Bill Clinton's true legacy is that he was president of two Americas.
One of his Americas has enjoyed soaring profits and wages, while the other -- where one-third of the population lives and works -- has seen its standard of living stagnant. He is president of one nation that is revelling in the dot-com gold rush and of another that works in the growing number of sweatshops in New York and Los Angeles. He is president of an America that promises to deliver freedom to every country in the world, and of a country that has more people per capita behind bars than any other, including China.
It seems only fitting that on Monday, the night of his big finale, Bill Clinton's two Americas came crashing together outside the Democratic National Convention.
Steps away from the convention centre, at the very moment that Mr. Clinton was delivering his "swan song" address, a sea of LAPD riot cops began shooting rubber bullets into the backs of thousands of social justice activists leaving a legal rally.
Since the stone-throwers and fence-climbers were confined to a small area, the police could easily have gone in and arrested only those who were breaking the law. Instead, the LAPD chose to do what the police did in Seattle during the protests against the World Trade Organization last November. They used the actions of a handful of people as an excuse to clear an entire area and violently attack a crowd of thousands whose only crime was failing to get out of the way in time.
Los Angeles never wanted the two Americas to get this close to each other, but a court decision handed down last month forced the city to designate a protest area near the convention site. The judge ruled that the original plan to create a wide "no protest/no access" zone around the Democratic gathering was unconstitutional: Turns out that free speech is not the right to scream at the top of your lungs in the middle of nowhere -- it is also the right to be heard.
Which is why L.A. was treated to the surreal sight of a political thrash band stealing the show from Mr. Clinton. On Monday night, the real swan song of the Clinton years wasn't the perfectly pitched speech delivered by the President inside the Staples Center. It was a different song altogether -- Guerrilla Radio -- performed live, on the doorstep of the convention centre by Rage Against the Machine.
As the delegates inside the convention were joyfully waving their "Thank You Bill" placards, young activists were turning the protest pen into a mosh pit, shaking their fists at the convention centre and hollering the lyrics, "It has to start somewhere!"
And it has already started. The running theme of convention week in Los Angeles is: Follow the money. Al Gore and Bill Clinton are chasing the money from corporate donors, and a new breed of investigative activist is close behind, following the intricate money trails of campaign finance to expose the ways in which corporations are distorting America's political agenda.
On Sunday, there was a protest at the Loews Hotel, the site of a bitter labour dispute between low-wage workers and management. The strikers chose this week for their rally because they wanted to draw attention to the fact that the CEO of Loews is a major contributor to Mr. Gore's campaign.
Later that day, there was an anti-sweatshop rally at the Gap. "What is Gap chairman Donald Fisher's favorite hobby?" the flyers asked. "Buying politicians" was the answer offered. On Monday, the target was Mr. Gore's personal holdings in Occidental Petroleum, an oil company embroiled in a human-rights dispute with the U'wa Indians of Colombia.
Monday night's rally outside the convention seemed like an awfully good location to start reclaiming politics from corporate donors and lobbyists. The protest pen is a fenced-in empty lot sandwiched between two large buildings. On the left is the Staples Center, where democracy itself is being graphically enclosed inside the logo of a big-box retailer. It has become a towering metaphor for the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party, not to mention the total privatization of the public sphere.
On the right is the Figueroa Hotel, whose 12-storey brick facade is entirely covered in an Apple billboard. The advertisement features the faces of several leaders of the past and admonishes us to "Think different." One of the faces is famed labour leader Cesar Chavez.
On the night of Mr. Clinton's address, local labour organizer Dolores Huerta stepped onstage and pointed to that towering advertisement. In Spanish, she invoked the spirit of Mr. Chavez, a spirit that has far more to do with the strike at the Loews Hotel than with the revolutionary new design of the iMac computer, even if it does come in nectarine orange.
Thinking really different now, and with helicopters buzzing overhead and riot police on all sides, Ms. Huerta led the largely Latino crowd in chants of "Viva Cesar Chavez." By sheer force of collective will, the people of Los Angeles liberated a piece of politics from the clutches of corporate branding, if only for a night.