I recently wrote about a conversation I’d had with a fairly typical Democratic candidate for Congress (O.K. perhaps he was below average) — a former military officer who claims to be for peace, but whose every solution involves war.  I asked him to make commitments on what sort of things he would vote for or against, and he evaded every such question, while maintaining that he held a desire for peace somewhere in his heart.

The suspicion might arise in a reasonable reader that candidates simply don’t make commitments and perhaps shouldn’t.  Every situation is unique.  Candidates can’t know the details of a future bill or the context in which it might be brought to a vote.  They can simply tell you what values they hold dear, what accomplishments grace their resumes, and how utterly worthless their opponents are.  More than that one should not ask.

This suspicion can be set aside in one of two ways.  The first would be a commonsense belief in democracy.  How the hell can you elect people to do what you want done if they refuse to tell you what they’ll do?  If they won’t tell you how they would have voted on past bills, or whether they would cosponsor existing bills, and if they consider looming wars that are constantly in the news to be “too hypothetical,” you can bet they’re hiding something, and you can bet that something stinks.

The other way to set aside the suspicion that candidates won’t make anti-war commitments is to find candidates who do.  I’d like to point out one who is probably at the top of the list.  It’s almost unfair to compare him with one of the worst candidates his party is fielding.  Yet he is almost certainly the best example of a new candidate running for an open seat and making a commitment to peace a central part of his platform.

Norman Solomon’s background involves decades in the peace movement.  He’s studied and written books and produced films about peace and war.  He’s traveled to war zones in an effort to prevent wars.  It shouldn’t be surprising that he would favor peace when he decides to run for office.  Yet there is a widespread and growing notion that those who most favor peace and can best work for peace are members of the military, or retired members of the military.  Electing these warriors for peace almost always leads to bitter disappointment, and yet the notion remains in the back of people’s heads that the best peace makers are the experts on war.  The idea that there might be experts on peace, that there might be value in the expertise that caused certain of those experts to draw the right conclusions about our current wars before they started — this is all off the radar screen of our public discussion.

Norman Solomon, Democratic candidate in California’s Second Congressional District (the north coast), is committed to supporting two bills that have been introduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland.  One of them, HR 780, which has 70 cosponsors, would limit Afghan war funding to paying for troop withdrawal.  The other, HR 4173, which has 27 cosponsors, would create diplomatic talks with Iran and forbid (with narrow exceptions) any unconstitutional attack on Iran not authorized by Congress.

Solomon would not only have voted no on this year’s National Defense Authorization Act and its provision of presidential power to indefinitely imprison, but Solomon publicly opposed it when it was up for debate.

Solomon would defund the current wars and has publicly lobbied Congress to use the power of the purse to defund immoral, illegal wars since the days of the war on Vietnam.

Solomon is committed to the struggle to restore to Congress its constitutional authority to declare and authorize war.

More can be found on Solomon’s website at http://solomonforcongress.com including this:

“Ending Perpetual War

“I favor – and have repeatedly called for – the swift and safe withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“As national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign (along with Congressman John Conyers and Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association), I support significant cuts in unnecessary military spending – with commensurate increases in funding for healthcare, education and other human needs. . . .”

“. . . Real national security involves shifting much of our perpetual military spending to programs that create sustainable jobs, expand education and opportunity, and rebuild our economy and our communities. . . .”

“. . . I am opposed to any more pre-emptive invasions and attacks that cause enormous human suffering while further inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment.  The United States should fully abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. . . .”

“. . . I support robust public investment in economic programs that create living-wage jobs. The government should invest directly in the nation’s infrastructure, and in social services that help stabilize our communities. . . .”

“. . . I strongly support H.R. 870 – the ‘Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act‘ — introduced by Congressman John Conyers, which provides for a federal policy of full employment. With a one-quarter of 1 percent transaction tax on Wall Street, the bill would generate roughly $150 billion per year in revenues, creating millions of new jobs. . . .”

“. . . For decades — as an activist, author and nationally syndicated columnist — I have detailed how big money in politics promotes everything from war and environmental degradation to economic injustice and unfair trade treaties to media conglomeration and corporatization of healthcare. In my largely volunteer-driven campaign for Congress, I have implemented a grassroots approach to fundraising: raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from several thousand (mostly small) donors, while refusing to accept a penny of corporate PAC money.  As a member of Congress, one of my top priorities will be to back legislation and a constitutional amendment aimed at removing money from politics.”

My recommendation to people who don’t have decent candidates in their districts is to organize, educate, mobilize, focus on building pressure in between elections, and support Norman Solomon for Congress.

Full disclosure: I ought to oppose just that, because I have lost Norman as a colleague at RootsAction while he campaigns and will lose him permanently if he is elected.  But what’s best for my daily grind is in conflict with what’s best for the country.

David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio

For the majority of people in the United States — a majority does not vote, a majority believes the government is broken, a majority thinks our public policy is headed in the wrong direction — the fact that we call this place a democracy is apparently outweighed by the fact that our national government almost never does what a majority of us want done. Some of the things we don’t want done include the destruction of the planet’s environment, the mass slaughter of war, the spreading of violence, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny aristocracy while millions at home and billions abroad suffer horrifically for lack of readily available resources.

When the people of Egypt decided earlier this year to rise up and resist their government’s abuses, it would have been helpful for them to have more real allies already in positions of partial power within that government. The same applies to us, should we ever determine that we are not going to take it anymore. Perhaps that moment will come in October: http://october2011.org Perhaps, as momentum builds around the country for real resistance, it will come ahead of schedule this summer. Perhaps it will come a few years down the road.

When such a moment comes, we will have to face violence without employing it. We will have to counter the crimes of war makers and robber barons with the impoliteness of uncompromising refusal to allow their operations to continue. We will have to make sacrifices and steadfastly advance the struggle while resisting innumerable temptations to compromise with the unconscionable. But we will also have to lead the way forward, negotiate, unite, and synthesize.

I’m not suggesting the rather silly critique that we know what we are against but not what we are for. Those questions answer themselves. We are against making war on the world. We are for making friendship with the world. We are against coal, oil, nuclear, and gas. We are for solar, wind, tides, and all renewables. We are against legalized bribery. We are for clean elections, free media time, verified vote counting, and automatic registration. We are against ignorance. We are for investment in education and journalism. We are against secrecy. We are for transparency. We are against corporate health coverage. We are for single payer. We are against plutocracy and corporate power. We are for taxing billionaires, imposing the law equally on all, and providing human rights to all and only humans.

If we make it impossible for the banksters to fund crimes in our name with impunity, we will also need to make it possible for working people to borrow money, diplomats to negotiate alliances and trade agreements, and criminals — including the biggest and most powerful of them — to be given fair trials. It will be helpful to us if we have some friends already in official positions of governance. But who will they be?

The very idea of aligning ourselves with allies in Congress has been given a bad name. And it damn well deserves it. Allies in Congress should align themselves with us, not the other way around. But even when they do so in large numbers, they are consistently out-numbered by their colleagues and by the power of the two parties to which they answer. We don’t seem capable of electing 218 principled House members, much less 60 uncorrupted Senators. And yet, we are better off with some minority in Congress speaking — even if, for now, it is only speaking — for the majority outside of Congress. I would even say we are better off with members in Congress who sometimes represent us and sometimes cave in to corrupting influences, as compared with those who never represent us at all.

Look at the people we idolize as whistleblowers. They are usually people who have been cooperative cogs in a machine of death and destruction, often for many years, who finally decided to expose a particular abuse. We don’t reject their good deeds on the grounds that they aren’t angels. I think Congress members’ actions should be treated the same way. They stand or fall on their own merits, not the personality of the member, much less the imagined holy or hellish nature of the member’s political party.

And yet, goddamn it, wouldn’t it be nice to really have one of us in Congress? Wouldn’t that be useful if the tide began to turn, whether slowly or in an immediate upheaval?

As I write this, Republicans in Ohio are working on eliminating Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s district. They’re not trying to vote him out, but to erase his district from the map so that he has nowhere to run for reelection, at least not in Ohio. Also, as I write this, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, longtime chair of the Progressive Caucus and ally of the peace movement, is announcing her intention not to run for reelection.

Yet a possibility is opening up of replacing Woolsey with someone who clearly has the potential to be even better than Kucinich has been thus far.

No matter how Woolsey’s district is redrawn in California, it will remain a very progressive district. This means that nationally those who pay attention to and work on elections, as well as those who want their children to have a decent world to live in, ought to take some interest in replacing Woolsey with a real progressive leader, not just someone who will vote the right way most of the time, not just someone who will say the right things, not even just someone who will stick their neck out and take the lead on matters that are deemed controversial within the Beltway, but someone who will educate, encourage activism, and organize within the government.

Luckily, that candidate is available and running, and he’s running against one — possibly two — Obama followers. No Republican or independent is going to be elected to Congress from Marin County. The representative is either going to be a robotic Democratic drone who votes as the President instructs, thus inverting and perverting our system of checks and balances. Or the representative is going to be the person that progressives turn to for support from around the nation in the years to come: Norman Solomon.

If you don’t know who Norman is, read his Wikipedia page. Norman is one of the best activists I know, and one of the best book authors, possibly the very best columnist, and undoubtedly one of the easiest colleagues to work with whether we agree on something or not (we’re working together on http://rootsaction.org ). Norman may not agree with everything in this column. But I’m not looking for someone identical to myself to elect to Congress. I think Norman Solomon would make a better Congress member than I would, and than most of us would. I think he is ideally suited for it. I expect him to stay connected to the activist world, to make ideal use of independent and corporate media, and to build a caucus of Congress members that doesn’t just add members to its ranks but actually takes actions that impact our public policy. When I say I expect these things, I don’t mean that I am making these demands of Norman (though I am); I mean that we can safely predict that he will conduct himself in this manner if elected.

That’s always a big if. The forces of mediocrity are always gathering strength against the exceptional. Let’s nip in the bud the notion that California’s Sixth District should be “represented” by a run of the mill hack. We can do that by pumping thousands of small donations from ordinary people all over the country into Solomon’s campaign this week before the totals raised thus far are counted and announced at the end of June. Solomon has already raised over $100,000. If Rahm hadn’t left for Chicago, the national machine to stop Solomon would be in full gear already. But people who stand for nothing are easily intimidated. I’m doing my bit to help scare them off right now. Won’t you? Please give at least the price of a fancy coffee for the sake of having a people’s leader in Washington when we need one: http://www.ActBlue.com/page/Supportathon