and purposefully. Someone
distributed copies of the indictment, with a list of the country’s most
powerful officials at the top and the Connecticut Peace Coalition of
New Haven’s email address on the bottom. In unison the group read the
entire indictment aloud. Then a few representatives stepped into the
courthouse to present the document to Connecticut’s Attorney General.
“Now we’ll see what they have to say,” someone remarked smugly. There
was applause and a hesitant chorus of “yays.”

“Sorry people,” muttered a passerby stopping to glance up at the
protesters. I frowned at him, but I didn’t wholly disagree. Neither did
I correct a friend who referred to them as “those crazies.” But at the
same time, their stance against attacking Iraq mirrored my own. As the
drumbeat for war had intensified over the past few weeks, I hadn’t been
able to shake the guilty feeling that students like myself had a role
to play. Hasn’t it traditionally been up to students to tilt the scales
to the left, to keep the government’s hawkish tendencies in line? And
if the protest movement was in fact my inherited duty, didn’t I share
some common ground with the protesters on the courthouse steps? A few days later, I took one of the white armbands that symbolized my
disapproval of war on Iraq. I dangled the frayed strip of cloth from a
strap on my backpack, carefully positioning it where my stance against
the war would be visible—but not too visible.

At one of the Coalition’s tri-weekly street-corner vigils, Joan Cavanagh
had taken up her usual post, solemnly distributing copies of the
group’s latest anti-war leaflet as fellow members stood behind her with
a banner. A loose tweed coat dwarfed her slender frame; a red knit
beret partly hid her shoulder-length grey hair. There was something
resolute about her silhouette, as she extended her arm every time
someone walked by. At forty-eight, Cavanagh is no stranger to the
anti-war movement. She made her debut as a protester when she was
active in her high school, then she dropped out of college after one
semester to join a collective that was working against the war. She
didn’t go back to school until she was 29. “I actually have the pride
of saying I was in prison on my 21st birthday,” she told me. “Most of
my friends were pretty cool with it. By that time they weren’t
surprised,” she explained. “I had already been arrested six or seven
times and had done jail time for it. My mother wasn’t too happy; what
can you say?”

About twelve people constitute what Cavanagh termed the “core group,”
those who regularly come to the weekly coalition meetings. There are
about 50 members who attend Coalition events, and the group’s email
list has about 300 names. In four years, they haven’t missed a Sunday
on the corner of Broadway, Park, and Elm silently protesting sanctions,
and now war, on Iraq. In the face of New England winters, hateful
accusations and—perhaps worst of all—passersby who don’t even look up,
what sustains such dogged resistance vigil after vigil, week after
week? “I can’t associate with the US government. I have to actively
dissociate myself,” Cavanagh told me. “Silence is complicity,” she
continued, likening present-day protesters to Germans who resisted Nazi
authority. “If everyone had capitulated at that time, what kind of hope
do we have of the human race?” I winced. That’s the kind of comparison
that leaves a bitter after-taste, that makes eyes narrow at the thought
that someone really had the nerve to say such a thing. It’s the kind of
analysis I’m quick to reject.

One-by-one, Cavanagh handed out leaflets to anybody who would take one.
She had already given out 100 leaflets in half an hour, she told me
proudly. She knows many passersby do in fact read the flyers, she told
me, because she often receives responses to them via email. Others
clearly don’t. A few people walked briskly by without looking up. “No
thanks. Iraq. Hmmm … See you guys later,” said a man walking by. I
wonder if those who refused the leaflet were wary of what didn’t come
from The New York Times, too wedded to the mainstream to ponder the
possibility of their own indoctrination. Maybe like me, they’ve learned
to parrot the opinions of those with the highest credentials and to
second-guess the chorus from the margins that seems to culminate in a
simple refrain: If The Government is behind it, it’s corrupt, no
questions asked.

But my faith in the system is instinctive, not intellectual.
Rationally, I realize that those cloth banners are about individual
issues more than subversion for its own sake; I believed one of the
coalition’s members, when he vouched that he doesn’t “pick a side ahead
of time,” and I respected his and fellow protesters’ willingness to
challenge what they read. But my fear of being a dissenter must die
hard, for I secretly hoped no one I knew had seen me standing beside
Cavanagh, holding a piece of the anti-war banner.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and 14 people had shown up to protest on the
corner of Broadway, Park and Elm. Cavanagh stood a few feet away,
distributing flyers. Just across the street, a man dressed in an
American flag costume and fiercely waving an enormous flag danced
across his strip of sidewalk shouting against the cacophony of honking
cars. “Saddam Hussein! He is a poacher! Let’s kill him now!” he cried,
addressing the anti-war protesters. “And you support him! USA!” The
anti-war protesters glanced up at him every once in a while, but didn’t
budge.

“It’s a matter of increasing numbers,” Joan said to me. “As the numbers
increase, the impact increases.” So the government really notices?
“They hear it,” she said. “They know it’s out there.” When it comes to
protesting, numbers make a dual statement, directed both at the
government and at the people. “I feel there’s a lot of people [who]
unfortunately need reassurance that they’re not the only ones who are
against what George Bush is planning,” said a Coalition member named
Paula, a freelance writer and poet. She hopes to provide that
reassurance, she explained, by “standing out in the street corner with
the signs and slogans they have in their hearts but they’re not ready
to show.” A lot of people thank her for what she’s doing, she told me.
“I say, ‘why don’t you join?’ They say, ‘well I’m glad you’re doing
it.’” I shook my head in disapproval, at the same time fully
recognizing that she’d described me to a t. I resolved to change.

There’s something exhilarating about crowds, especially when they number
in the hundreds of thousands like the one in Washington, dc, a few
weeks after my initial encounter with the Coalition. “There’s no power
like the power o’ th’ people ‘cause the power o’ th’ people don’t stop,
say what?” I was jumping up and down as I shouted with the crowd. “This
is what democracy looks like! That is what hypocrisy looks like!” we
cried gleefully, pointing from ourselves to the White House beside us.
It was a celebration of the First Amendment. As far as you looked, all
you could see were protesters and their signs. For a few hours, I
believed we were a force to be reckoned with; I believed in “the power
o’ th’ people” and “what democracy looks like.” We were living it.
Maybe that’s how the coalition members felt when they delivered the
indictment to the State Attorney General and sat back to wait for the
trial to begin. I wondered how I’d once mocked the cardboard signs of
the Connecticut Peace Coalition and marveled that it had taken me so
long to truly comprehend the power and the imperative of resistance.
“The people! United! Will never be defeated!” we shouted rhythmically,
and I believed it. It was my job to put that truth into action. As the
numbers increase, the impact increases. And silence is complicity.

In the middle of the day, swept up in the anti-war fervor, I removed my
white armband from its inconspicuous position on my backpack and asked
a friend to tie it around my arm.

But the magic was fleeting, and shortly after my return, the torn piece
of cloth was relegated to my desk drawer with a promise to retie it
that I have yet to fulfill. In fact, the protest at the capitol already
feels like a distant memory. A Yale student and Coalition member I
befriended on the bus to dc asked me afterward if it I would attend
more large-scale protests like it. I didn’t have to pause much to
answer in the affirmative, and I haven’t changed my mind. I guess I
have no trouble protesting when thousands of people around me are doing
it too.

Yesterday, I attended one of the Coalition’s street-corner vigils for
what might have been the last time. That day’s banner read “No us
Military in Iraq.” I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. And I don’t
think they’re a bunch of “crazies.” I respect their conviction of their
own accountability in us foreign policy, their courage in challenging
the mainstream, and their determination to display their resistance to
the people and the government person by person, week after week. I
considered volunteering to spend a few minutes holding up a corner of
their worn, cloth banner. But after hanging around for a few minutes, I
decided against it and left.

 

Erica Franklin is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.