EDITOR'S NOTE
Rothschild, Matthew
EDITOR'S NOTE Matthew Rothschild Caverns of Clinton On the morning of November 5, I took my youngest son, William, to the polling place with me. We stood in line in the basement of Blessed...
...It felt great...
...I get irritated by strings of letters that don't amount to words...
...Dave Barry?] acquire a web site...
...Other leftwingers had similar experiences...
...And the enthusiasm for Nader here was unlike that for any of the other Presidential candidates...
...It will pay for itself in new subscriptions...
...While presence on the worldwide web might have been optional as recently as six months ago, it no longer is...
...For those of you who dwell in the virtual world, here's our address: www.pro-gressive.org...
...I've just spent more than an hour looking for The Progressive magazine's web site," MBrewster wrote...
...I didn't hesitate for a second...
...In fact, in the section of town where our office is located, Nader actually outpolled Bob Dole...
...visiting with neighbors, until we got to the registration table...
...In addition, our web page lets us flag what's in the latest issue and display our various wares: radio interviews, T-shirts, calendars—the virtual Progressive marketplace...
...Since I couldn't say the same about Clinton—who could?—I felt no compunction about bolting the two-party system...
...I'm glad someone on the national stage said that...
...One district in Madison gave Nader more votes than the entire state of Louisiana...
...And I don't have a crying need for more information in my life, since I'm overwhelmed as it is...
...The odd thing about living in a place like Madison, and hanging around left-wingers all day long, is that I get a distorted view of the nation...
...And MBrewster, I await your list of thirty-five subscribers...
...Some of the left's leading writers, including Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, and Katha Pollitt, exposed the moral vacuous-ness of that position this election year...
...Driving home on election eve, I saw Nader supporters with homemade placards at major intersections...
...But while I'm technologically hidebound, I've come to recognize the virtues of a web page for The Progressive...
...And it allows us to respond instantaneously to events, instead of once a month, which has long been a handicap...
...But back to the caverns of Clin-tonism is surely not the way...
...It was electioneering of the old school, before soundbites, soft money, and the Lippo Group...
...William and I skipped out of the church, confident we'd committed no sin...
...Just to underline this point: I will subscribe to The Progressive, and I will encourage thirty-five friends of mine to subscribe...
...He barely made it to asterisk status...
...I had my differences with Nader this campaign, but I never doubted his integrity or his commitment to peace and social justice...
...It enables us to reach a potential audience of millions of people who have never even heard of us...
...Check us out...
...Credit for our web page goes to Scot Vee Gamble, our longtime Circulation Coordinator, who volunteered to guide us down the path and to take on the task of translating what we do here into the foreign language the web requires...
...You MUST [who is this guy...
...But at least he stuck his neck out and said no to Clinton's sell-outs, no to corporate power, and yes to grassroots democracy...
...It's a great relief to be able to express ourselves promptly instead of having to hold our tongues for thirty days at a time...
...We should demand a recount," she joked...
...Where we go from here is another dilemma...
...I gave the clerk my name, took the paper ballot, and William and I went into the booth...
...I'm not much for the cliquish attitudes of those who use the web a lot...
...if you get on the web...
...We stood in line in the basement of Blessed Sacrament church in Madison (where's the ACLU when you need it...
...Barbara Ehrenreich wrote to say all her friends had voted for Nader, too...
...I got a scolding e-mail message from someone who identified himself as MBrewster something or other...
...Here in Dane County, Nader received more votes than he picked up in some entire states, including Iowa, Arkansas, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Alaska, our veteran political reporter John Nichols wrote in The Capital Times...
...Most of my colleagues, many of my friends, some of my neighbors, and even a few family members voted for Nader...
...Of course, Nader didn't win...
...I grabbed the marker, and cast my vote for Ralph Nader, who was on the ballot here...
...Now we update the web page several times a week with fresh commentaries and stabs at political humor...
...And I'm glad that as an intellectual proposition, the lesser-of-two-evils argument has taken a beating...
...As a horse-and-buggy guy, I'd hoped the internet would just vanish...
...MBrewster went on to make a pledge he might regret...
...There were many such free spirits here in Madison...
Vol. 60 • December 1996 • No. 12
