The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement.

• Author: Nichols, John

The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement Edited by Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey Westview Press. 400 pages. $18.00.

Americans do not ask much of Democratic candidates for the Presidency, and this electoral reality is not lost on the people who run the party. In fact, top Democrats they were so aware of the low expectations for their party that--with a slight assist from five members of the Supreme Court--they bumbled the Presidency into the lap of George W. Bush.

Al Gore and his handlers felt certain last year that they could feed the American people a junk food diet of vaguely populist rhetoric and compromised policies and still narrowly prevail. As a result, they missed every opportunity to win the sort of commanding victory that is in the offing for any Democrat who convincingly stands for the simple putting-people-first principles that through much of the twentieth century made the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman so dominant.

In the course of three separate interviews with Gore during the 2000 campaign, I asked the Vice President about the anti-globalization protests, the farm crisis in the upper Midwest, the mass outcry over genetically modified foods, and a host of other fundamental issues. Gore refused, at every turn, to go near policy positions that posed any significant threat to Wall Street--even though such stances would have made his candidacy far more attractive to the nearly three million voters who supported Ralph Nader's Green Party challenge and the tens of millions of citizens who simply did not cast ballots.

Constrained in his rhetoric and his platform by the chains of corporate contributors and polling data manipulated by the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, Gore simply would not speak the words that could have ignited his campaign. For all the blame that pundits and pols attempt to place on Nader and his Green hordes, or on Katherine Harris and her minions, that is the fundamental explanation for the loss of a sitting Vice President to a failed Texas oil speculator who was the dim bulb among his father's thousand points of light.

Amazingly, tragically, dangerously, however, some of the people who pleaded with Gore to address progressive issues now attempt apologies for his pathetic campaign. They don't seem to get that Gore didn't get it--and that this is why he lost.

Witness this strange passage from the introduction to the new book The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New...