Reclaim the American Dream

WASHINGTON – Do you sometimes feel as if our democracy is coming apart at the seams? Gridlock, hate speech, dark money, negative ads, political parties at each others throats instead of working together for our common good? It’s almost enough to make you give up on American democracy. But please,don’t go there.  Because I know […]

(Editort’s  Note: Five months ago, on June 4, this was our warning – and now Trump is doing just what predicted, using the mail vote to try to dispute and overturn the results of the election.)  Washington – The ominous threat behind Donald Trump’s mindless, factless fear-mongering about mail voting is that his real aim […]

Washington – No state has done more for voter rights and ballot access this year than Virginia, and women were the key drivers of those reforms. Go back half a dozen years and Virginia’s state government looked Deep South and Deep Red. The Virginia legislature was run by Republicans, mastered and marshaled by men. Democrats […]

Washington – Okay, America, how do we vote in 2020 with coronavirus facing us? Wisconsin chose to bull ahead – stick with its April 7 date and in-person voting. Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposal the state put off the primary until June or at least make it  all vote-by-mail. But Republican leaders in the legislature […]

  by Hedrick Smith What struck me when I began reporting on grassroots citizen reform movements in states as varied as Florida, Connecticut, and South Dakota was how creative and ingenious political amateurs were in generating ideas for reform and how gutsy and resourceful they were in mobilizing millions of voters to adopt state-level reforms […]

by Hedrick Smith It’s been a couple of weeks since our film, THE DEMOCRACY REBELLION, began airing on PBS stations across the country, and the response to these stories of grassroots political reforms has been fantastic! “Your brilliant program is the only bright spot in my day. I actually watched it on my cellphone in […]

Washington – Except for the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, our national media is so mesmerized and monopolized by the political war zone in Washington that you’d think nothing important ever happens in the rest of the country (except perhaps natural disasters). Unfortunately, that means the major media have largely missed one of the […]

Washington – Back in the 1960s, when I was covering Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and other civil rights activists for The New York Times, I heard die-hard segregationists try to bait him as an “outside agitator” stirring up trouble. “You’re comin’ into our town,” they would bellow, meaning Birmingham or Albany, Georgia or […]

Washington – The 2018 elections may be a mixed bag for Democrats and Republicans but this has been a boom year for grass roots political reformers, whose jackpot was the powerful WethePeople backlash in seven states against partisan gerrymandering. Citizen rebellions in five states – Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Colorado and Utah – forced referendums and […]