COLUMN LEFT : The Losing Idea Is ‘Moderation’ : A North Coast upset gives this election a thin silver lining.

‘If I’d been a better writer,” Elias Canetti told his diary in 1941, “I’d have stopped the war.” I’ve always liked the spirit of this remark, particularly after elections. A few more columns and maybe the voters would have seen it my way.

Now the pundits are crisscrossing the post-election field of battle, taking stock and shooting the wounded. Leftists are hunting around in the trash for silver linings, which are in short supply this time around. Down went the environmental initiatives, down went Proposition 131, which would have put public funding into elections. How can you beat the corporate dollar, which runs more or less everything, without public campaign funding?

The answer is that you can’t, and if Americans don’t want public campaign financing they’ll end up with corporate fascism, of the soft or hard variety. Even now, corporate power is so settled a part of the landscape that it is unperceived, and therefore virtually unquestioned.

During the budget fight, the Democrats suddenly discovered that it was OK to raise the issue of something called “fairness.” But the Democratic leadership was pretty uneasy about the whole “fairness” craze, since in the end it leads to questions about corporations, and who exactly is filling the campaign chests of those folk on the budget and finance committees?

That’s what helped sink Harvey Gantt in his race against Jesse Helms in North Carolina. He was short-winded when it came to fairness. He didn’t run on an economic populist ticket, which would have helped him jump the race barrier. He was anti-union and skirted the S&L; scandal, which would have been a good stick to beat Helms with. Gantt’s chief backers included state banking interests mired in the S&L; bailout deals.

A forthright radical economic posture did not necessarily spell ruin and, in the case of Vermont, gave a landslide victory to Bernie Sanders, the first socialist to be elected to the House in well over a generation. It didn’t hurt Democrat Paul Wellstone of Minnesota either, a former state chairman of the Jackson campaign, who took Rudy Boschwitz’s Senate seat even though he was outspent 7-1. Wellstone called strongly for universal health care and used the S&L; issue to make broader points about redistribution.

The lesson of both Sanders and Wellstone is that you’ll get somewhere with coherent radical positions if you can also tap a well-motivated movement. Vermont is a thinly populated state to which a lot of radical (including Sanders himself) moved in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Sanders also built up a decent working-class base in Burlington when he was a two-term mayor. Minnesota has long had an active peace movement--the bomb, Vietnam, Nicaragua--which gave Wellstone many of his enthusiastic volunteers.

In California, one thin silver lining to this election was in Mendocino County and northward, in the first congressional district, which brings me back to Canetti and the power of the pen. The incumbent on the North Coast was Doug Bosco, a Democrat running for a fifth term. He had long since lost his allure as a friend of the environment, clasping instead the corporate dollar--offshore oil, timber companies, an S&L; loan--to his bosom.

Bosco’s most pertinacious foe throughout most of his incumbency was Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley Advertiser, a weekly paper with a spirited anti-corporate outlook and politically alert readers. Bosco faced not only a Republican, Frank Riggs, but also a challenge from Darlene Comingore of the Peace and Freedom Party. Ignored by daily papers, Comingore got plenty of ink from the Advertiser, which simultaneously savaged the errant Bosco. She ended up with 31,505 votes, draining enough support from Bosco to give Riggs victory by nearly 2,000 votes.

The North Coast somewhat resembles Vermont--it is thinly populated and with plenty of radicals who’ve moved there over the years. Statewide, the Peace and Freedom Party scored around 2% in its races. Comingore took 15%, partly because of the Anderson Valley paper’s robust anti-corporate stance. Riggs may be no angel--he’s from the real estate business--but he’s better than Bosco on the environment. Both he and the next Democratic challenger will have that third-party threat to court or to worry about.

Rebellion in the backlands. Yes, it’s a silver lining. The way things are going, I think a third party will soon be sparked by the spontaneous combustion of sheer desperation. On Wednesday a Democratic “moderate” (another word they stole from us) was calling for a presidential candidate who “has the gravitas of Nunn, the discipline of Robb, the ability to deliver a values message of Clinton and the stamina and campaigning ability of Gephardt.” In other words, the Identikit equivalent of chloroform.

They’ll never learn, will they?