"All Together Now" was the first of many ruthlessly factual pre-election essays I've written which have demolished the breathtakingly ignorant talking point that "the (major political) parties are the same."
I had begun following national politics in my teens, with a laser-like focus on social justice and the ways policy and process impact human beings. This focus continued through my 20's and early 30's, when W. Bush ran against Al Gore.
I was acutely aware during the 2000 presidential election of Clinton/Gore's ideological shortcomings on issues of trade, regulation of Wall Street, the Communications Act, and Welfare Reform, but I was also acutely aware (based on Bush's record as governor of Texas) that Gore was worlds better than W on the 90-95% of other policy decisions presidents make and vastly more qualified for office. Through the fall of 2000, I argued repeatedly with supporters of Ralph Nader, most of whom said it "wouldn't really matter" if Bush beat Gore because they were "so similar."
It mattered a great deal, as it turned out. This piece explored in painful detail dozens and dozens of ways in which W reversed Clinton/Gore policy for the worse.
"All Together Now" was posted in the summer of 2003, as Democrats were beginning to think of who should run against Bush in 2004. No candidate had emerged, so I took on the first question for many of getunderground.com's very left-leaning young readers: whether to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate or to "vote ones' conscience" for a third party candidate. The essay is less accessible than features I would write in the future--thousands of words in length, over-reliant on laundry list formatting, chock-full of long paragraphs--but it definitively proved that the only way to vote one's conscience was (and still is) to vote Democratic.
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