Thank George W. Bush.

Last week, in a Labor Temple hall that's seen more than its share of abortive coalitions over the years, a new local alliance took some first, halting steps toward relevance. The 60 or so people attending were, in one person's words, a room full of generals many of the people who run the various left-leaning activist and lobbying groups concerned with electoral politics in Seattle. The Dean people were there; so was the Kucinich camp. So were some Green Party types, as well as progressive Democrats and grizzled Rainbow Coalition survivors. So was a new Seattle school board member, and at least four past Seattle City Council candidates.

The idea is as simple as the well-worn cliche in progressive politics--why can't we all work together? Thanks to the shared sense of revulsion a second Bush term is inspiring, there's enough activist electricity in the air these days and enough of a focus on winning elections rather than brandishing the perfect ideology that finally, perhaps, all the generals can fit in one room.

The nascent effort is calling itself the Seattle Progressive Electoral Coalition (SPEC), and it treads in territory littered with the corpses of past left-leaning Seattle coalitions. The pitfalls are all too familiar: when you get a roomful of people chronically outside the halls of money and power, ideology is what's left to battle over.

Typically, these sorts of coalitions have devolved into fortnight-long meetings wrangling over Mission Statements and Strategic Visions and Points of Unity; by the time the prized document is hammered out, three people are left in the room and neither the document nor the group is ever seen again. What makes this coalition potentially different is the shared sense that this sort of chronic powerlessness isn't inevitable.

While presidential politics clearly hover over the project, so do local politics. Its not entirely fair to give all the credit for SPECs inspiration to George Bush or to conservative Democrats like Gary Locke. Credit also last falls winning school board reform campaigns and even the energizing effects of last year's peace movement. People who've spent two months or two decades marching outside City Hall have suddenly got it in their minds that at least locally, they're a majority and they can win. A growing body of progressives with experience in electoral campaigns can help make it happen.

As if to underscore the point, last week longtime local activist Alice Woldt announced a primary challenge this year against 32-year state rep. Helen Sommers of Seattle's 36th District (spanning Queen Anne, Magnolia, Ballard, and Phinney Ridge). Woldt was nudged out last year as the head of the Church Council of Greater Seattle after nearly two decades with the group. While politicos have focused on Woldt's friendship with House leader Frank Chopp, the core of Woldt's campaign will come from progressives. Woldt's roots run deep in the local peace and religious social justice communities; she is the type of experienced, competent candidate a group like SPEC would be ideally suited to recruit, train, and support.

More to the point, Sommers is the sort of incumbent a group like SPEC would consider a prime target. As head of the House Appropriations Committee, in recent years Sommers budget decisions have cut deeply into the state's social services and educational programs while continuing to lavish money and tax breaks for corporate lobbies and leaving the states regressive tax structure untouched. Democrats like Sommers and outgoing Gov. Gary Locke are exactly the sort of politicians disaffected Democrats talk about when they talk of reclaiming their party.

It's one thing to endorse candidates, as Seattle's past progressive electoral efforts have largely focused on; it's quite another to run campaigns and expect to win, or to research issues or propose legislation and insert it into campaigns. So far, SPEC is mostly good intentions, combined with meetings every first Thursday evening at the Labor Temple. SPEC still needs to decide on a structure, generate funding, and come up with a strategic plan that doesn't duplicate the work of many of the groups already represented among its attendees. That won't be easy. But in a one-party city where many voters share the beliefs if not the tactical preferences of our city's chronic protest movement, what happens when the protesters realize they're as capable as anyone else of making the policies? The potential is there, embodied in candidates like Woldt and like last year's victorious school board members, to make more noise than any demonstration can make.