Nader *did* seek their endorsement, but the realos indicated almost immediately after the 2000 election that they were ready to come home to the Democrats. If they had instead felt like the Nader vote was wind in the sails of the Green Party (which it was), things would have turned out differently, I'm sure.
That is true, but the "realos" on the steering committee aren't the ones in the Green Party that Nader should have been sounding out anyway. Nader had a good chance of overcoming the hostility of "realos" at the top of the Green Party (despite their ability to set the floor rules and apportion the number of delegates to each state in such a way as to raise the odds of the Cobb faction victory) by working closely with left-wing Green leaders like Peter Camejo, Jason West, Howie Hawkins, Walt Contreras Sheasby, Stanley Aronowitz, etc. from the get-go, appealing to rank-and-file Greens persistently, and organizing a campaign inside and outside the Green Party to secure the party's endorsement. After all, the votes at the Green Party national convention were very close.
At 1:51 PM -0400 7/7/04, Shane Mage wrote:
And the "safe state strategy," for a party that can expect no electoral college votes anywhere, makes perfect sense in this election. The great majority of the Left protest vote is to be found in places like New York and California, where the case against the *competent* Imperial candidate can be made most clearly because the fear of throwing the election to Ubu and his Bushits is such obviously hysterical nonsense in those states.
The "safe state" strategy is rational and coherent in theory, but here is a paradox of Cobb/LaMarche and Nader/Camejo campaigns in reality. The delegates of the largest, best organized, and most powerful Green Parties in states such as California (where 65 Greens hold elected office), Pennsylvania (26), and Massachusetts (19) supported Nader/Camejo rather than Cobb/LaMarche, 2 to 1. The key is California: "Cobb won about 5,000 votes in the California Green Party primary, for less than 12 percent of the total. Fewer people than that voted for him in all of the other state caucuses and primaries combined leading up to the convention" (Alan Maass, "Green Party Shifts Into Reverse," <http://www.counterpunch.org/maass07012004.html>); in contrast, Camejo received 75.4% of votes in the California GP primary (<http://www.gp.org/convention/delegate_tally.html>). What does this mean?
* Cobb/LaMarche carried the majority of delegate votes in the second round of voting at the national convention, but if you look at primary votes, Nader/Camejo and their allies commanded *a far larger number of rank-and-file Green supporters* than Cobb/LaMarche. Those who are alleged to be better party-builders than Nader/Camejo turn out to have shockingly fewer party-building foot solders than Nader/Camejo. * The state where it made *the most political sense* to run a strong Nader/Camejo Green Party campaign -- because it is a "safe state" where Green leaders and activists solidly support Nader/Camejo -- will have Cobb/LaMarche (who are little known outside of Texas and Maine respectively and therefore will receive much fewer votes than Nader/Camejo would) on the Green Party ballot line. * As Nader/Camejo can get on the Reform Party ballot lines in two of the most crucial battleground states of Florida and Michigan, the Green Party's Cobb/LaMarche nomination may have an unintentional consequence of making the Green Party presidential campaign absent in the battleground states without making Nader/Camejo disappear from them.
In short, a politically sensible compromise between the Nader/Camejo and Cobb/LaMarche factions within the Green Party would have been Camejo's proposal for "free states," i.e., the Green Party at the national convention endorsing both campaigns and leaving each state Green Party free to choose the campaign that is best suited for growing the Green Party in the state. That way, New York and California Green, for instance, could have benefited from the prominence of Nader/Camejo whom they supported (and will probably continue to support anyway), while cautious Greens in the Southern states, as well as such battleground states as Minnesota and Wisconsin, whose majority supported Cobb in the primaries could have run a symbolic Green Party presidential campaign with the Cobb/LaMarche ticket while focusing their main efforts on down-the-ticket candidacies. (The only controversial point in the "free states" proposal would have been what to do with Pennsylvania.) But the Green Party paradox is that it ended up ceding the "safe state" of California, where the Greens are the best organized in the nation and Peter Camejo is best known, to John Kerry, while vacating the third party ground in Michigan and Florida to Nader/Camejo. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
