Newspaper Page Text
rm± feature
The Longshot
RICHARD WINFIELD PROBABLY WON’T WIN, BUT HL WANTS YOU TO HEAR HIS MESSAGE
By Tyler Wilkins news@flagpole.com
less than two months, Georgia voters will decide
whether U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler keeps her seat, and
there’s no shortage of candidates on the ballot from which
voters can choose.
Richard Dien Winfield, a philosophy professor at the
University of Georgia, is one of 21 candidates vying for
the seat in a special election known as a jungle primary,
or nonpartisan blanket primary, in which all candidates
who entered the race will be on the November ballot. This
process bypasses a traditional primary that narrows down
the candidates to one from each party before the general
election.
Running on a very progressive platform with con
siderably less money than candidates with higher name
recognition, Winfield knows he’s a “longshot candidate.”
But he believes the special format of the Senate race may
work in his favor and, at the very least, he hopes to present
“an alternative view of what we need to do to perfect our
democracy.”
A New ‘Social Bill of Rights’
Amid the public resurgence of the Black Lives Matter move
ment and the widening of the income and wealth gap in
the U.S., Winfield is advocating a
plethora of proposals to combat p
economic and racial injustice. m
“I think the very existence of our g
democracy requires that we address g
the fulfillment of our social rights ^
that we have ignored to our peril,” m
says Winfield, who ran unsuccess
fully as a Democratic candidate
for U.S. Rep. Jody Hice’s seat in
2018. “Now we are facing the mid
night hour, where this is the most
important election in our lifetime.”
Following in the footsteps of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Winfield has
as a key proposal a federal job guar
antee, in which the federal govern
ment would offer a $20-an-hour,
full-time job to every American.
Winfield believes it could foster a
more robust bargaining process
between employers and employees
and eliminate the fear of unem
ployment. The federal government
would place workers with different
skill sets into fields for which they
are suited, supplying goods and services their communities
need that are not supplied by private companies.
“I’m putting forward policies that I think have broad
appeal because they’re core to fulfilling the American
dream,” Winfield says. “It’s not a matter of restricting the
private sector. I’m not a socialist. Reform the market, so
that the market and the public sector work together to
remove the obstacles to equal opportunity and provide eco
nomic independence and security to everyone.”
Along with this proposal, Winfield argues that an
“employee bill of rights” should be established, which would
require corporations to fill half of their boards of directors
with non-managerial employees. It would also force compa
nies to extend full-time benefits to part-time, contract and
gig economy workers and prohibit mandatory overtime.
Additionally, Winfield supports paid leave for emergencies,
sickness, maternity and vacation for all U.S. employees.
“Employees have the real expertise and knowledge of
what the business is actually doing, and a company will be
much stronger if it takes full advantage of the knowledge
6 FLAGPOLE.COM | SEPTEMBER
and decisions of its employees,” says Winfield, who’s a
member of the United Campus Workers of Georgia union.
“There are all these attempts to lower taxes on corporations
[and] the wealthy, as if that is going to generate investment
in new production facilities. Well, that’s not going to take
place if people don’t have money in their pockets.”
In regard to health care, Winfield supports creating a
public single-payer health care system. However, he takes it
a step further than other politicians, branding it a “Super-
Medicare-for-AH” single-payer system, in which all health
care costs would be covered with no copays or deduct
ibles. He believes this would help businesses save money,
“because it relieves [them] of having to pay anything for the
health plans of employees.”
In terms of reproductive health, Winfield is calling for
“reproductive freedom,” providing women with free access
to contraception, day-after pills and the opportunity for
free and safe abortions. He also wants to provide child
allowances of $900 per month per child to all families.
Winfield is also advocating for a similar overhaul to the
legal system: “legal care for all.” This would establish public
insurance for all legal fees, allowing individuals to choose a
legal representative they prefer in the hopes it would allow
poorer individuals to seek better representation in court
and give jobs to lawyers who struggle in the private sector.
“If you don’t have the money to hire your dream team,
you end up with a court-appointed lawyer or go to a legal
aid clinic,” Winfield says. “In both cases, the lawyers are
paid very little per client, have huge caseloads [and] no
resources to hire experts to do investigations. They’re over
burdened and underpaid.”
He wants to abolish for-profit prisons, for-profit pro
bation services and cash bail. He also wants to eliminate
the plea-bargaining process, as it’s “the railroad to mass
incarceration.”
Winfield says he would also prioritize banning high-ca
pacity firearms, requiring liability insurance for gun owners
and mitigating the effects of climate change. “We are going
to be facing a wave of economic catastrophes,” he says.
“We’re already seeing it with wildfires out of control, more
and more hurricanes and rising sea levels. This involves a
gigantic loss of economic assets, which will be huge blows to
our economic welfare. If you think COVID-19 has created a
world depression unlike anything we’ve seen, just wait until
the calamities of unmitigated climate change come our way.”
23, 2020
Winfield says his policies would reduce the need for
existing welfare programs and bolster the economy and
workforce, which would in turn actually save the U.S.
money. He’s also calling for an overhaul of the U.S. tax sys
tem, placing the majority of the tax burden on the top 10%
of U.S. income earners.
Struggle for Attention
Winfield says he has struggled to share his policy propos
als with voters. For starters, the COVID-19 pandemic has
limited his opportunities to connect with voters in person,
causing him to rely on social media and the press. Winfield
says he feels excluded by mainstream news outlets that are
focusing too heavily on more prominent candidates and
not sharing the spotlight with him and other lesser-known
candidates. “They have to stop their boycott of every politi
cal candidate except these four establishment darlings,” he
says. ‘They shouldn’t be complicit with the rule of money
over our democracy.”
The most prominent contenders are U.S. Rep. Doug
Collins (R-Gainesville); the Rev. Raphael Warnock,
an Atlanta pastor running as a Democrat; Ed Tarver,
a Democrat and former U.S. attorney; and Loeffler, a
Republican who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp after
U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson stepped down due to health con
cerns in 2019. Although these candidates have among the
highest name recognition and funds in the special election,
Winfield says he believes none of them particularly stand
out to voters. “None of them are doing that well because
they aren’t presenting much in the way of policy,” he says.”
I’m trying to present what I think are genuine solutions. I
have to get that message out.”
These candidates—along with Matt Lieberman, a
Democrat, an entrepreneur and
the son of former U.S. Sen. Joseph
Lieberman—had raised and spent
the most campaign money as of
June 30, according to OpenSecrets.
While Loeffler had raised more
than $17 million, Winfield had only
raised about $32,000 as of June 30.
Winfield believes this is an issue,
as candidates with the most money
have the most opportunities to
reach voters. To help candidates
with less money, Winfield is calling
for the public financing of all candi
dates running for federal and state
office.
Nonetheless, Winfield says the
format of this election could be
advantageous for his campaign. If
no candidate receives a majority of
votes in a jungle primary, a runoff
election between the top two candi
dates takes place in January.
It wasn’t until 2018 that
Winfield considered running for
office, he says. He grew up in
Queens, NY, and studied philos
ophy at Yale University before
he landed a full-time teaching position at the University
of Georgia more than 30 years ago. After teaching for so
long and writing 21 books, he decided it was time to try
and apply what he had learned about economic and social
justice.
“In 2018,1 decided it was time to leave the ivory tower
behind and see what I could do to change the political con
versation,” says Winfield, who is taking a leave of absence
to run, as required by UGA rules. “After Trump was elected,
I think we were then, as we are now, facing a real existential
crisis to our democracy—not created just by Trump, but by
our failure to deal with the inadequacies of our entire sys
tem of government and its approach to freedom.”
Wnfield ran as a Democratic primary candidate for
Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, finishing third with
23.3 percent of the vote. Looking back, he says he largely
underestimated the winner, Tabitha Johnson-Green, who
was also relatively unknown.
Winfield could meet a similar fate in the 2020 election.
Nevertheless, he says he’s marching forward. ©