Merle Woo lost to her opponent, New Alliance Party (NAP) candidate Elizabeth Munoz, in the Peace and Freedom Party (P&FP) primary June S. Woo took San Francisco and Alameda Counties. Nevertheless, second-time gubernatorial Munoz’ greater name familiarity helped her statewide, as did the fact that NAP was able to mail campaign lit to the entire P&FP registrant list — financially impossible for Woo.
Also, Socialist Action, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party and other leftists refused, for various sectarian reasons, to back the socialist Woo.
Nonetheless, Woo made an impact, especially in the press, a fact that astonished old-time P&FP campaign workers.
There’s always the next go-round: Meanwhile, people need to learn more about NAP.
They may sound good on first hearing. Their song is one of “empowerment” for all the oppressed. They sing out for an end to racism, for lesbian/gay rights, for housing, health care, the right to abortion … Sweet music. But in an age when sweet music is made into Muzak and used to pitch Pepsi, beware of crooning political hucksters.
You’ll never hear NAP sing socialist songs. Yet here is a group that poaches at socialist watering holes — for issues, pieces of ideas, the progressive electoral constituency — while slandering socialists as irrelevant to American politics!
This is the same “lone alternative” to the two-party system whose strategy in the ’88 presidential elections was to hop aboard Jesse Jackson’s bandwagon if he wound up being the Democratic Party nominee. This, despite the fact that NAP insisted, rightly, that the Democrats will never accede to Black equality!
NAP was also fishing for Jackson votes for their own candidate, Lenora Fulani, in the event Jackson stumbled. Not only votes: NAP solicits money for something called the “Rainbow Lobby” which, when people confuse it with Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, NAP doesn’t mind. The Rainbow Coalition has publicly blasted NAP for duplicity.
NAP is currently cuddling up to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has clout in the Black community and NAP wants some. But Farrakhan is a notorious anti-Semite, homophobe, male supremacist, and bedrock pro-capitalist. So how does NAP square this with their supposed support for women’s, gay, and Jewish equality and workers’ democratic rights? For that matter, how do they reconcile it with support for Black women, Black gays, Black workers?
The NAP package is snake-oil.
What do you expect from a group whose leader, Fred Newman, spent time at the feet of Lyndon LaRouche in 1974 — when the master was already well down the road to Nazism?
LaRouche was, at the time, sending goon squads out to smash the Left; today Newman slanders socialists and tries to steal their support. LaRouche brainwashes his followers; according to ex-insiders, Newman runs NAP as a “sex-therapy” cult.
LaRouche today is an outright fascist. Who knows where NAP will end up?
