Thomas MacMillan Photo
Allan Appel Photo
State co-chair Debra Hauser.
After Darnell Goldson wiped the egg off his front porch, he signed up — along with some other New Haveners — to help a new national movement to offer Americans a centrist alternative to Tea Party and MoveOn.org.
Goldson, a New Haven alderman, is one of several local people helping to get the “No Labels” movement off the ground.
Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi need not apply.
The movement — sparked by the top political associate of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s reportedly eyeing an independent presidential bid — has set up state groups led by registered Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. It has held local “meet-ups” around the country; its first national gathering is scheduled to take place in New York City on Dec. 13.
Two of “No Labels’” three Connecticut co-chairs are based in New Haven: East Rock activist Debra Hauser (a Democrat) and Brett D. Hellerman (a Republican), founder and CEO of Church Street-headquartered Wood Creek Capital Management.
Goldson (in top photo) plans to attend the New York gathering. The Democratic officeholder from the West Rock neighborhood started helping the fledgling movement after taking flak for supporting a Republican candidate, Linda McMahon, for U.S. Senate this fall. Someone ripped up his lawn sign and pelted his house with eggs. He concluded that it has become harder for people involved in politics to hold independent views, to think outside rigid ideological lines.
Goldson had already been steering an independent course in office, departing from fellow Democrats on issues like taxes. He found himself disagreeing with his party’s philosophy on education (he supports school vouchers, for instance) and government welfare programs. (“Any conservative black family will tell you that welfare destroyed black neighborhoods and families. I don’t think we should force people to give charity. Charity should come from the heart” and private groups, not taxes.) But he didn’t want to join the Republican Party; he finds the national party “way too right-wing for me.”
He attended No Labels meet-ups in New Haven, at former state representative candidate Debra Hauser’s home; then at the Bridgeport home of former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker (the third of the three state co-chairs); then a regional gathering in New Hampshire.
Goldson was skeptical at first; he thought the movement consisted of “Clinton folks trying to get back in.” He learned otherwise and signed on. The organization’s website lists dozens of founding members from across the country; they run the gamut from a Ms. Foundation official to a scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute to top dogs from the centrist Concord Coalition and Democratic Leadership Council. Definitely some liberals are involved. Definitely some conservatives. And a lot in the middle.
Whether they can coalesce behind a coherent set of policies remains to be seen; that process begins in New York on Dec. 13. For now the founding idea is to spark a “moderate” counterweight to the citizen groups that have come to define the liberal and conservative poles of American political debate.
“We do not want to be a ‘third party.’ We definitely want to be an alternative voice. We want to be a voice like the Tea Party or MoveOn.org. But we want to organize the sensible center,” Debra Hauser said in a conversation Monday. The first goal: Organize a million members by the end of 2011. Discussion of running or cross-endorsing candidates comes later.
Hauser said she first heard about the movement earlier this year from founding organizer Nancy Jacobson; they’d met through Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Hauser was too busy to get involved while running for the Democratic nomination to represent the 96th District state General Assembly seat.
That experience (she lost the primary) primed her for “No Labels,” she said. She recalled policy discussions with her campaign staff in which she felt her ideas were dismissed because they didn’t fit a neat “Democratic” label.
For instance, she wanted to discuss the possibility of slightly raising the sales tax to address what’s now a $3.4 billion (and climbing) state deficit.
“A member of my staff was furious with me,” she said. “I knew it was regressive and blah blah blah. But compared to New York and New Jersey, we have a much lower sales tax. I was bouncing it around with my staff. [They said:] ‘That’ hurts with people.’ I don’t want to hurt poor people. But can we have a dialogue that isn’t, ‘We can’t even consider that because Democrats don’t’” do that?
For Brett Hellerman, the “No Labels” movement holds the promise of resuscitating a political space for a dying species: the moderate Republican, aka New England Republican. Fiscal conservatives who are liberal on social issues.
“There’s definitely a sense that the party has left us rather than us leaving the party,” Hellerman said. “Obviously politics has gotten quite polarized. The extremists on each side are running the debate. It leaves this huge gap in the middle that neither party seems to be able to capitalize on.”
That polarization has prevented government from tackling tough issues like the deficit and foreign policy challenges in new ways, Hellerman argued.
“I don’t think either party has really come up with a new idea for decades,” Hellerman said. For instance, the health care debate centers around insurance without much attention to how to tackle the obesity epidemic, he said. Foreign policy has focused on conflicts a half a world away while ‘the Chinese are ensconced on both sides of the Panama Canal.” and “we have a lot of anti-American governments moving into Latin America.”
Speaking for himself (not for the movement or for his business), he said, he’d like to see new approaches emerge from the No Labels phenomenon. Like a “hemispheric” foreign policy. Or focusing policy on “knowledge economy” industries — “universal broadband instead of resurfacing I‑95 for the 19th time going on the 20th time.”
While organizers are seeking to avoid having their movement associated with potential individual candidacies, speculation already abounds. A Wall Street Journal piece (besides quoting Darnell Goldson) noted the role of Michael Bloomberg operative Kevin Sheekey in bringing together the initial Republican-Democratic pair founding the movement. Independent Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman — currently a pariah in his old Democratic haunts, and perhaps not conservative enough for the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party — is expected to attend the Dec. 13 gathering.
Darnell Goldson, for one, said he has little interest in helping to promote Lieberman’s reelection in 2012. “He’s a war-monger” who has had little time for constituent groups back home, he said.) But he said he’s ready to jump on a Bloomberg presidential bandwagon. He called the New York City mayor “a smart guy who’s not beholden to special interests” and seized on education reform before it became fashionable.
Goldson also said that if he does run for reelection as alderman next year, he’ll remain a Democrat. (If No Labels cross-endorses, the way, say, the Working Familes Party does, he’d be open to running on two lines.)
“I am a Democrat by accident of birth,” Goldson said. “I was born into a town that breeds Democrats. I don’t have anywhere else to go that’s viable at this point.”