[Marxism] Jeff St. Clair on the Green Party debacle

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This is so good, I didn't have the heart to clip it.)

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
November 6 / 7, 2004
Dead Party Walking
Green Out

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

    "Mister Kurtz, he dead."

    Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Buried in the ossuary of roadkill from the November election you will
find all that remains of the once brawny Green Party, now splattered
into a micro-stain on the electoral scorecard with evidence of its
passing barely detectable by even the most expert political forensic
scientist.

The Green Party, notorious spoiler of Democratic aspirations in 2000,
not only wasn't a factor in this election; its very existence was
scarcely mentioned by the press ... or by anyone else.

This sorry state of play was hardly surprising since the Green Party's
presidential candidate, a mortician-like lawyer named David Cobb, told
CounterPunch a few weeks ago that he wasn't the least bit concerned
about how many votes he might come his way on election day.

Well, Mission Accomplished, Commander Cobb. And, in case you missed it,
you and your running mate, Pat LaMarche, only convinced a mere 106,264
voters nationwide to pull your lever or punch your chad.

By contrast, Ralph Nader, rejected by the Greens in favor of Cobb,
vilified by the Democrats and denied ballot status in such key states as
California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oregon, still pulled in 503,534 vote,
nearly five times Cobb's microscopic accumulation.

Cobb was also trounced by Michael Badnarik, the California computer
programmer who replaced Harry Browne at the head of the Libertarian
ticket this year. On the ballot in 49 states, the vocally anti-war
Badnarik got 360,000 votes. Cobb's dismal showing now puts the Greens in
the catacombs of third party politics, resting in a musty chamber
beneath even the Constitutionalist Party, whose candidate Michael Allen
Petrouka received 131,000 votes from 36 states.

Across the summer and fall, David Cobb kept reiterating that the
presidential race wasn't that important. Instead, his campaign was meant
to be a vehicle for party building, greenspeak for raising money,
winning ballot access and aiding other Green candidates down the ticket.

But a similar wipeout took place in state and local races, once the
embryonic stem cells meant to fuel the growth of the nascent party. The
Greens were consistently outperformed by Libertarians,
Constitutionalists, Independents and Socialists.

For example, in Oregon, once a bastion of the Green Party, the Greens
could only muster up six candidates for election across the entire
breadth of the state. They didn't field a candidate for any of the
state's five congressional races-despite the fact that incumbents were a
lock to win all of them. Nor did they offer a challenger for key state
races, such as Secretary of State, Treasurer or Attorney General. By
contrast, Libertarians and Constitutionalists ran candidates in each
congressional race and in all key state contests.

It's hard to build a party when no one knows you're out there.

Yet, it could have been so much different.

This should have been the Green's banner year, a chance to prove its
mettle as a real alternative party. The gateway was opened for them by
the Democrats, who nominated a pair of pro-war, anti-bill of rights,
free traders to lead their ticket. Popular discontent with the war was
raging, as was angst about the cratering economy, outrage over corporate
corruption and skyrocketing energy prices-none of which were being
addressed by Kerry and Edwards.

Instead the Greens stiff-armed Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo and, in a
rigged convention, turned the party over to a Cobb and his self-selected
coterie of former Democratic Party fundraisers and advisors from public
interest groups whose financial feeding tubes are plugged into big
foundations that were desperate for a Kerry win. These laptop savants
were the architects of the Anybody-But-Bush designer virus that ravaged
the left, leaving zombies in its wake.

The Green Party convention, held in Milwaukee last June, was a sordid
and crooked affair that sullied the democratic values the party purports
to represent. In Green Party primaries, Nader and Camejo pulled in more
than three times as many votes as did Cobb. Yet at the convention the
nomination was turned over to delegates, largely handpicked by the
Cobbites. Nader and Camejo went down and so did the bedrock principle of
one person/one vote. It smelled a lot like Chicago in 1968 or Florida in
2000.

With the nomination secured, Cobb and his gang advanced a stealth
campaign strategy. Call it run and hide. Yes, they would run a
candidate, but he would do everything he could to hide from potential
voters. It worked. Cobb's veep candidate, Pat LaMarche, announced early
on that she might not even vote for herself if the race in Maine
tightened. That blunder set the feckless tone for the entire campaign.

The so-called safe-state strategy called for Cobb to direct his
attention to those states that either Kerry or Bush were assured of
winning, such as New York, California, Texas, New Jersey, Vermont,
Washington, Indiana, Illinois and Maryland.

So how did he do by his own narrow goals? Cobb scored best in his
adopted home state of California, where he tallied 31,697 votes. But
this was actually a pathetically weak showing. California went big for
Kerry as it did for Gore. Yet, in 2000 Nader, who was kept off the
California ballot in 2004, racked up 418,000 votes. Inexplicably Cobb
failed to qualify for the New York ballot, where Nader scored 102,000
votes this year. Cobb similarly failed to qualify for the ballot in his
native Texas, in Indiana and in Illinois, where Nader drew 103,000 votes
in 2000. In New Jersey, Cobb got only an anemic 1,700 votes and was
beaten badly by both Badnarik and Petrouka. In 2000, Nader reaped
100,000 votes in New Jersey. Cobb spent a lot of time in Green-friendly
Washington State. Yet when Wednesday morning dawned he only had 1,998
votes next to his name. In 2000, Nader got the nod from 102,000
Washingtonians. In Pat LaMarche's home state of Maine, the Green ticket
got 2,775 votes (we're not sure if one of those was cast by LaMarche) --
5,000 votes fewer than Nader this year and 32,000 votes less than Nader
in 2000.

By any standard, this was a dismal showing in the very vote rich states
where Cobb said he was going to run the hardest. He only edged the
Libertarian candidate in Connecticut, Hawai'i, Maine, Minnesota, Rhode
Island, and DC. Those are some slim pickings.

So Cobb wrestled away the nomination from Nader and then effectively
went to work destroying the party from the inside over the course of the
next four months. It was an act of supreme political cowardice that
couldn't have happened at a worse time for the nation.

The Green Party should have served as the political vehicle for the
anti-war movement, a movement that put ten times as many people on the
streets of Manhattan in August as Cobb got to vote for him on that dark
Tuesday in November. If the Green Party had risen to the challenge, it
could have helped force this ugly war to an early end, saving thousands
of American and Iraqi lives. Instead the Greens went AWOL in order not
to hobble its Democratic Party allies. This non-aggression pact proved
to be a fatal decision that failed to propel Kerry past Bush and
rendered impotent the Greens as force of political opposition.

But don't expect any expressions of regret or probing self-analysis from
this lot of professional losers. Cobb, Medea Benjamin, Ted Glick and
their cohort will speed on to their next grant-fueled project without
looking back, like political hit-and-run drivers.

Now even the Green Party name is probably tarnished beyond any utility.
So say a little prayer and then get to work.

A new party must rise from the carnage of the Greens and the progressive
wing of the Democratic Party, which was once again bound, gagged and
abused by the lords of the party to little avail. No doubt Kerry's
debacle at the hands of Bush will soon be blamed on them and will serve
as yet another excuse by the party establishment to compel the Democrats
to bow even deeper at the feet of the corporations and military
interventionists.

Freedom can come from such losses. Freedom from illusions, for starters.
There's a crisp clarity to the political landscape now that will cloud
up as the days and months go by. The time to bolt is now, while the
guards are changing.

There are many fellow travelers, leftists and libertarians, wandering
out here in the wilderness searching for a new party of resistance to
corporatism and imperial wars that will be led by those who will not
flinch under fire.

Where to begin?

There's a whole swath of country which the Dem elites have not only
abandoned, but are literally scared to tread across. Start there in the
Red States, where there many, many thousands of souls desperate for a
militant party that will fight for them-the "lesbian enclave" in
southeastern Oklahoma that the vile Tom Coburn kept screaching about in
his senate campaign; or Earth First!ers in the depths of Idaho; peace
activists in Huntsville, Alabama, HQ of Star Wars; or civil rights
organizers in South Carolina, birthplace (and living museum) of the
Confederacy. Move to France? Ridiculous. Why not move to Iowa? Or
Wyoming? It's wide open political terrain now.

Red is a good color, a color with a pulse and an honorable history.
Here's to a Red States Party ... Onward!

--
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