The Arianna Sideshow

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"We want to throw light on the things that no one will be talking about in the other conventions--and have a genuine debate, not an infomercial," Huffington says. She and her co-conveners--who include Scott Harshbarger of Common Cause and antipoverty activist Jim Wallis--have whittled their agenda down to three items. One day will be devoted to campaign-finance reform, the next to the growing income gap between rich and poor, and the third to "reforming"--read liberalizing--the nation's drug laws.

If all goes well, organizers hope, this trinity of issues will form the nucleus for a "new politics," re-energizing the half of the electorate now so alienated from the old politics that it no longer bothers to vote. Campaign-finance reform is the thread that ties all other reforms together. "It's no accident that the major parties aren't addressing the income gap and are ignoring the failed war on drugs," says Harshbarger. "The constituencies that are hurt by these issues aren't donating millions of dollars to the political parties. Unless you fix campaign finance, you can't move on to the other issues." Still, it seems a curiously arbitrary trio of concerns--particularly the drug-war component, which scores scarcely a blip in any catalog of the public's disenchantments. Why single out drug laws instead of guns, for example, or the environment, or educational policy, or any of half a dozen issues with greater populist appeal?

One reason--ironically enough, given the convener's hostility to big money in politics--might be cash. A third of the convention's tab will be picked up by organizations funded by George Soros, the international financier whose passion for ending the drug war has made him an all-purpose bogeyman for political establishmentarians everywhere. Other funding will come from foundations and individual donors across a narrow span of the political spectrum, from the center to the center left. "Transcending the old categories of left and right," after all, is a favorite rhetorical trope of liberals who are tired of being dismissed in a political culture that makes "moderation" the pre-eminent virtue. Ideological taxonomists will find the lineup of shadow convention speakers--from Jesse Jackson to Paul Wellstone--eerily predictable and not particularly transcendent. All that's missing is a candlelight vigil for the Scottsboro Boys.

The monochromatic ideology of the shadow conventions has proved to be self-reinforcing as Republicans get skittish about signing on. John McCain will open the gathering in Philadelphia with a call for campaign-finance reform, but--here as elsewhere--not many of the party faithful will follow him. Jack Kemp, originally publicized as keynoter, withdrew from the conventions last week. "Jack just feels this isn't something he's comfortable participating in," says a spokesman. "The more he looked into it, there just didn't seem to be the balance and the genuine debate he'd been hoping for." Kemp's retreat leaves Congressmen Tom Campbell and Chris Shays as the only other two national Republicans participating--though by week's end Shays' representatives said their man was rethinking his appearance.