Winning isn't everything.

• Author: Cobble, Steve

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My political friends often asked me last year, "Why are you helping Kucinich run for President? You know he's not going to win."

My normal response was: "If everyone who agreed with him voted for him, we'd win."

But over the course of four decades of progressive politics, I've also concluded that politics is not always just about success at the polls. And winning is not always getting the most votes. Sometimes, winning in politics is changing the landscape.

As Barry Goldwater unfortunately demonstrated back in 1964, sometimes politics is about changing the behavior of a major party.

Or, as George Wallace unfortunately showed in '64, '68, and '72, and Pat Robertson in 1988, politics is about strengthening a constituency that a major party can then adopt or co-opt.

Sometimes, as George McGovern proved in 1972, politics is about bringing new blood into a stagnant system, training a new cadre of organizers, changing the rules of the game.

And sometimes, as Bobby Kennedy and Jesse Jackson highlighted, politics is about poetry as well as prose, offering a new way of thinking about America, challenging the power structure head-on, giving voice to the voiceless.

All of these campaigns changed American politics, and over time they may have changed the nature of our political parties, making more of an impact in defeat than the victors did while winning.

I've spent many years working on "impossible" campaigns. A generation before the Kucinich campaigns, I was Jesse Jackson's 1988 national delegate coordinator, and later ran the Keep Hope Alive PAC. I also wrote speeches for Jackson, and served as political director for the National Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

In his '88 campaign, Jackson inspired the young, won thirteen states from Alaska to Vermont, down to Georgia and Louisiana. He filled basketball arenas from Columbus, Ohio, to Portland, Oregon, and won in Puerto Rico. Jackson walked the picket lines and settled strikes during campaign stops, marched students directly down to the voter registration offices, stayed in the homes of families without jobs or health care.

There was even a moment, at the end of March in 1988, when Jackson pulled a stunning upset and presented America for the first time with the possibility that an African American candidate might just win the nomination. Those of us who worked on that campaign will never forget his victory in Michigan on March 26--a day that prophesied that Dr. King was right, that America could get better, that someday, if we kept working at it, we could live together in peace and justice.

Despite not winning the nomination, the Jackson '84 and '88 campaigns made a lasting mark. We strengthened the infrastructure of the Democratic Party, over the resistance of the party insiders. The millions of new...