I certainly started the campaign pretty out of touch with these potential allies and the entire fabric of their rural and small-town life. I tried hard to make an issue of Vietnam and its links to today's foreign policy. Nobody cared. And when my opponent cited the book I had written about the sixties and the antiwar movement, and called me a draft-dodging, drug-taking peacenik, nobody cared about that either. Today's needs simply overwhelm yesterday's concerns. In a similar vein, you don't get hurt for being "soft on defense" if you want to ban landmines or cut $50 billion in unneeded next-generation weapons like Star Wars out of the $270 billion military budget. But you don't get helped, either. Most voters feel they're not qualified to pass judgment on the military budget--half of all discretionary spending--and foreign policy is too far removed from the challenges of daily life.

I made much of the daycare centers, college slots and veterans' hospitals that could have been funded instead of the $80 billion F-22 fighter plane my opponent voted to build in Newt Gingrich's home county, but the local media, so savvy when it comes to local and state budgets, couldn't grapple with a discussion of the plane's military justification. They had never heard of it and referred to it as the F-2 or the B-22 when reporting on my speeches.

Well before election season, progressives should be publicizing to independent voters and the media the local impact of unfair national decisions, particularly in this area of national security, so that when elections roll around our candidates can capitalize on an existing groundswell rather than spend their campaign funds trying to create one. At the low-cost end, local activists for peace and religious groups should be peppering the local papers and talk shows and going door to door with complaints about the local cost of wasting tax dollars on military pork. California Peace Action has moved public opinion and votes in Congress using this strategy. We need to build similar organizations in more districts. At the high-cost end, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities is planning a multimillion-dollar campaign on the military budget that will include buying time for sharp commercials on prime-time TV and radio. Corporate-backed media from ABC to NPR have frozen progressives out of the free news programs and pundit wars, so we have to buy our way into the debate.

It is crucial, though, that the Peace Actions and the Business Leaders work out the plan together, to boost one another's impact. A strength of the progressive movement is that we forge ahead without waiting for anybody else's say-so. But on national budget priorities, we have been so fragmented and have failed so spectacularly that it would be wise to slow down and coordinate if we hope to make this an issue in 2000 and beyond.

Just Do It

It may sound strange, coming from someone who lost badly, but running for Congress convinced me that any race is winnable and that progressives who are fed up with their representation should simply get out there and run. There are many Congressional districts that are "misrepresented" by someone whose party is in the minority simply because an attractive candidate was there, running hard, when scandal or just a grumpy constituency washed away the obvious favorite. And once you're in, the power of incumbency is a beautiful thing. Your official operations and resources make you omnipresent (even before the PAC money rolls in for re-election), voters start to think of you as what a member of Congress should be, and you become very tough to beat. So if you've got the fire in the belly, go for it. The worst that can happen is that you'll meet a lot of wonderful people, and you'll get the chance to speak up for them at the one time every two years that the media are actually listening.

But you won't find me out there with you next time. I went to see the DCCC in December and got the kiss of death: Our seat won't be on the list of targeted races even if Houghton retires. The targets will be seats meeting three criteria: The Republican got less than 55 percent in 1998, Clinton won the district in 1996 and the incumbent voted for impeachment. That rules out our seat, so again we would be badly underfunded, and again I would have to quit my job and run around full time trying to compensate for the lack of television time. My wife and I had to face the reality that neither our bank account nor our time together as a family could take that again.

So today I'll walk our 6-year-old son to school, chatting about important this and that, and then have coffee with my wife so we too can chat about important this and that. And tonight, I'll be home at a decent hour to read books with our son or watch him go modern as he logs on to the Web and navigates his way to www.lego.com. Great days like this were rare during the campaign, when my wife would say, because of the endless phone calls that I would have to make and take when I finally got back from a weeklong campaign swing, "Even when you're here, you're not here." We'll look out for our own little working family for now, and try to chip away at the personal and campaign debt we racked up in the last adventure.

The campaign has left me with one complicating legacy. I became so interested again in the domestic issues I worked on before coming to Washington in 1981, like improving childcare and increasing access to college, that I've decided to leave my arms-control group after pushing our initiatives during this one last Congressional session. I'll be looking for ways to achieve these new goals, but for a while it won't be as an elected official. Of course, it is almost time for redistricting, the time every ten years when they throw all the Congressional seats up in the air and let the game begin again. New York will likely lose two of its upstate seats in 2002, as the nation's population shifts to the South and West, and all the lines will get redrawn. Who knows? Maybe my home county will end up in one of the DCCC's targeted districts. If so, that'll be me on the line, saying, "Sister, can you spare $2,000?"

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