How the Greens Can Avoid the Spoiler Mantle in 2004 by Art Goodtimes
Telluride, Colorado, turned out in force to hear long-time political activist and former California State Senator Tom Hayden at its Out Loud Lecture Series recently. With no college within a hundred miles and lots of educated folks, Telluride supports a regular lecture series that brings national figures to town – the kind of intellectual stimulus craved by locals as well as the many winter visitors to this Southern Rockies destination ski resort.
Personal friends with the town’s former manager, Hayden gave an off-the-cuff rambling talk about the impending Iraqi war and American politics. But much of the meat of this talk came in the question and answer period.
I was disappointed he didn’t expand on a question about the political party cross dressing Cowboy-Yankee analysis of American power elites by his former Students for a Democratic Society buddy Carl Oglesby. And I didn’t particularly agree that overextension was the biggest weakness of the new American empire as it promotes its economic hegemony on a global scale, as he advocated.
But Tom Hayden was right about one thing. And that was his take on what should happen with the Green Party in 2004.
We cannot afford another disaster like the 2000 elections, he insisted. We can’t have another Nader vying for votes in decisive swing states, as we saw happen in Florida (along with all the vote-counting hanky panky).
Yes, the Green Party is important, Hayden agreed. And maybe the antidote for the current Republicrat malaise that our two-party duopoly has engendered in many voters who feel disenfranchised by the process. But the New World Order won’t survive another four years under the thumb of only one sector of the American economy – the oil cartel.
As a rural county commissioner in Telluride and a prominent elected Green involved in state and national party politics, I couldn’t agree more.
In 2004 the Greens ought to run presidential candidates only in those states where they need such races to maintain ballot access or protect their ballot line. But the party has to avoid running a third party candidate in states where it might jeopardize the eventual Democratic candidate’s chances.
Too much is at stake worldwide to make the same mistake the Greens made with Nader in 2000. Of course, in most Green circles, that last statement is heresy. There was no mistake in the last elections. Nader helped legitimize the Green Party as a serious contender for constituents, spurring the formation of thousands of new Green Party chapters all across the country. And that’s true.
But if we are to believe exit polls that suggested some 30 percent of citizens who voted Green in 2000 would have otherwise voted Democrat, Greens have the potential to turn the tide to Bush in 2004. The risk of any third-party candidate spoiling a close election between major party candidates is endemic to a winner-take-all system.
Sure, election reforms like Instant Runoff Voting could change the playing field. Make it easier for minor parties to compete without spoiling. Trouble is, IRV has only been adopted in one American city to date – San Francisco. And so, while it may be the best future tweak for our antiquated electoral college system, it’s not the law currently in force.
Perot’s Reform Party had a lot to do with the incumbent Bush Senior losing to Clinton the first time around. And some will say that Nader’s Green Party run, even though it only garnered 3 percent of the vote nationally, tipped the scales for Bush in a few states, like New Hampshire and Florida.
Most Greens deny that. They point to Gore’s loss of his home state. And the voting irregularities that disenfranchised many black Democratic voters in Florida. And that’s true, as well.
But it’s time for the Green Party of the United States to stop making denials and face the unhappy truth. Running a candidate in the 2004 national elections against the Democratic presidential challenger, while perhaps giving some needed name recognition to the party and providing a forum for educating the public about its ten key values, will in the end only help the Republicans.
And it’s exactly that kind of splintering of the left that has torpedoed so many progressive movements in this country.
It’s time for the Greens to recognize that they are only in the initial stages of their development as a viable national party and that they need to concentrate their efforts on building the party from the bottom up before running the risk of becoming the progressive spoiler in national elections.
Sure, in those states that need to protect ballot lines or achieve ballot access, the Greens can run presidential candidates. It'd be best if that was a state-only candidate, one who actually was a registered Green and could actively campaign in that state.
But on the national level, in effect, they need to heed their own key value of grassroots democracy. To walk their talk. This next go-round at the ballot, Greens ought to vigorously contest local and state elections, and win enough of them so they can soon take on the major parties on an equal footing.
Who knows, Tom Hayden might even vote Green next election, so long as it doesn’t mean re-electing Bush Junior to a second term.
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