Question: What does a minor party candidate for vice president of the United States do on Election Day?.

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Question: What does a minor party candidate for vice president of the United States do on Election Day?

Answer: She buys some steaks from Knauer’s, rents a few videos and hunkers in for the day at home.

"This is where I live," Socialist Workers Party vice presidential candidate Margaret Trowe said Tuesday morning, the day after she had declared victory for the Socialist Workers Party before an audience of about a dozen at the Austin Public Library the night before.

Trowe and Socialist Workers presidential candidate James Harris didn’t win Tuesday’s election; they didn’t even get the 5 percent required to gain federal funding. The recount in Florida won’t change that. However, that doesn’t matter to Trowe; what matters is getting the word out.

She and Harris visited more than 70 towns and cities during the campaign, and six other countries.

"Given our resources, we carried out a vigorous campaign," Trowe said, explaining that the pair had $100,000 to spend on their campaign for the White House.

"I declared victory because we fulfilled what we promised to do at the beginning of the campaign on June 25," Trowe said, from her seat at the Coffee House on Main Street North. She looks through wire-rim glasses with an intensity that shines through the fatigue of campaigning for four months. "We pledged that we would visit, travel to and be part of the struggle everywhere that workers and farmers are struggling against the brutal effects of the capitalist boom."

Her words have struck a chord with those who are working for $10 an hour or less, who haven’t built up a stock portfolio, who are forced to sell milk or hogs for less than the money than they put into them, who have to work harder and faster on the factory line because the company is trying to make a bigger profit.

"We told the truth," she said, "that the interest of the millionaires and the interests of the working people are irreconcilably in conflict. Their’s is a system that can only survive by trying to crush the spirit of work solidarity around the world."

And, while a larger percentage of populations elsewhere in the world may be more sympathetic to the Socialist Workers’ message, Trowe is convinced that the United States is the place to be.

"This is the belly of the beast, where the most powerful and most vicious capitalist class exists," she said. "When we form a workers and farmer government in the U.S.A., that will be the big domino."

She rattles off examples of how America is run by and for the capitalists: companies that knew they had put defective products on the market but which did nothing until enough people died; a meatpacking plant that no longer uses USDA inspectors but instead uses its own inspectors – with the permission of the government.

"It’s like the fox inspecting the chickens," she said. "They don’t do a good job. They want to keep the line moving, but if you find contamination you have to pull it off the line and that slows it down."

Though the facts would seem to favor capitalism, Trowe has high hopes. She points out that the civil rights movement wasn’t dictated from above, that civil rights didn’t come from President Lyndon B. Johnson.

"They came from black workers and farmers, from the fight against segregation in World War II, against Jim Crowe laws and lynchings," she said, "from the young high school students who wanted to go to good schools and who knew that ‘separate wasn’t equal.’ … Civil rights came from the people when they demanded it."

Question: What does a defeated candidate for vice president do after Election Day?

Answer: If she’s a Socialist Worker member, rest for a couple days and then head to Cuba for a Solidarity and Trade Union Conference. When that’s over, she’ll head back to Austin, maybe back to a job cutting out hearts on the line at Quality Pork Processors, maybe back on the campaign trail. Either way, she plans to keep spreading the word.

"We hope we can start meeting here, and maybe offer some classes on the history of the labor movement in the U.S.A.," she said. "If people are curious, they should learn more. … We don’t promise anything to anyone that joins us except our willingness to go through the struggle together and to be honest."

Anyone who would like more information on the Socialist Workers Party can check it out on the World Wide Web at http://www.themilitant.com, or call the party’s office in St. Paul at (651) 644-6325.