[GPRI] FW: [usgp-dx] Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 2008 (Re: Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate)

[Greg Gerritt]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Scott McLarty <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:26:12 -0700 (PDT)
To: <natlcomaffairs at green.gpus.org>, <dcsgp at yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [usgp-dx] Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 2008 (Re:
Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate)

(I wrote this after reading a Z Magazine review
of Howie Hawkins' book 'Independent Politics: The
Green Party Strategy Debate'
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=12407>
that was forwarded on some Green Party discussion
lists.)

In my opinion, the major challenge of 2008 for
the Green Party has little to do with the
presidential race.

In order to prove ourselves a growing political
party with a real future, we need to win
elections.  If we don't rack up victories, then
the public's perception of us will be that the GP
has hit a ceiling, that we'll occasionally win a
couple of City Council seats here & there, but
Greens are too small & marginal to have any kind
of traction or effect on the political direction
of the US.  We'd be permanent members of the
political space also inhabited by the Libertarian
Party, the US Constitution Party, etc., and votes
cast for Greens are mostly wasted.

This unfortunate perception will be correct...
unless we begin making real electoral gains.

While the presidential race is important, our
biggest (and most achievable) goal in 2008 should
be to place candidates in important state and
municipal offices.  We should aim to get 4 or 5
Greens into state legislatures, at least a half a
dozen more Greens onto the City Councils of major
cities, and a dozen or more Greens on smaller
City Councils & County Commissions.  And maybe a
few new Green Mayors of small & medium sized
cities.

We can accomplish these goals, because we've
already succeeded at different times in electing
Greens to these offices.  But it will take some
preparation: recruiting excellent candidates;
raising money for them; helping them build
campaigns; promoting them publicly.

Our strongest national committee right now should
be the Coordinated Campaign Committee.  Greens
who are serious about seeing the GP advance in
2008 should either be joining or offering their
services to the CCC, or should be making
arrangements to get some CCC help for their local
& state parties & candidates.  We should be
holding Green Campaign Schools throughout the US
as 2008 approaches.

There's no doubt that our participation in the
presidential race is important: it gets us a lot
of press & public attention; it helps state
parties win ballot access; the Green nominee
serves as a sort of figurehead for the GP's
platform & principles.  But the presidential race
is also the most irrelevant when it comes to
gauging the GP's actual progress, since it's the
race in which we're most vulnerable to factors
over which we have no control.  Overwhelmingly,
voters in 2004 who agreed with the GP on the Iraq
War and other issues decided that their main goal
was to defeat Bush -- even if this meant voting
for a dreary pro-corporate pro-war Democrat like
Kerry.  Very few voters made it their priority in
2004 to support a growing antiwar third party.
The result was that both Cobb & Nader got small
fractions of one percent.

The GP can run the best candidates & campaigns
possible, but we can't mandate what voters'
priorities are.  Despite all the heated internal
debate over choices of candidate & campaign
strategy, the major factor in the 2004
presidential race was that we were irrelevant to
over 99% of voters, and would have been
irrelevant regardless of nominee (or endorsee) or
campaign strategy.  In fact, we were already
irrelevant early in 2004, even to many GP
supporters: Brent McMillan noted in a recent
posting titled "Overview of Green Party national
planning for 2008" that "Before we even got to
the convention approximately 70% of the national
party's donor base either went ABB, Anybody But
Bush, or didn't want us to run a candidate at all
for other reasons.  We then proceeded to fight
over the scraps."

(Someone will probably write back and note that
Ralph got over four times the number that Dave
got.  Here's my response: (1) Of course -- Ralph
is famous.  (2) A discussion about how we could
have received a larger fraction of 1% in 2004 is
not worth our time.)

This dynamic repeated in 2006, when we ran some
of our strongest candidates & most well-organized
campaigns ever for seats in Congress -- people
like Rae Vogeler, Aaron Dixon, Kevin Zeese, Howie
Hawkins, Byron DeLear, Bill Paparian, etc. etc.
They mostly pulled numbers in the 2-4 percent
range, not through any fault of their own, but
because voters who opposed the Iraq War & other
Bush Administration horrors were determined to
transfer control over Congress from Repubs to
Dems.  As in 2004, to most voters the GP was
irrelevant at the congressional level.  With
Howie Hawkins' campaign for the US Senate in New
York, there was no reason for any sincere antiwar
voter to vote for warhawk Democrat Hillary
Clinton, since her reelection was inevitable, but
most voters who claimed to oppose the Iraq War
still voted for her.

On the other hand, in some important
gubernatorial races, which were not affected by
this sentiment, Greens did fairly well, with Rich
Whitney (Illinois) & Pat LaMarche (Maine)
receiving about 10%.  Pat might have drawn 20-25%
or even more if a progressive Democrat hadn't
also run as in independent, turning it into a
four-way race with the progressive vote split.
Rich's unprecedented numbers in Illinois, after a
vicious Democratic effort to keep him off the
ballot (Gov. Blagojevich spent $800,000 in
taxpayers' money on legal strategems), were
especially good news.

The GP might get 5% in the 2008 presidential
race, or we might get a tiny fraction of 1%
again.  Either way, we should not allow ourselves
to make our performance in the expensive and
fickle spectacle of the presidential race the
sole or chief determinant of GP progress, and let
it eat up all our time & mental energy as in
2004.  Placing all our eggs in the presidential
basket is like someone deciding to pursue a
career in the music industry, and then staking it
all on winning American Idol.

Furthermore, we should remember that a lot of
voters may decide to vote Democrat in the
presidential race, but will still be ready to
vote Green in state & local races.  An absolutist
ideal of Green politics would find this
unacceptable: if a voter is 'Green' (supports the
GP platform & positions, is registered Green),
then naturally the voter will vote for every
Green on the ballot, especially the presidential
nominee.  But that's not how real electoral
politics works.  Voters decide who to vote for
based on a variety of reasons.  It's extremely
naive to believe that a typical voter does some
research to determine which candidate best
represents his or her own positions on major
issues and then casts a vote accordingly.  If
this were the case, the GP would already be a
major US party.

In reality, voters (even registered Greens) often
make decisions based on all sorts of criteria,
some of them irrational or inconsistent.  The
important thing for the GP is that all votes are
valuable to us, even the ones we think are
irrational & inconsistent.  If a voter decides to
support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or even
George W Bush or John McCain for president, we
still want his or her votes for Green candidates
running for state legislature, city council,
school board, etc.  In other words, we need to
hold our noses sometimes and respect voters'
choices.  If we expect to grow, we'll have to
welcome support from people who've made some very
non-Green choices.

Will we have a strategy in 2008 for winning back
all those self-defeating antiwar types who voted
for Kerry in 2004?  Will we have a strategy for
persuading progressives who decide to vote
Democrat in the presidential race to vote Green
in state & local races?  Are we mature enough not
to treat politics as a zero-sum game, and craft
our campaign messages in a way that doesn't allow
the national campaign to smother our chance to
win a lot of down-ballot races?

We should absolutely run an aggressive
presidential campaign in 2008, competing in every
state, and with every state GP pledged to support
the national nominee.  (If we don't want our
nominee to run aggressively in every state, or
some state GPs decide they'd rather place a
different name on their ballot line, we probably
shouldn't bother to run a presidential campaign
at all.)

But Greens should be realistic about what we can
and can't accomplish, and we should anticipate
that external forces will affect how well our
national nominees do on Election Day in ways that
we can't foresee.  Here's one example: we might
witness the first billion-dollar presidential
campaign in 2008; will this work to the GP's
advantage (evidence of how money has corrupted
corporate-party politics), or will it simply
crush us?

It's the state & local victories, along with new
registrations & more state GPs with ballot
status, that will demonstrate the GP's permanence
and steady growth.  If we place 4 or 5 Greens
into statehouses, a bunch of new Greens onto city
councils, etc., then it won't really matter if
the Green presidential candidate gets 5% or 3% or
1% or 0.05% in 2008.  It'll also set the GP in a
stronger position for winning a seat or two in
Congress during the next five years.  When we
finally get a Green or two into Congress, it'll
change the whole political landscape of the US,
signaling the beginning of the end of the
two-party system.

Scott







 
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