Ten races to watch: '98 elections - progressive, pro-labor, and environmentalist candidates

Progressive, The, Nov, 1998 by John Nichols

Running in a racially mixed, working class district, Mahoney made a virtue of his blue-collar roots, declaring on the front of his literature: "Every day, Tim Mahoney laces up his boots, packs his lunch, and puts in a solid day's work. As our Representative, he'll do the same for us." With strong support from Progressive Minnesota--the local New Party chapter--as well as a long list of unions, he won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party primary in September and is now poised to take the seat on November 3.

Like union printer Mark Pocan, who is expected to win an assembly seat in Madison, Wisconsin, and a handful of other candidates around the country, Mahoney has created a model for the labor movement's "2,000 in 2000" strategy by building a multiracial coalition of supporters, emphasizing living wage issues, and refusing to toe the centrist line of the Democratic Party establishment.

7. ILLINOIS: LANE EVANS

Peace PAC, the group that monitors Congressional opposition to Pentagon excesses, gives Lane Evans a 100 percent rating year after year. The same goes for the anti-hunger group Bread for the World, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the League of Conservation Voters, the ACLU, and just about every other group with which a conscientious legislator would want to be identified.

Yet Evans is no big-city liberal.

Since 1982, Evans has represented rural northwest Illinois, a region of farms and farm implement producers that elected Republicans to Congress before he came along and still frequently backs GOP candidates in statewide races. Evans faced tight reelection contests in 1994 and 1996--when a former TV anchorman named Mark Baker held him to just 52 percent of the vote.

This year, the anchorman is back. With lots of national GOP money, Baker is running a campaign that accuses Evans of having "a far-left social agenda and tax-and-spend record." And he is making none-too-subtle efforts to hang Bill Clinton's moral lapses around Evans's neck in a district where Sunday morning still means going to church.

(U.S. Representative Mel Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, faces a similar assault in Jesse Helms country. Watt and Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, are some of the last Southern progressives left in Congress.)

Evans faces what the Chicago Tribune says is the toughest fight of his career. If he loses, Congress will be a different place. It would miss one of the few serious questioners of the U.S. military.

As a member of the House National Security (formerly the Armed Services) Committee and the ranking Democrat on the Veterans' Affairs Committee for ten years, this former Marine spearheaded the crusade to win Agent Orange compensation for his fellow Vietnam-era veterans. He led the battle to expand services for women veterans. He fought to make the defense and health care establishments take post-traumatic stress disorder seriously. He took up the cause of homeless veterans when few others would, and he was one of the first members of Congress to raise the issue of health problems experienced by Gulf War veterans.