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<h2>Here Comes Our Local Socialist</h2>
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<p class="pubdate">Published: Nov 4, 2007</p>
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<p><b>S</b>PRING
HILL - If resumes were destiny, Brian Moore, the Spring Hill resident
and Socialist Party candidate for president, would have a leg up on
many, if not most, of the major party candidates.</p>
<p>His experience in social work outstrips Hillary Clinton's. He's run
more organizations than Mitt Romney. His hands-on work in foreign
relations as a member of the Peace Corps gives him more credibility on
international issues than Barack Obama. And his education and private
sector work experience render him equal to Rudy Giuliani on the
management front.</p>
<p>He also retains a quality, at 64, that none of the major party
candidates can touch: the ability to turn on a high-octane fastball.
Forty-five years after he was named most valuable player for a St.
Mary's (Moraga, Calif.) College baseball team that had a catcher who
attracted the attention of Major League scouts, Moore - a robust,
meat-and-potatoes Irishman/first baseman - hit substantially higher
than his weight during the most recent season of the Nature Coast Adult
Baseball League, populated by recent college players.</p>
<p>More on Moore: He's as affable as Mike Huckabee, the cheerful
ex-Baptist pastor, as wonky as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and as
deeply committed to doing what he believes is right as any combination
of Duncan Hunter, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Tom Tancredo and John McCain.</p>
<p>So what's a nice Nature Coast guy like this doing at the top of a
party whose very name scares about 88 percent of American voters right
down to their phalanges? "I know, I know," he says over a breakfast of
scrambled eggs, pancakes and applesauce, in deference to a freshly
installed cap. "Being a Socialist, I always looked at it as a negative,
a nasty word.</p>
<p>"But when I studied it, I got to understand that it wasn't always
bad. Socialism got mixed up with McCarthy and Stalin and the Red Scare.
… Socialism isn't communism." What it is, an aggressively anti-war,
anti-military, high-tax, equalize-the-wealth, it-takes-a-village
system, appeals to the kid inside Moore who grew up over the hills from
Berkeley, Calif., close enough to be influenced by the impassioned
rants of "all those troublemakers" - protest leaders Jack Weinberg,
Mario Savio, Stokely Carmichael and others.</p>
<p>At the same time, having emerged from high school in Sacramento as a
three-sport star, captain of the football team and student body
president, Moore completed his freshman year at St. Mary's as the
ultimate establishment figure (he dreamed of a Major League Baseball
career) thinking, "Is this all there is? I wanted something more out of
my college experience."</p>
<p>The second-oldest in a working-class Irish Catholic family of seven,
Moore was drawn to a deeper understanding of his faith and duty. He
found it at the Franciscan Theological Seminary, Mission San Miguel, in
Santa Barbara. Moore confesses, "I emerged as a troublemaker."</p>
<h2 class="subhead">Stratospheric Odds Against Winning</h2>
<p>The rest has been a 40-year journey in search of social justice,
equality and the alleviation of suffering, including two campaigns for
the District 5 congressional seat that includes most of Pasco and
frequent troops-home-now roadside protests around the county, all of it
bringing him to this moment in the penumbra of the national spotlight.</p>
<p>Certainly, he appreciates the steepness of his proposed climb. </p>
<p>"I won't win," Moore says, "well, unless the system breaks down
because there's a major war or a plague and people decide to turn to
something they haven't tried before." </p>
<p>So, barring an international catastrophe, what's in it for Brian
Moore, wed for the first time in 2003, and the recently adoptive father
of a 10-year-old?</p>
<p>Never underestimate a troublemaker. </p>
<p>"Someone must say what must be said: I think there's a growing
disillusionment with the two major parties," he says. He decries their
ties to corporate America, scolds their support for "free trade over
fair trade," finds their policies regarding relations with the rest of
the world indecipherable and indistinguishable - which, he says,
largely describes their domestic agendas, too.</p>
<p>In that light, he says, perhaps the message can get through that
Socialists "want to give power to the people, to the citizens. … We
have to embolden people not to feel embarrassed about their socialist
tendencies."</p>
<p>That assumes, of course, that when push comes to shove, Americans
will put aside traditional notions of rugged individualism
characterized by Moore as John Wayne-style cowboy posturing.</p>
<p>But wait. Would we, instead, vote for a candidate who values
"equality and egalitarianism" and would get us there by slashing the
military by half, closing overseas bases, disbanding the nation's
intelligence agencies and intervening only where America doesn't have a
compelling interest (Darfur, for instance); limiting the pay of
corporate executives to some modest multiple of the average employee;
nationalizing health care with the idea of spreading coverage and
limiting "unnecessary" tests, while still allowing physicians and
hospitals to be flogged by the tort bar; and coercing businesses to put
"human rights" and employee concerns ahead of profit and the concerns
of investors?</p>
<p>"Socialism is the only way for the people to regain their footing,"
he says. "It's the only way to have peace, a fair society, fewer social
problems and a better quality of life."</p>
<h2 class="subhead">Equality, Not Profit</h2>
<p>When record numbers of houses go into receivership, pensions are
threatened, whole divisions of jobs go overseas and oil continues to
rule, pushing the anxiety quotient into the red, capitalism is doomed,
he says. No more of this "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps"
business.</p>
<p> "We need a more human system based on equality," he says, "not
based on profit." While author/philosopher Ayn Rand spins in her grave,
Moore wonders earnestly, "Does that make me un-American?"</p>
<p>Not at all. Despite its tender age, the United States is, at 231,
nonetheless sufficiently mature to weather having its warts enumerated
and detailed. But its inherent greatness - its ability to offer
opportunity, security and unprecedented liberty whether times are
dismal, tumultuous or brilliant - is abundant proof that you can be
utterly patriotic and hopelessly wrong at precisely the same time.</p>
<p><b>Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.</b></p>
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