At the time I was doing posters for the Counterinaugural, the Florida freak show was still playing out in the courts and in the streets. Besides, our message didn’t really depend on the results; the message for the Counterinaugural protests was that people need to organize and take action on their own behalf and look among themselves for “leadership” instead of depending on “elected” politicians and the results of an “election” rotten to the core with hypocrisy and corruption, and so mobbed up with corporate cash that its results couldn’t possibly be legitimate no matter who “won”.

Ironically but happily, the scene depicted here came quite close to being what actually happened at one of the feeder-march rallies headed up by a group including the Rev. Al Sharpton. I’d gotten used to having huge historic events right here in the same city, so when several thousand folks gathered just half a block from my house, within sight of my front stoop, at Staunton Square on Capitol Hill, that was some treat. The climax of the whole rally, just before marching past the Supreme Court and on downtown, was a “mass swearing-in” of all the folks present, a mass affirmation that the People are supposed to be the real “leaders”.

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Throughout the campaign, the Repuglicans slang mud, made up outrageous claims based on words pulled from random context (Al Gore saying “I invented the Internet”), and made the most absurd threats they could think of to suppress minority turnout. The Donkeycrats, meanwhile, were busy bullying, belittling and threatening Nader/Green supporters and the rest of the Left for not supporting their craven, gutless asses, and threatening them with guilt for bringing down the bloody boot heel of GOP tyranny on all of us for voting Green (”a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush”).

Finally, as we all know, it came down to the good and saintly Donkeycrats against the mean old nasty Repuglicans in a close one in Florida — as some wags like to say, “close enough to steal”. The mean old nasty Repuglicans were doing things like busing in gangs of college brownshirts — these Brownshirts wore crisp white shirts and nice ties and khaki pants, though — to harass election-office workers and disrupt the recount; the good and saintly Donkeycrats, meanwhile, not wanting to reveal their years of complicity in profiling and other racist Drug War policies that created thousands of young black felons — and, subsequently, thousands of young black non-voters — were reduced to mealy-mouthed lawyerly tap-dancing about hanging chads, pregnant chads, the intent of the voter, and all sorts of other banal “meaning of is” bullshit.

In the middle of all the pissing contests in the media and in the streets in front of the Supreme Court building, there was still the Counter-Inaugural mobilizations to be planned and organized and, of course, the poster to be designed and made street-ready by the middle of December. Considering the behavior of the two major parties throughout the campaign, and especially during the Florida recount circus, the whole theater playing out in front of me started to look less like a political dispute between two election campaigns and more like a gang war, like in a Quentin Tarantino film, like Reservoir Dogs or something. The suspicion, jealousy and paranoia had gotten to be too much, and the two hoods who pulled off the caper were turning on each other.

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Ah, Y2K… a simpler, happier time. Nothing important having to do with computers or networks crashed, failed, collapsed, imploded or fell over. We still didn’t have our flying cars yet, but we were still wired to the teeth on the solidarity high from A16. Of course, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to bitch about not having our flying cars yet, as it was fast approaching time to decide how we were going to organize around the Presidential “Election” circus, and the attendant party conventions. This being DC, we spent a lot of time spotlighting Statehood organizing and the “debates”.

Every Presidential “election” year, the Commission On Presidential Debates, a totally bipartisan outfit, convenes to decide, in an entirely bipartisan fashion, how to prevent anybody other than Republicans and Democrats from appearing in the nationally televised “debates”. This, of course, was also the first year in many that the Democrats were facing any kind of serious challenge from the Left — and by “the Left”, I don’t mean “candy-assed phony ‘Pwogwessives’ who vote Democratic, mail checks to NPR and read Mother Jones while they’re taking a dump”; by that, I mean the goddamned Left, from the outside, in the form of Ralph Nader and the Green Party USA, who actually were close to polling numbers high enough to qualify for Federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next “election” year. Needless to say, most of the Democratic Party’s most vigorous campaigning wasn’t against the GOP, but against the Left — basically, against its own base — for daring to decide they had a choice, and that they didn’t need the Democrats’ permission to take action, and to call the Democratic leadership to account for their abandonment of core values, its failure to defend working people and, basically, being such a worthless, no-account, dive-artist outfit while still attempting to put up a shabby, weak, Liberal/Progressive facade. It was the year the Democratic Party finally revealed what it was really all about by doing everything it could to keep off the ballot and out of the “debates” a party whose platform would’ve been raised proudly by the Democratic Party themselves in, say, the early ’70s.

This poster advertised a series of protests held in downtown DC, at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates, calling out the Democrats for their hypocrisy and cowardice, and calling out the CPD for rigging the rules in favor of rich, well-connected establishment politicians, and for allowing corporate influence in the form of Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship of the telecasts. This was also the year where you couldn’t turn on your TV set without at least once seeing that goddamn’ “Whazzuuuuuuup!” commercial at least ten times. Still, it was silly enough to hold my attention for more than ten seconds, and my friends and I were already using it as a form of ironic, absurdist greeting, so when I let my mind wander a bit and started riffing on the whole Presidential Debate/Whazzuuuuuup idea, it didn’t take long to start asking myself what influence Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship will take. Would they be allowed to hang their logo onstage, like those old quiz shows from the ’50s? Would A-B be allowed final say on the questions…and have us reduced to an hour a night for three nights of Gush and Bore standing there going “Whazzuuuuuuuup?” This, while not the most likely, proved to be the more entertaining vision.

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Well, here we were maybe a year and a half since the big “victory” parade we gave ourselves, and Daddy Bush’s approval numbers were circling the drain two months before the “election”. Not being able to figure out how a bar-code reader worked, right there on TV in front of everybody and their cat, certainly hadn’t helped matters any. So, there was only one thing for Daddy Bush to do, and that’s — you guessed it, gin up another war scare with a pretext so flimsy that I can’t even remember what it was. Get everybody’s patriotic hard-ons working again, and they’ll forget about the economy, and the looming North American Free Trade Agreement… and the fact that their President was such a sheltered preppie that he never even had the chance to see how a bar-code scanner at the frickin’ supermarket works.

A few mornings after our crews had hit the streets with this one, a scattering of them across Capitol Hill started showing up with a note stuck over them addressed to the local GOP contingents — that is, the Hill’s resident population of beer-guzzling interns working for GOP representatives and Senators — from the local Democratic contingent of young beer-guzzlers, apologizing in the most profusely craven and abject manner for the tasteless cartoon being displayed on Capitol Hill, mere weeks before a major Presidential “election”, implying that Daddy Bush was instigating a war scare to rustle up some votes. Oh, p’shaw. A war scare to win an election? Oh, tut-tut, it is to laugh.

Anyway, said young Democratic partisan beer-guzzling youth ended by swearing all up and down that it was the work of a lone nut — admittedly, half true — and not that of the Democratic Party, which goes without saying as even back then, the Democratic Party was one of the most dickless, craven outfits ever to foul the modern American political stage and could never, ever in its wildest dreams, ever summon up the cajones to publicly suggest that a sitting GOP President — a scheming, lying, conniving, former CIA Director, f’cripesake — would actually whip up a phony war threat in order to win an election.

As we were to find out about a year later, President Bill could give us all a clinic in how that kind of behavior is done right.

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