Hayden Group Renamed, Gets Broader Goals

Tom Hayden gave his fading political organization a new name and new direction Tuesday in his continuing struggle to rekindle liberal political passions in the baby-boomer generation.

His 10-year-old Campaign for Economic Democracy will henceforth be known as Campaign California.

And, he said, its recent emphasis on rent control and city hall politics in college communities will be broadened to include house-by-house canvassing and organizing in four urban centers--Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Sacramento.

The immediate goal of the new organization is to help push the toxic-discharge initiative, Proposition 65, on the November ballot.

But Hayden, the Santa Monica Democratic assemblyman and a former leader in the Vietnam War protest movement, is never far from his dream that the liberal activist spirit of the 1960s will emerge again to shape U.S. politics, with him in the position to be a leader.

He said he wants his new group to grow and be a credible force in the 1988 California Democratic presidential primary.

The changes formally announced Tuesday have been evolving in the Hayden camp for a year as his old organization gradually lost influence and a sense of purpose. At a breakfast session in Los Angeles and later, at a Sacramento press conference, he described the guiding theme for the new organization:

“We differ from the prevailing Republican view that unbridled entrepreneurialism blessed by God is the answer to all of our problems. . . .

“Among our peers in our generation there is a crying need for entrepreneurialism to be linked to a concern for the environment, for protection of employee rights, for advancement of civil rights. . . . We don’t think people want to choose between success and conscience.”

Joining Hayden were five fellow activists who share his political agenda--the Rev. James M. Lawson, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Los Angeles chapter, movie producer Paula Weinstein of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, Democratic Party activist David Stein, Santa Monica-Malibu school board member and renter rights activist Connie Jenkins and Michael Baratz, collective bargaining director for the Service Employees International Union.

Many aspects of the new organization will be unchanged from its predecessor, which was created out of Hayden’s unsuccessful 1974 race for the U.S. Senate. It will still be financed partly from small individual contributions and partly from the proceeds of the physical fitness business of Hayden’s wife, actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda. The fund-raising goal for the current year is $800,000 from rank-and-file supporters and an equal amount from Fonda.

Still Staunchly Liberal

The new group also remains staunchly liberal and built around the generation of voters now age 40 and under, those whose politics were molded in the activist heydays of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Weinstein, former motion pictures director for United Artists, said the Campaign California group would be a magnet for members of this generation “who have reached a point of success in their careers and who are looking to be politically active again. . . . We have to re-enter the political process and take back the idea that we can affect change.”

But Hayden was anxious to underscore the differences between the new organization and the old one. Chiefly, this is abandonment of the economic democracy slogan along with its founding, and presently unfashionable, goal of redistributing wealth and power through citizen control of corporations.

“One of the things I have learned is that economic democracy as a term was too complicated for the average voter and it implied a belief that there was a public solution for every private ill,” said Hayden.

He now prefers to talk in terms of cooperation between government and business.

“In my view government has to be more responsive and the private sector more responsible and both have to be somehow brought together in a partnership to find solutions to our problems.”

Solutions Hard to Define

Like others who are searching for what the Democratic Party should stand for, Hayden and members of his group find it easier to describe the problem facing the party than to define a solution.

For the time being, Campaign California has settled on the goal of securing passage of the toxics initiative, a measure with broad support among Democrats of all stripes as well as environmentalists. Hayden said his organization would knock on 300,000 doors and talk to 500,000 families on behalf of the initiative.

The proposition, which was placed on the ballot through a voter petition drive, would increase penalties for toxic polluters and require that citizens be warned of the presence of dangerous chemicals in drinking water.