The mid-term senatorial election is fast approaching, and the field of candidates is larger than you may realize. In the Senate race, Republican Mike McGavick's challenge to Democrat incumbent Maria Cantwell is well known. But the November election will find Green Party candidate Aaron Dixon vying for the seat.
The 57-year-old Dixon is a father of six with a well-established history of community activism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dixon was a crucial organizing member of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. During his time with the BPP he advocated for the civil liberties of black students at Rainier Beach High School, started the Free Breakfast for School Children program and helped open a free legal clinic and a community medical clinic, which evolved into the Carolyn Downs Clinic located off East Yesler Way.
Today Dixon juggles the responsibilities of a statewide political campaign with his Seattle nonprofit organization, Central House, which he founded in 2002 to provide transitional housing for homeless young adults as well as a base for a youth leadership project that currently operates in four Seattle high schools.
In the following interview, Dixon discusses his reasons for accepting the Green Party's offer to run as their candidate, his experience working with the state Green Party's fledgling infrastructure, and his reception outside of Seattle.
Why did you decide to run?
I was approached by the Green Party in December or early January. I had never had any inclination to run for political office. I always said if I was asked I'd always say no.
Did you have specific reasons for not wanting to run?
I don't like being in the public eye. I'm really a private person. I've never had too much faith in politicians. It was something I never really wanted to be.
Were you surprised to be approached?
Yeah, I was surprised, but I had been thinking, before they came to visit me, how important it is that we started working towards putting really progressive, or even revolutionary, people into political office. I had been in Brazil and Venezuela, and I was very aware of the political changes taking place in South America. It's a worldwide movement where people are looking out of their traditional political rings to elect really progressive people to office.
I know a lot of people were really fed up with Republicans and Democrats alike, really fed up with the current group of politicians, and past politicians, that we've had.
You called the Green Party's network a 'shell'? How do you feel about the infrastructure now that you've been campaigning for several months?
They told me, when they talked to me, that their statewide apparatus was not that well intact, but we have a lot of volunteers that have signed up to be on my campaign. We have a lot of young people, a lot of old people, a lot of people of color. We have quite an apparatus here in Seattle. Also, we have organized campaign committees in Bellingham, Tacoma, Spokane and Olympia.
Also, on several college campuses through- out the state we have Aaron Dixon for U.S. Senate committees: Western Washington, University of Washington, Evergreen, Seattle Central, Shoreline Community College and we're looking to develop committees at Washington State and Gonzaga.
What's your reception been like in Spokane?
I haven't really met people in Spokane yet, but let me tell you about going to Enumclaw. I went to the country fair. My campaign manager and I were looking for a place to park. There was a big, burly white guy with sunglasses on that was trying to get people to park in his yard for $3. So, we pulled in and I handed him a brochure and told him I was running for U.S. Senate. We just started talking about my campaign and a lot of things that are happening in the country.
We talked for about 20 minutes, and after we finished he said, 'You know what? I'm going to vote for you, but my wife's a Republican, but she doesn't know what I do when I go into the voting booth.'
We went into the county fair and we got some really good response, and it was quite surprising. When we came back to get our car, this guy's wife was sitting out in the driveway and she said, 'I want you to give me one of those yard signs because my husband tells me you're a good man, and we're going to vote for you.'
During the recently held Connecticut Democratic primary, Senator Joe Lieberman lost to anti-war challenger Ned Lamont, and people are drawing parallels to the Washington Senate race. Is this a stretch?
No, it's not a stretch at all because the war in Iraq is one of the key issues that American people are concerned about. Sixty-seven percent of American people say that they want those troops home. Seventy-two to 75 percent of American troops that are over there say that we should be out of Iraq. The fact that our politicians aren't listening to us and they're continually trying to push this war forward and maintain that we need to stay there, and at the same time trying to create threats and the threat of attacking Iran - which many of our senators including Maria Cantwell and Lieberman have supported - is a flash point.
Now, I'm not a millionaire like Lamont, and, unfortunately, that speaks to what is really wrong with our political system. Both the people that I'm running against, Cantwell and McGavick, are millionaires and they're both pro-war.
How is your fundraising going?
It's a grassroots fundraising effort, but it's going good. We could use more money. If we had more money we would be able to get our message out even broader. We don't have that, but we're doing extremely well with what we have, and we're doing very well with raising money when we need it.
What is your most effective tool when faced with lack of funds?
One of the tools that we use for really reaching out to the people is the house party and promoting the concept of people hosting a party. They invite their friends and relatives and neighbors and invite me over and have a meeting and an opportunity to talk with people face to face. Towards the end we do a fundraising pitch and ask for contributions.
You recently stated that a win for Mike McGavick would not make you unhappy. Would you expand on that statement?
I think that, because we only have a two-party system, a lot of politicians take their constituents for granted. One of my primary reasons for running is to put that in people's minds that we must have a multi-party system.
Most of the modern, industrialized countries in the world have a multi-party system. They are able to elect different types of candidates, different types of people, so that when they president gets elected he has to build coalitions with a lot of different groups and organizations. This adds more diversity, brings in new ideas, fresh ideas.
We've got Democrats and Republicans, and for the last 10 years their ideas have been very similar. As a matter of fact, we've seen the Republican party move more to the right and we've seen the Democratic party move toward that direction as well.
The Republican party, they have an ideology that's aggressive and in your face. The Democratic party, their difference is they're not aggressive, but they're still perpetuating the global machine. They do it more quietly, more undercover. It was Bill Clinton that pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement through. NAFTA has had an extreme impact on the poor countries in Central and South America. That is why we have so many immigrants coming into this country.
If we are going to save this world, if we are going to save this country, we're going to have to get out of that mentality of being so dedicated to the ideology of these two parties who really resemble a one-party system.
Cantwell took a stand against Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) to help stop oil drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, but McGavick is for drilling ANWR. That seems like a big difference.
That is a misnomer about ANWR. They're still moving forward with drilling. People need to do more research and realize that Cantwell didn't really stop ANWR.
The other thing is that if she's so pro-environment, why is she so much in support of a war that has created tremendous ecological destruction in Iraq? By our troops using depleted uranium, that country is totally environmentally destroyed. You have babies that are being born in Iraq that are badly deformed because of the depleted uranium. It's just unconscionable.
It's contradictory to say you're for the environment and you're a proponent of this war. I don't think that Cantwell has a strong enough stand on the environment.
To me, the environment is the number one issue because if there's no world here, if we cannot live and breathe and be halfway healthy, nothing else matters. I do not see where Democrats in Washington have stood up strong enough to George Bush to let him not sign the Kyoto Agreement and let him overturn environmental regulations.
Campaigns are as much about images as ideas. Recently some issues have come up about your personal life: criminal charges, primarily traffic related, and subsequent unpaid fines; you've never voted in King County; you're not legally married to your wife; and you owe unpaid child support. Can you address them?
I have never been behind in my child support. What that came from is my daughter's mother and I were paying for childcare, and I became unemployed. I wasn't able to continue paying for childcare. So she attached them to my [amount owed]. It increased my child support payments, which I made, but on the record it looked like I was in arrears.
As for not being legally married?
I've been trying to get a divorce from my former wife for some time, and she has not been cooperative. We split up about 10 years ago, but I did not want to get a divorce because I was very sensitive to my kids. I raised my two daughters as a single parent, and it was very difficult for them that we weren't together. The divorce is going through now, and it will happen in October.
About the criminal charges and fines?
I have a lot of debts in tickets, and a lot of working people have the same dilemma. If you are a working person and you get a ticket, you have a choice of paying that ticket or buying some bread. What are you going to do? You're going to buy some bread.
Then the tickets get to a certain amount and they suspend your license, and if you drive, you get another ticket and it keeps going up. So you're being penalized for being poor, for not having the money to pay for those tickets.
They happened at a time when I was raising my kids by myself. I had to make a choice between paying these tickets off or trying to provide for my kids and being able to keep a roof over my head. I have since taken care of all those tickets that kept me from having a license.
That's one of the big things that's wrong with our society and our culture. We want to penalize people instead of trying to create some type of holistic system where we can work with them and solve the problem. I still have a large amount of parking tickets, [but] I'm working on it.
How do you expect people to vote for you and engage in the political system when you have not done the same?
Since that came out, I've been stopped by a lot of people that said, 'You know what? I've never voted either.' Our politicians often resemble cookie cutouts. They're all the same. Why would a person want to vote?
I was in the Black Panther Party for 10 years. I was a revolutionary for 10 years, and because of my political awareness and my political experiences [including voting for congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in her 1972 presidential bid as well as other BPP-supported candidates], I understand the political arena.
As a matter of fact, when Gore ran against Bush [in 2000], I voted for Gore. I felt that this country could not take four years of George Bush, but since I had not voted in such a very long time, I did not realize that I had to register beforehand. Whether my vote went through or not, I made that effort.
We need people who really want to do some serious change and bring some vastly different techniques and ideas and concepts into the political arena: people that are not bought by big business but are really dedicated to truly bringing some changes and services to the community.
Money buys access to major media. What is your solution to the money problem in politics?
There really needs to be a strong finance reform for political campaigns. They need to make it so that anybody who wants to run a serious campaign has access to an equal amount of money.
How has your Black Panther Party history has affected your image with voters across the state?
I was a little worried about my Black Panther past, particularly with people outside of this city. I think that it actually has been more of a positive than a negative. The Black Panther Party has been responsible for the development and implementation of a lot of important social programs that are still around today. People see this and they understand it. Being involved in this campaign has given me an opportunity to talk about that.
What do you feel are the most important issues facing Washington residents?
Universal health care is something I would push to come to fruition because the average American doesn't have health care. Our slogan is 'Out of wars into our communities.' We need to end our addictions to war and bring those resources into our communities so that we can rebuild our communities and rebuild our schools.
I would fight to end the war on drugs because it has cost billions of dollars and it has imprisoned a lot of people when their only crime was being addicted to drugs.
I would fight to end the Patriot Act, to end NAFTA and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
We're a warring society. We're a warring culture. Every time we want to do something about a problem in our society, we have to say it's a war: war on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty, war on this, war on that. Why does it have to be a war? Why can't we just look at it in terms of a problem we have to solve?[[In-content Ad]]
