There was a fascinating semi-prospective collision between what John Palfrey calls the "classical" and "jazz" styles of doing politics in Dan Cantor's "Why Parties Still Matter" workshop this morning. Cantor is the director of New York's Working Families Party, one of the few successful third parties in American politics. It's currently a one-state phenomenon, thanks to NY's longstanding fusion law that allows parties to cross-endorse candidates of other parties (though that may begin to change as the party is already active in Connecticut and is hoping to pass ballot measures legalizing fusion in more states in 2006.)

I won't go into the details here of why fusion allows a third party to play a sustainable and powerful role; suffice it to say that the six-year-old WFP, which is a coalition of progressive unions, community organizations and individual members organized into local chapters, just won its biggest victory with the passage of a $2 increase in NY's minimum wage, which took place when the Republican-run state senate overturned the Republican governor's veto of said legislation.

(Stats: the party has 25,000 enrolled registrants, 5,000 dues-paying chapter members, a 45,000 person email list and a $2.5m annual budget. It currently pulls about 150,000 to 170,000 votes in NY elections, about 2% of the total, making them the third-largest third-party in the state, after the Conservatives and the Independence Party. Its state executive board offers representation on a hybrid basis--some seats are based on the size of chapters and their dues-paying members, most are delegated to membership organizations like unions based on how big they are and how much money they pay in dues.)

What was so interesting about the discussion was how grounded Cantor is in the dynamics of building and exercising real power, rooted in being able to mobilize WFP members and supporters and wield a ballot line along with all the other tools available to political organizers--and how he is searching for ways to meld that with the energy and potential of online community. Here's a rough summary of what he had to say and some of the discussion that followed:

Cantor: Why are parties valuable? Because they transmit power. A genuine party, one that is not just devoted to fundraising, gives you a way to act over time, election after election after election. Because a party doesn't fold its tents after election day, the WFP now has the best voter list in NY. Candidates never do that. What does a party get you?

1. Unbelievable access to lawmakers, because there is nothing they are more interested in than in keeping their jobs.

2. It helps you discipline the disparate agendas of varied activists and groups. It's much harder to form than a coalition (think letterhead organizations), but a party is much more durable. Because a party has a line on the ballot and some real power, it's much harder to leave a party than it is to leave a coalition. Dennis Rivera, the powerful leader of NY's 1199 union, can't afford to leave even when he loses an internal vote at a WFP board meeting, because the state has given us a ballot line. Everybody comes to the party's board meetings.

3. The party becomes a home for activists, and its one that is much more diverse than, say, a cocktail party for Democratic party donors. The WFP is 55% people of color. And when you get big burly construction workers from upstate together with feisty ACORN activists from NYC, over time you can build real trust, even when people disagree.

4. Not everyone can devote time to meetings (as Oscar Wilde said, "socialism would take too many evenings), but the party gives ordinary people a way to express their values on election day.

So far, the WFP isn't doing much online to develop this community. One new innovation Cantor was proud of: they make candidates seeking their nomination apply online and their tool automatically produces the ballot petitions and relevant voter lists. A nifty application. And they are about to experiment with requiring candidates seeking their endorsement to attend a three-hour class, organized by county, where an array of constituent and issue groups get to present their concerns and hopefully educate and sensitize candidates to them.

As you can see, the WFP represents a serious challenge to the net-centric-politics school. Most of what they do is face-to-face and highly structured; opaque to the outside world, not transparent.

Why haven't they done more online? We are made nervous by the wildness of the Dean phenomenon, Cantor said, where everyone gets to throw in whatever they want. Also, he cited cultural issues, ranging from unionists who have long been cautious about sharing information openly about their efforts (after all, they have real enemies), and low-income people fearful of losing what power they have to the ether. "How do you engage in this many-to-many conversation and not let it dominate everything?" Cantor asked.

Also, the organizing whizzes who built the WFP are very wary of the new online groups, like Democracy for America. That group is not going to last, Cantor asserted, because it's not based in institutions. "One leg is not enough: you need a role for organizations, a role for individuals organized by neighborhood, and a role for individuals online. And you have to remember that politics happens geographically--people have to be visible to each other."

I have to give Dan a lot of credit for coming to this conference and staking out such a strong position so clearly divergent with most of the people in attendance. Several of us pushed back a bit to get him to see that there were many more things to think about:

-Not all political campaigns need to be so rooted in explicit organization; the successful campaign against Sinclair Broadcasting comes to mind.

-The party's endorsement process ought to be opened up in several ways. For example, my colleague Andrew Rasiej suggested that they develop a listening quotient for candidates to reward the ones who demonstrate that they are really responsive to their constituents, or those who also pledge to raise most of their money in small contributions. And I proposed that they put their interviews of candidates on the web in live video, as a way of including more people in the process.

The good news is that he was listening. If you have more ideas or reactions, post them here. Or write Dan Cantor at dcantor@workingfamiliesparty.org.

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