"'Bushwomen' is about the people, and this book is about policy," Flanders told me recently. "I think the Bush administration has overhauled the strategy and tactics of its movement. They have the same goals as the early backlashers of the '70s and early '80s, but back then people who opposed women's liberation said as much. These people accomplish their ends by different means. People have talked about this being government by decree and regulation rather than legislation, and I think that's what we've seen, particularly in the area of women's rights.

"I mean, the Department of Health and Human Services was handed over to religious radicals who overhauled the Web pages containing information about condoms, breast cancer and abortion. Now the CDC has to inform all their clients that condoms don't work. Worse, administration-backed policies would give pharmacists the right to deny legal birth control to women at will. All this stuff is beneath the level of the media radar. They're doing it behind closed doors."

How American women became suckered by the Bush administration to such a significant extent is anybody's guess. Flanders thinks women have been playing defense so long that they forgot they had an offense.

"For one thing, the women's movement has spent the last 20 years defending the gains of the preceding tenures," she says. "They've been on defense for an awful long time; it's been very hard to get beyond the immediate priority of Roe vs. Wade. Part of the purpose of 'The W Effect' is to say that there are gender aspects to every kind of policy, that understanding whether gender politics works in this country is critical to understanding whether politics works. Women are not some kind of minority special-interest group; they are the canaries in our coal mine. We will not have our whole understanding of gender politics shrunken down to one Supreme Court decision."

Whether a Kerry administration could have turned this ship around is a question that many, including Flanders, would have loved to have answered. But it was exceedingly hard to root for the Kerry camp when its most visible female, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was more or less invisible.

"I'm very sorry she had as low a profile in the campaign as she had," Flanders says. "When she did have her head above the parapet, she was hacked for weeks on end by the media. I think Teresa Heinz Kerry is a powerful female role model, somebody who sees the U.S. as part of the world. She doesn't believe this guff about freed women in Afghanistan and Iraq; she knows that's a load of bull."

"The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy"
By Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray
Foreword by Ralph Nader
240 pages
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Order from Powells.com

Finally, we come to the guy you love to hate, Ralph Nader, and his merry band of bullshit-callers at CitizenWorks. I'm having a little fun -- well, a very little fun -- tossing Nader back into the faces of all those Democrats who begged him like peasants to forgo running for president in 2004. As I argued in a previous column, anybody who wants to run for president, for whatever reason, should be able to do so without having to shoulder the short-sighted strategies of his opponents as if they were his own. No one has yet explained to me why Nader should stop championing corporate reform and attacking the sellouts in the Democratic Party, just so those same hacks can mismanage their way out of another election win. Now that the donkeys have lost to the weakest incumbent in American history, Ralph is back to looking like the progressive visionary we always liked having around before we decided to criminalize him for sticking up for his beliefs. All of them.

"The Democrats aren't truly looking at themselves in the mirror," Nader told me recently in an interview. "They're basically saying that we have to talk more about religion and moral values. They didn't make corporate reform an issue in this election, even though the mass media has given it massive coverage in the cases of Enron, Eliot Spitzer and others. They're simply not learning any lessons."

Too bad the Kerry campaign didn't read this book before they crafted their message -- maybe someone can send Hillary Clinton a copy before 2008. It might give Democrats some ideas about how to lessen the phenomenally unfair advantage multinational corporations have over everything remotely connected to power and influence. Drutman and Cray's manifesto is a product of both Berrett-Koehler Publishers and CitizenWorks, the nonprofit Nader founded in 2001 to generate further public participation in the decisions that affect their everyday existence, ones that are all too often made behind their backs.

"Most people already think that corporations have too much control over their lives," Nader says, "so you have to appeal to them on that level, where they can see how concentrated corporate power affects them daily. After all, some of them are barely make a living wage in the same company where their CEO makes 700 percent more than they do."

The way to create change, Nader believes, is to have an agenda and stick to it. "The People's Business" fleshes out a winning program on that count, from enhanced prosecution budgets for the Justice Department and the SEC to closing tax loopholes to an FBI corporate crime database and much more. "The book is also focused on helping workers exert more power over their retirement and compensation," Nader adds. "But ultimately, the more fundamental issue is the challenge of corporations' constitutional rights. They're not human beings, so they shouldn't have the same rights as the rest of us."

Although the book seems achingly idealistic -- as Nader has so often been described -- the longtime champion of citizen rights isn't fazed. He knows the Bush administration, more than any other in American history, is defined by its corporate contributors -- for instance, a third of Bush's "Pioneer" fundraisers were awarded positions in the administration or equivalent perks -- and it's not about to change its tune in another term.

But whatever else you might want to say about him, Nader knows that fighting for political change doesn't end after Election Day. In some ways, he says, the real fight lies ahead. "You always be ready, in case there are scandals involving the administration or other acts of corruption," he says. "This corporate challenge will be a good test. Who knows? It might resonate with someone on Capitol Hill." Let's hope -- no, pray -- that something does.

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