"How to Take Back America"

by M.J. Fine

How hard is it to get people to vote? How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office (Soft Skull) lists many good ways to boost turnout at the polls, but read between the lines and you may be discouraged. Even many of the progressive activists who put the book together admit they haven't practiced what they preach.

Like a lot of well-meaning collective efforts, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office plants plenty of facile and naive rhetoric alongside its genuine good ideas, and introduces a few solutions that may be worse than the problems they attempt to solve.

Thankfully, though, it wasn't written by consensus. Focusing on swing states and places that are vulnerable, 25 authors contributed chapters on grass-roots efforts in their own communities. (A few chapters also address such solidly Democratic states as New York and Washington -- not to mention South Korea -- but swinging Pennsylvania gets no love.)

Poet Piper Anderson writes about New York's No More Youth Jail Beds campaign, which made uneasy allies of prison activists, artists and a councilman with close ties to law enforcement. Anderson, who moved to Brooklyn from North Philly, is clearly passionate about spending money on education instead of incarceration, but she's more fact-minded than some of her co-authors.

November's showdown between Bush and Kerry (and, as some contributors seem loath to get over, Nader) is very much in play, and no one has all the answers. But this discussion can only help.

"How to Take Back America," discussion presented by the Philadelphia Social Forum, with Piper Anderson, Thu., May 27, 7 p.m., free, Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St., 215-735-9600.

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