Re: Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate
Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:59 pm
PART 2 OF 3
How the Greens Chose Kerry over Nader
By Walt Contreras Sheasby
Published on http://www.unrepentantnadervoter.com.
July 19, 2004
The battleground at the Green Party National Convention on June 23-29 stretched from the West (Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico) to the Great Lakes (Minnesota and Wisconsin) and the corners of the Atlantic coast (Maine and Florida). Those are the seven Unsafe States with Green ballot lines, and denying those ballot lines to Ralph Nader was the mission accomplished at the convention in Minneapolis. David Cobb won the election with 408 of 770 ballots cast, based on the strength of his support in places like Montana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and, of course, his native state of Texas. [1] The urban branches of the party were overcome largely by bending the rural twigs sprouting in Bush country.
From the Green Politics Network to the Cobb/LaMarche Debacle
The convention result was largely engineered by veterans of the Green Politics Network (GPN), which was founded in spring 1992 by John Rensenbrink, Dee Berry, and others opposed to the "Fundi radicalism" of the early Greens. There had been a national Green organization called the Greens/Green Party USA since 1991, growing out of the Committees of Correspondence formed in St. Paul in 1984. The GPN, however, shunned these radicals and hoped to link up electoral-oriented pragmatic reformers into a confederation based on state parties rather than membership locals.
In 1995-96 many of the radicals balked at a presidential campaign, while others worked on the search for a candidate. According to Patrick Mazza of the Oregon Pacific Party, "In states such as Ohio and Texas, G/GPUSA activists blocked efforts to put Nader on the ballot."
Immediately after the election on November 16-17, 1996, an invitation-only meeting of sixty-two Nader supporters was held at the Glen-Ora Farm in Middleburg, forty miles west of Washington, D.C. This historic farm had been surveyed by George Washington at age sixteen. It seems appropriate now that after gathering in a room where JFK used to hold meetings after his election in 1960, many attendees then are now supporting another JFK in 2004.
When Howie Hawkins, a leader of the Greens/Green Party USA and a New York Nader campaigner came to Glen-Ora, he was blocked from entering on the first day, and on the second day, as Mazza put it, "Hawkins was told in no uncertain terms the new organization is a fait accompli."
Rensenbrink announced that it "has been a long, arduous, often agonizing journey," but the Middleburg Meeting "heralds the emergence, at last, of a viable, vigorous, and facilitative Association of State Green Parties (ASGP)."
Nader told the sixty-two ASGP founders at Middleburg that "whoever's going to go for the Democratic nomination in 2000 has got to realize they are going to lose if they don't stop the drift into the corporate maul." [2] The cards were all on the table four years before Nader's second Green campaign, but as the election neared November 2000, the GPN veterans and some Nader novices began to urge their candidate to take a dive.
Nader had written the forward to Rensenbrink's Against All Odds: The Green Transformation of American Politics in 1999, and had told left Greens that the author was a sterling radical and to be trusted, but within a year Rensenbrink was openly venomous toward his former mutual admirer. Rensenbrink conceals his personal rancor in a jumble of indictments that are taken at face value by the liberal media and Green novices: "[Nader] doesn't want to be a Green, he runs with his coterie rather than party organizers, he doesn't involve local Green leaders and he doesn't get the racial issue. I fear if Nader runs, he'll drag down every other Green in this country."[3]
As the A.P. wire reported on June 23, 2004, "Delegate John Rensenbrink of Maine said he was a Nader adviser but had to break with the candidate over his insistence on running an aggressive campaign in swing states, believing it could lead to Bush's reelection. While no backer of John Kerry, Rensenbrink believes the Democrat is the lesser of two evils." Apparently even less of an evil than Nader himself.
Pot-Boiling the Twigs
Various anti-Nader, Anybody-But-Bush, and openly pro-Kerry Web sites and listservs all tried to influence gullible Greens before the convention. The GreensforKerry.com Web site (registered through Go-Daddy.com) was revealed as belonging to NextGeneration.org, a campaign consulting firm mostly for environmental causes but also working for Democratic politicians. [4]
A mass e-mail letter was sent to Greens by Jeff Bennett in San Francisco, who claimed to be a member since 1998, saying: "It is shocking to me that the Green Party would even consider endorsing Ralph Nader for president this year. ... But now I see that the Green Party leaders might not be working for environmental protections and social justice at all. Maybe they just want to break the two-party system, even if they break the planet in the process." No one in the Greens in the Bay Area recalled ever seeing or hearing the name of the sender.
Not to be outdone by covert Democrats, seven Green Party politicians, headed by David Segal, a city councilor in Providence, Rhode Island, formed Greens for Impact (GFI) to "encourage voters in swing states to vote for John Kerry in the general election." Segal revealed that the real aim of the Rensenbrinkians was not independent political action but dependent political action, as with the German Greens: "Though small, the Green Party sometimes has enough sway to change the outcome of an election, but as a party that does not believe in fascism and extortion, our segment of the progressive movement must work together with the dominant left-of-center party, as our fellow Green Party members in Europe and many other nations have done." [5]
The most ambitious effort was funded by George Soros through the Democrats' 527 groups, [6] three of which combined to focus their anti-Nader TV advertising firepower on six states that were decided by two percentage points or less in 2000 -- Wisconsin, New Mexico, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Oregon. In addition the groups formed TheNaderFactor.com to also beam Internet pleas by repentant Greens and Naderites. [7]
The Real Strategy
To deny those six or more states to Nader, primary battles had to first be won in as many of the forty-five states with delegates as possible, even though only twenty-three states have a ballot line at the moment. In fact, some of the key skirmishes were in states that failed to get a Green line this year, such as Texas and Illinois. Other delegates were selected by relatively small Green formations in the South, stretching from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia to North Carolina and Virginia, all states without a ballot primary which nevertheless chose and sent delegates to keep Nader off the ballot in other states.
Belinda Coppernoll, secretary of the Green Alliance, the left tendency in the Green Party, and a delegate from Ellensburg, Washington, summed up the process:
The unlikely candidate who defeated Nader, forty-one-year-old David Cobb, said that he would campaign vigorously for all Green candidates in the forty states not considered critical to the outcome of the presidential race. [9] He will be the Green Party candidate on the ballot in all the states that supported Nader, including the biggest, California, as well as Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont. The spectacle of rural states blocking progressive states is an old one in America: it appears in the guise of the electoral college, which overrides any popular vote. The breakdown of the delegate allocation at the convention reveals exactly how that worked. [10]
Had the contest been decided by "one person equals one vote," the Nader/Camejo ticket easily would have been the overwhelming winner; among Greens, the polls show 70 percent support for Nader. [11] While California only had about one-seventh of the delegates at the convention, they represent over one-half of the registered Greens in the country. David Cobb, a Texan who moved to California, won only 5,000 votes, or 10 percent, in the California primary. As a stand-in for Ralph Nader, Peter Camejo won 76 percent, or 33,000 votes, in the California primary, but nationally he had less than half the number of delegates that Cobb claimed. This was on the basis, in many cases, of meetings of less than a hundred Greens in various states without a ballot primary. Those who could afford to go were given delegate status, regardless of whether they faithfully reflected the vote on the candidates.
Moreover, many of the delegates claiming to favor other candidates or to be uncommitted in order to be sent to the convention may have intended to vote for Cobb all along, as soon as they were released from their state mandates after the first round of voting. Some of the most prominent longtime allies of John Rensenbrink, like Tony Affigne from Rhode Island, arrived in Milwaukee as nominally undecided delegates. In several states a significant number of Nader/Camejo or Lorna Salzman votes in the first round turned to Cobb/LaMarche votes in the second round.
As Kevin McKeown, mayor of Santa Monica, California, explained: "In the first round on Saturday, our California delegates were bound to the statewide primary results from March. California cast thirteen votes for Cobb out of our 132 delegate seats, based on his 10 percent showing in the California primary."
"In the second round, it became apparent that Cobb had organized at the county level, particularly in the Bay Area, to get his delegates appointed. When they were released from the primary vote mandate of all California Greens, they switched to Cobb." This meant an extra twenty-six votes for Cobb. "The shift in the California vote alone was enough to put Cobb over the top. If California had again voted the primary outcome of 10 percent Cobb in round two, Cobb would not have had a majority." [12]
As one delegate, Ken Smith, reported: "The only other person waiting with me was sitting two chairs over to my right, and she was our Lorna Salzman team leader. I could swear she also had a Nader/Camejo poster, but in the second round it somehow transformed itself into a Cobb sign.
"The first person to arrive on the left of this so-called Lorna Salzman California delegation row ... was Medea Benjamin. Medea placed three Cobb posters on the chairs to my left, and a second woman with a Cobb sign then sat down on my right. Now why would I think that maybe there was some type of a preplanned conspiracy?"
In the decisive second round, in which Nader/Camejo delegates and those of other candidates supporting that ticket were asked to vote for no nomination, the tally was Cobb, 408; No Nominee, 308; Mesplay, 43; Beeman, 8; abstain, 3.
John Rensenbrink's Maine delegation cast all but one vote for Cobb. In Missouri, a state which has long had a large left Green community in St. Louis that is not actively involved in the party, Dee Berty of Kansas City delivered all her state's votes to Cobb.
Blair Bobier of the Pacific Green Party in Oregon delivered virtually all his state's votes to Cobb. Texas alone cast 34-1 votes for Cobb on the basis of a meeting not much larger than the number of delegates. Georgia chose its delegates at a small meeting far removed from Atlanta during the heightened security of the G8 Summit when travel and lodging were difficult to arrange. As a result, the Georgia State Green Convention that sent twelve delegates to Milwaukee -- eleven obligated to voting for Cobb -- had a grand total of seventeen people in attendance.
In Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Montana the influence of the old New Party chapters that entered the Greens there was decisive.
The Anybody-But-Bush syndrome prevailed at this convention, and John Rensenbrink was honored in the final moments with an orchestrated homage. The Greens will probably come to regret their rigging of the tally in order to stop Nader. The low vote in November for the Cobb/LaMarche ticket will disappoint and anger those Greens who have invested their hopes in the party. There will be a considerable price paid in ballot lines by the less-secure states who depend on a certain percentage of the vote to stay on the ballot.
On the other hand, it is clear that the Greens for Nader and the Green Alliance do not intend to leave the party or allow themselves to be pushed out by the Rensenbrink wing. To the would-be terminators, the left wing of the Greens promises, "We'll be back."
***
Suicide Right on the Stage: The Demise of the Green Party
By Jeffrey St. Clair Published on http://www.counterpunch.org, July 2, 2004
So this is what alternative politics in America has degenerated to: Pat LaMarche, the newly minted vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party, has announced that she might not even vote for herself in the fall elections. The Greens, always a skittish bunch, are so traumatized by the specter of Bush and Cheney that they've offered up their own party -- born out of rage at decades of betrayal by Democrats from Carter to Clinton -- as a kind of private contractor for the benefit of those very same Democratic Party power brokers.
Take a close look at what LaMarche, a not-ready-for-primetime radio "personality," had to say to say to her hometown newspaper in Maine only days after winning the nomination in Milwaukee.
"If the race is tight, I'll vote for Kerry," LaMarche said. "I love my country. But we should ask them that, because if Dick Cheney loved his country, he wouldn't be voting for himself."
This is the sound a political party makes as it commits suicide.
LaMarche's running mate, David Cobb, is no better. The obscure lawyer from Texas is a dull and spiritless candidate, handled by some truly unsavory advisers (more on them in future columns). In action, he functions as a kind of bland political zombie from a Roger Corman flick, lumbering across the progressive landscape from Oregon to Wisconsin and back again, to the tune of his liberal political masters. The tune? The familiar refrain of "Anybody But Bush."
Bland, yes, but it worked, thanks to the likes of Medea Benjamin and the pompous Ted Glick. At their recent convention in Milwaukee, the Green Party, heavily infiltrated by Democratic Party operatives, rejected the ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo in favor of the sour campaign of Cobb and LaMarche.
This won't harm Nader much. Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the Green Party's encyclopedic platform, Nader can now distill the themes of his campaign to the most potent elements (war, jobs, corruption, and the environment) and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader can, if he chooses (and he should), focus his efforts only on the battleground states, where Kerry must either confront Nader's issues or lose the election. It's as simple as that.
The fatal damage in Milwaukee was done to the Green Party itself, where Cobb and his cohort sabotaged the aspirations of thousands of Greens who had labored for more than a decade to build their party into a national political force, capable of winning a few seats here and there and, even more importantly, defeating Democrats who behave like Republicans (d. Al Gore). The fruits of all that intense grassroots organizing were destroyed in an instant.
But behold: the rebuffed Nader continues to poll nearly 6 percent without the Green Party behind him. Yet, you can't discern Cobb's numbers with an electron microscope. Of course, the pungent irony is that's precisely the way Cobb and his backers want it.
So, the Greens have succeeded in doing what seemed impossible only months ago: they've made the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich, which still chugs along claiming micro-victory after micro-victory long after the close of the primaries (indeed there have been more victories after the polls closed than before), seem like a credible political endeavor. Of course, Cobb and Kucinich share the same objective function: to lure progressives away from Nader and back into the plantation house of the Democratic Party.
But at least Kucinich remained a Democrat. Cobb and LaMarche were supposedly leaders of a political party that formed not in opposition to Republicans, but from outrage at the rightward and irredeemable drift of the Democratic Party. Apparently, the Green Party has not only lost its mind, it's lost its entire central nervous system, including the spine -- especially its spine. They've surrendered to the politics of fear. And once the white flag is raised there's little chance of recovering the ground you've given up.
Always nearly immobilized by an asphyxiating devotion to political correctness, the Green Party has now taken this obsession to its logical extreme by nominating a pair of political cretins at the top of its ticket. Under the false banner of the Cobb/LaMarche campaign, the Green Party is instructing its members to vote for its candidates only in states where their vote doesn't matter. This is the so-called safe-state strategy.
Safe? Safe for whom? Not for Afghan or Iraqi citizens. Not for U.S. troops. Not for the detainees at Gitmo, Bagram, or Abu Ghraib. Not for migrant farm laborers or steelworkers. Not for the welfare mother or the two million souls rotting in American prisons. Not for the spotted owl, the streams of Appalachia, or the rain forests of Alaska. Not for the residents of Cancer Alley or the peasants of Colombia or teenage girls slaving away in Nike's toxic Indonesia sneaker mills. Not for the Palestinians, the Lakota of Pine Ridge, or elementary school students from the hard streets of Oakland. Not for the hopeless denizens of death row or three-strikers in for life for a gram of crack or gays hoping to unite in marriage or even cancer patients seeking simple herbal relief from excruciating pain.
A crucial player in this unsavory affair was Medea Benjamin, the diva of Global Exchange. In rationalizing her decisive vote backing the Cobb/LaMarche ticket, Benjamin emitted this profundity: "John Kerry is not George Bush." Apparently, that tiny sliver of genetic variation is all it comes down to these days.
Yes, Medea, you're right. Kerry is simply Kerry, a bona fide war criminal, with a record of political infamy that is just as malodorous as that of George Bush -- only it's longer. Over the past four years, Kerry has been complicit in the enactment of some of Bush's most disgusting policies. Indeed, these days Kerry offers himself up mainly as a more competent manager of the Bush agenda, a steadier hand on the helm of the Empire.
Kerry stands unapologetically for nearly every issue that caused the Greens to bolt the Democratic Party. He was present at the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council, the claque of neoliberals that seeks to purge the Democratic Party of every last vestige of progressivism and reshape it as a hawkish and pro-business party with a soft spot for abortion -- essentially a stingier version of the Rockefeller Republicans.
Kerry enthusiastically backed both of Bush's wars and now, at the very moment Bush is signaling a desire to retreat, the senator is calling for twenty-five thousand new troops to be sent to Iraq, where under his plan the U.S. military will remain entrenched for at least the next four years.
Kerry supported the Patriot Act without reservation or even much contemplation. Lest you conclude that this was a momentary aberration sparked by the post-September 11 hysteria, consider the fact that Kerry also voted for the two Clinton-era predecessors to the Patriot Act, the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Counter-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which were just as bad if not worse.
Although he regularly hams it up in photo ops with the barons of big labor, Kerry voted for NAFTA, the WTO, and virtually every other job-slashing trade pact that has come before the Senate. Kerry, who has courted and won the endorsement of nearly every police association in the nation, regularly calls for putting another one hundred thousand cops on the streets and even tougher criminal sanctions against victimless crimes. He refused to reconsider his fervid support for the insane war on drug users, which has destroyed families and clogged our prisons with more than two million people, many of them young Black men, whom the draconian drug laws specifically target without mercy. Kerry backs the racist death penalty and mandatory minimum sentences.
A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Black Caucus jeered Ralph Nader when he spoke to them about his campaign, a bizarre reception for a man who has been a tireless advocate for civil rights and poor people. If this group of legislators actually cared about the welfare of their constituents, instead of merely their sinecure within the party, they would hire the twin dominatrixes of Abu Ghraib, Lynddie England and Sabrina Harman, to clip a dog leash on Kerry (who disgustingly said he'd like to become the second Black president) to interrogate him about his dreadful record on civil rights when he comes calling seeking their support. Of course, they won't. The Congressional Black Caucus is perhaps the only political conclave with clout as vaporous as the Greens.
Kerry, and his top adviser Rand Beers (a veteran of the Clinton and Bush National Security Council), crafted Plan Colombia, the brutal and toxic war on Andean peasants, waged for the benefit of oil companies under the phoney rubric of drug eradication. His scrawny energy plan, devoid of any real emphasis on conservation or solar power, calls for more offshore oil leasing, widespread natural gas drilling, transcontinental pipelines, and strip-mining for coal. His deficit-fixated economic policy, scripted by Wall Street bond tycoon Robert Rubin, is even more austere than Clinton's.
Like Joe Lieberman, Kerry markets himself as a cultural prude, regularly chiding teens about the kind of clothes they wear, the music they listen to, and the movies they watch. But even Lieberman didn't go so far as to support the censorious Communications Decency Act. Kerry did. Fortunately, even this Supreme Court had the sense to strike the law down, ruling that it trampled across the First Amendment.
All of this is standard fare for contemporary Democrats. But Kerry always goes the extra mile. The senator cast a crucial vote for Clinton's wretched bill to dismantle welfare for poor mothers and their children and, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he continues to hail the mean-spirited measure as a tremendous success.
This is merely a precis of the grim resume of the man the Green Party now supports through the proxy candidacy of David Cobb. The message of the Cobb campaign is: a vote for Cobb is a vote for Kerry. Translation: a vote for Cobb is a vote for war, and everything that goes along with it.
It's also a vote for political self-annihilation. David Cobb is the Jim Jones of the Green Party. Form a line and pass the Kool-Aid.
Risk-free voting? I wouldn't bet your life on it.
***
Why I Changed My Voter Registration Today
By Norman Solomon
Published on http://www.commondreams.org
June 28, 2004
This morning I mailed a form changing my party registration from "decline to state" to the Green Party. It's a tiny individual step in response to a hugely important collective action -- the party's decision at its National Convention to nominate David Cobb for president.
A majority of the delegates went for a candidate who relied on grassroots organizing and respectful debate. Cobb won the nomination after proving his capacity to engage in substantive dialogue with Green Party activists and other progressives. Without that capacity, he probably wouldn't have ended up taking his position in favor of a "safe states" approach to this year's presidential race.
How thoroughly Cobb and his running mate, Pat LaMarche, will implement such a strategy remains to be seen. Hopefully, history will record that in 2004 the Green ticket boosted the party's strength among progressives nationwide while making common cause with the wide array of movements determined to prevent a victory for the Bush-Cheney gang on Election Day.
As a practical matter, ending the George W. Bush presidency on November 2 will require sufficient votes for John Kerry in most of the twenty or so swing states: Oregon and Washington; Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado; Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Delaware; New Hampshire and Maine; West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana; and, of course, Florida.
(Since I live in California, where Kerry is running twelve to fifteen points ahead of Bush, I'm safely voting for Cobb. But if I lived in one of the twenty closely fought swing states, I'd vote for Kerry.)
With the swing states all too close for comfort, activists should be emphatic that the Green Party's presidential campaign this year ought to concentrate its efforts on "safe states" -- where the Bush-Kerry race isn't close.
The Green Party should not be at cross purposes with the progressive movements struggling to end the Bush presidency. People in those movements will long remember, for good or ill, how the Green Party conducts itself between now and the day that seals the fate of the Bush White House.
One of the potential key benefits of Cobb's nomination is that he seems genuinely interested in hearing -- and being responsive to -- grassroots activists. This is a refreshing and vital departure for a Green Party presidential nominee. So, more than ever, it's time for activists to speak up.
If strategic thinking prevails, the possibility exists that the Green Party in 2004 will strengthen itself from the bottom up while also providing tangible solidarity in the national effort to defeat Bush. If the Green Party proves equal to this momentous task, it could open up new possibilities for the years and decades ahead.
***
A Reply to Norman Solomon and Medea Benjamin: Believing in a Green Resistance
By Todd Chretien Published on http://www.counterpunch.org, July 26, 2004
The great immigrant revolutionary, abolitionist, and supporter of women's rights Thomas Paine made the point in 1776 that in order to win any meaningful battle, it is necessary not only to fight when it is easy. It is necessary to fight, and in fact, it is especially important to fight, when all "pragmatic" opinion counsels compromise, retreat, and surrender. Had Washington's army sued for peace in 1776 at Valley Forge, then the world's first representative democracy would never have been born.
Visionary abolitionist Frederick Douglass advised John Brown to abort his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry not because he opposed the rebellion, but because he believed it could not succeed in its tactics. However, when John Brown was executed by the slave power, Douglass lauded him as the "man who started the war that ended slavery."
In 1937, Congress of Industrial Organizations union leader John Lewis dared the government to break the auto sit-down strikes and "shoot him first." The auto bosses and Roosevelt backed down, and we can thank the Flint rebels for the remnants of unions we still have today.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, touching off a direct-action movement that bucked those who advised to let the apartheid courts work with "all deliberate speed." The racist backlash was intense and led to the deaths, beatings, and jailings of thousands of young Black and white freedom fighters. But Jim Crow died as well.
Any serious consideration of American history shows that Thomas Paine was right. Independence, abolition, unions, civil rights, suffrage, abortion, Stonewall. All great rebellions and reforms came into being because the minority who advocated "unreasonable" demands refused to disorganize their forces under the pressure of majority opinion. Instead, they held to their principles, gathered their forces, weathered the storm, and showed friend and foe alike that "truth and not lies are the motor force of history."
Today, we are at an historical crossroads. Bush has set the world on fire. He has invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti; cheered on the Israeli war against the Palestinians; shredded our civil liberties with the Patriot Act; and wants to codify his version of the Old Testament into a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He wants to outlaw abortion and doesn't believe in global warming. No doubt, he is a danger to the planet.
However, rather than opposing this madness, John Kerry has helped Bush light the matches. He voted for the invasions and wants to send more troops. He promises more, more, more of the same for Sharon's dirty war, and adds that we should get tough with Venezuela. He voted for the Patriot Act and vows to intensify the "war on terror" if elected. There are, of course, some differences. Kerry does not want to write his anti-gay marriage bigotry into the form of an amendment. He believes in global warming but thinks any radical action to reverse it will hurt American corporate power. He says he will appoint pro-abortion federal judges, but will follow Clinton's policy of slowly outlawing abortion to the young and the poor.
Unfortunately, many "sunshine patriots" are demanding that the antiwar movement that put over a million people in the streets in the spring of 2003 now line up behind a pro-war candidate. This is especially wrongheaded timing because the majority of the country is turning against the war and occupation. Medea Benjamin, Peter Coyote, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich, Norman Solomon, and many other liberal and progressive leaders tell us that a Kerry regime "would be less dangerous" than Bush. This may or may not be true. Remember, it was LBJ who escalated the war in Vietnam, not Nixon. But, even if Kerry is "less dangerous," he will be more capable of wreaking havoc on Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, abortion, gay rights, civil rights, and unions if we sacrifice our political movement to getting behind him.
Tragically, rather than building on the great start we made in 2000 when Ralph Nader won 2.7 million votes for peace and justice, many of the very same people who helped that effort are trying to wreck it this time around. Rather than encouraging the Green Party and all antiwar organizations, unions, and civil rights groups to unite for a progressive campaign aiming to get millions of votes, they are condoning, if not actually leading, a campaign to vilify as "Republican dupes" those movement organizers and ordinary people who believe Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo are right to fight for the chance to carry our mobilization for peace and justice into the ballot box.
In Los Angeles in 2000, Democratic Party leaders stood on the balcony of the Staples Center and watched the LAPD teargas thousands of protesters. It seems to me that if we can't build a movement that learns not to vote for a party that directs police assaults on us, we don't have much hope of ever building a political challenge to corporate America. No doubt, the debate over presidential tactics will sharply separate many of us who have worked closely together in the past and will again in the future. While all of us who want a better world should argue respectfully, debate we must because the stakes are too high to hold our tongues.
Norman Solomon wrote last month that he was registering Green precisely because its National Convention nominated a candidate who promised not to challenge the two-party system where it counts. He joins the chorus of liberal voices who warn us that "this is not the year." But he is wrong. As Paine, Douglass, Parks, Lewis, Malcolm, Mario, Gurley-Flynn, and countless others understood, any movement that ever aims to win must learn to stand up for itself precisely when it is darkest. That's the only way the millions of people who hate the system that oppresses them can ever gain confidence in us to join us and transform our movement from a minority affair of protest into a majority tide of power. For whatever my effort is worth, I am registering Green this year because most of the people I know in the Green Party refused, and are refusing, to submit to the duopoly blackmail. Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo can't change tile system by themselves, but every vote they receive will show the world that there are millions here in the United States who intend to conquer the hell of corporate power and the tyranny it rains down on the planet.
Hang on Citizen Paine, we're coming.
***
Growing the Green Party
By David Cobb
In These Times
July 16, 2004
Here's a story that you won't see in the corporate media: The Green Party is growing -- getting bigger, stronger, and better-organized in every election cycle. Even after the infamous 2000 presidential election, when the media and Democrats blamed us for Bush's selection and ignored the blatantly illegal and biased behavior of Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and a Republican Supreme Court majority, our numbers have grown.
In 1996, the Green Party was organized in ten states, guaranteed a ballot line in just five, and had elected forty officeholders. Today, we have parties organized in forty-four states, twenty-three with guaranteed ballot access, and hundreds of Greens elected to public office, including the mayors of Santa Monica, California, and New Paltz, New York, and the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And, for the first time in our party's history, we have two registered Greens as our presidential and vice presidential candidates, myself and Patricia LaMarche, respectively.
The goals of the Cobb/LaMarche campaign are to present a genuine, progressive alternative, grow the Green Party, and have this year's election culminate with the removal of the White House's illegitimate occupant.
We are speaking truth to power in this campaign. We are the only party calling for decisive action on catastrophic global climate change and our addiction to fossil fuels, a living wage, universal health care under a national insurance plan, real steps toward racial equality, an end to the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, and the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
We are also confronting the "spoiler" issue head-on. When this question is raised, it provides us with an opportunity to talk about reforming a flawed electoral system. There isn't a spoiler problem. The problem is an antiquated, antidemocratic electoral system that forces people to vote for a candidate they really don't support in order to keep an even worse candidate out of office. We deserve a more democratic and more efficient electoral system, representing the diversity of people and opinions in our country.
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is one solution. IRV allows people to rank candidates in order of preference so that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win enough votes to make it into a runoff, your second-choice vote is automatically considered. IRV is used to elect officeholders in Australia, Ireland, and London, and is soon to be implemented in San Francisco. (Learn more about IRV, proportional representation, and other reforms to ensure fair elections on the Web site for the Center for Voting & Democracy at http://www.fairvote.org.)
Third parties have played a critical role throughout American history. In their heyday, third parties elected mayors, governors, and members of Congress. In fact, the entire social fabric of our society was woven from ideas that originated within third parties: the abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, Social Security, the 40-hour workweek and the direct election of U.S. senators, to name just a few.
What we are trying to accomplish through our work with the Green Party is greater than anyone campaign or anyone election. We are in this for the long haul. One of the key steps to growing our party and eliminating a dangerous global threat is ensuring the removal of George W. Bush from office. Bush is a huge problem. But he is not the problem. The problem is a corporate-military-industrial-prison-judicial system that is destroying the planet. We need to address the larger problem, but we also need to remove the most immediate threat to global peace -- and that means getting Bush out of office.
I am in no way suggesting that anyone vote for John Kerry. Kerry is a corporatist and a militarist who supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the passage of the Patriot Act. He also opposes real universal health care and a living wage. However, although the differences between Bush and Kerry may be incremental, they are not inconsequential.
In forty or so states the electoral college votes have, for all intents and purposes, already been cast. For example, Massachusetts, California, and New York will go to the Democrats; Utah, Wyoming, and Texas to the Republicans. In these states, where our message is "Don't waste your vote," a vote for the Green Party is a powerful tool. In the battleground states that will decide the election, we understand if you won't vote for our ticket this time. That's okay. A vote is a powerful and personal decision. You can register Green and support us in every other way possible, especially with votes for state and local Green candidates and contributions of your time and money.
With the strategy we have articulated, we will grow the Green Party, provide voters with a genuine alternative, and make the world a safer and saner place to live.
***
Rigged Convention, Divided Party: How David Cobb Became the Green Nominee Even Though He Only Got 12 Percent of the Votes
By Carol Miller and Forrest Hill
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
August 7, 2004
How did David Cobb become the Green Party presidential nominee against the overwhelming majority of the Green Party?
The answer is quite simple. The Green Party followed a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic and allowed the will of its members to be manipulated.
Primaries: The Will of the Voter
In five states, registered Green Party members, who are the rank and file of the party, had the opportunity to vote in a presidential primary. These five primaries represent the majority of registered Greens in the country.
The five primaries took place in California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island. The total number of votes cast for a presidential candidate as recorded by Ballot Access News was 45,733.
The results from these primaries for the leading three candidates are as follows:
In the three largest states, California, Massachusetts, and New Mexico, David Cobb was defeated. In California he was beaten six to one by Camejo, and Lorna Salzman almost tied him for second place. In Massachusetts he was beaten by Lorna Salzman and in New Mexico by Carol Miller. Both Lorna Salzman and Carol Miller endorsed the Nader/Camejo campaign.
In D.C., Cobb received 37 percent of all votes cast. The total number of votes cast in the Washington, D.C., primary, including write-in votes, was 374. Cobb faced only one local opponent, yet received only 138 votes!
In Rhode Island, the one state in which Cobb actually won more than 50 percent of the vote, only eighty-nine votes were cast. The primary ballot included only Kent Mesplay and Cobb. It did not even include New York's presidential nominee, Lorna Salzman. The vote was seventy-one for Cobb and eighteen for Mesplay.
Overall, the total primary vote for candidates who support Nader/Camejo was over 83 percent compared to Cobb's 12.2 percent. Where Greens actually were able to vote, Cobb was roundly defeated.
Nominating Meetings: The Will of the Few and Selected
In all other states Green Party delegates were chosen at nominating meetings. These meetings varied in size but were overall quite small. The national Green Party Web site never reported the number of votes cast at any of the state nominating meetings. This cover-up, whether intentional or not, hid from Greens the small number of voters that were determining how large numbers of delegates were proportioned between the candidates.
Nor did the Web site explain the delegate formula or justify the size of each state's delegation so that Greens could follow the process. In fact the formula completely ignores the number of Greens registered in each state as a determinant for the number of delegates. Most Greens assumed that delegates were proportioned according to a one person, one vote system as any democratic organization would normally assume.
Only the Cobb campaign organized a turnout of their supporters for these nominating meetings. This enabled Cobb to appear to have a higher percentage of support than he would gain if local Greens had an easier way of expressing their views, such as a primary.
In caucuses where the turnout was relatively large, Cobb often did poorly. But in some cases Cobb supporters were able to get around their low vote count by packing the delegation selection. For example, in Maine, where Nader's name was on the ballot, Nader defeated Cobb 52-42 (the remaining sixty-five votes went to thirteen other candidates). These votes represent 33 percent for Nader and 26 percent for Cobb. Yet during the vote at the convention in Milwaukee, eighteen out of nineteen Maine delegates voted for Cobb and one voted for Nader, or 95 percent for Cobb and 5 percent for Nader.
Democratic Violation of "One Person, One Vote"
Even this one-sided, basically one-candidate campaign could never have led to a Cobb victory at the convention without the help of a second undemocratic factor. The Green Party does not use a one person, one vote system but instead has an electoral college system that punishes states like California for its success in recruiting tens of thousands of Greens, while rewarding states that have only a small membership. Unlike the national electoral college, the Green Party's weighted voting gives some states hundreds of times more votes per Green member than other states.
For example, in Iowa there is officially no Green Party. The state liquidated it after they failed to reach the 2 percent threshold for their gubernatorial candidate in 2002. However, Iowa had nine delegates to the Green Party convention. There are ninety people registered as Greens in Iowa and over 150,000 registered Greens in California. Thus, in Iowa for every ten registered Green Party members there was one delegate to the nominating convention. If the party were to weigh all its members equally, then California would have received over 16,500 delegates instead of 132. The ninety Greens in Iowa had as much power in the party as 11,363 members in California.
Imagine a party in which candidate A gets 11,300 votes and candidate B gets 90 votes, and candidate B is declared the winner. Unfortunately, that party's name was the Green Party at the Milwaukee convention.
It is disturbing that while the Green Party platform opposes the electoral college and favors "one person, one vote," it does not practice what it preaches. Without the undemocratic voting process implemented by the national coordinating committee, Cobb had no chance of winning after the primary vote in California and the heavy opposition to his candidacy in other major states like New York and New Jersey.
Denying Candidates the Right to Appoint Their Delegates
But even taking into account this undemocratic ratio of representation that worked mightily for Cobb, he was still unable to win outright. He just didn't have enough delegates. To win the nomination, his supporters were allowed to alter the decisions of the small state meetings and primaries. This last nondemocratic step was achieved because Green Party rules do not allow a candidate chosen by its rank and file to appoint their delegates like all other parties have in American history. The only requirement for becoming a delegate is simply having the ability to attend the convention. Thus, whichever candidate can get their supporters to the convention can end up winning regardless of the votes of the primaries or caucuses, as in Maine.
In this manner Cobb was able to take delegate votes from other candidates. This was achieved simply by having his supporters show up and cast their votes for him after the first round of voting. Examples where this practice was highly evident include Maine, Missouri, California, and Texas.
In Maryland, two Cobb delegates attempted to become a Nader delegate and a Carol Miller delegate prior to the convention. They were only stopped because a Nader supporter prevented them from doing so by making it publicly clear that they were in fact Cobb supporters.
In California Cobb supporters were able to turn his 12 percent support in the primaries into a delegate vote of 26 percent by packing the delegation. Specifically, twenty-two votes shifted to Cobb during the second round of voting. These votes are equal to the margin by which Cobb won the election.
In effect the Green Party picks its presidential candidate not based on the will of its members but by discriminating against Greens in some states, and in the end, by allowing anyone to become a delegate who can show up at the convention. Cobb's support at most reflects but a small percentage of Greens. The overwhelming majority of the rank-and-file members opposed his candidacy.
Fighting Back
Cobb's amazing rise from 12 percent in the primaries against 83 percent for pro-Nader candidates to a majority at the convention was due to a well-organized campaign to turn a minority view in the Green Party into what appeared as a majority decision at the convention.
Behind the Cobb phenomenon is a very real political difference in the Green Party. As many articles have pointed out, the party is divided between those who want to oppose the two parties of money and those who support voting for the lesser of two evils to help prevent a Republican victory. Cobb represents a political capitulation away from our independence from the two corporate-controlled parties.
The nomination of Cobb is a step backward, away from an uncompromising challenge to the two-party "duopoly" and away from the prominence that the Greens have achieved, thanks in good part to Nader's 2000 campaign. It is time we take back the Green Party from those who want to capitulate to the Democratic Party!
How the Greens Chose Kerry over Nader
By Walt Contreras Sheasby
Published on http://www.unrepentantnadervoter.com.
July 19, 2004
The battleground at the Green Party National Convention on June 23-29 stretched from the West (Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico) to the Great Lakes (Minnesota and Wisconsin) and the corners of the Atlantic coast (Maine and Florida). Those are the seven Unsafe States with Green ballot lines, and denying those ballot lines to Ralph Nader was the mission accomplished at the convention in Minneapolis. David Cobb won the election with 408 of 770 ballots cast, based on the strength of his support in places like Montana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and, of course, his native state of Texas. [1] The urban branches of the party were overcome largely by bending the rural twigs sprouting in Bush country.
From the Green Politics Network to the Cobb/LaMarche Debacle
The convention result was largely engineered by veterans of the Green Politics Network (GPN), which was founded in spring 1992 by John Rensenbrink, Dee Berry, and others opposed to the "Fundi radicalism" of the early Greens. There had been a national Green organization called the Greens/Green Party USA since 1991, growing out of the Committees of Correspondence formed in St. Paul in 1984. The GPN, however, shunned these radicals and hoped to link up electoral-oriented pragmatic reformers into a confederation based on state parties rather than membership locals.
In 1995-96 many of the radicals balked at a presidential campaign, while others worked on the search for a candidate. According to Patrick Mazza of the Oregon Pacific Party, "In states such as Ohio and Texas, G/GPUSA activists blocked efforts to put Nader on the ballot."
Immediately after the election on November 16-17, 1996, an invitation-only meeting of sixty-two Nader supporters was held at the Glen-Ora Farm in Middleburg, forty miles west of Washington, D.C. This historic farm had been surveyed by George Washington at age sixteen. It seems appropriate now that after gathering in a room where JFK used to hold meetings after his election in 1960, many attendees then are now supporting another JFK in 2004.
When Howie Hawkins, a leader of the Greens/Green Party USA and a New York Nader campaigner came to Glen-Ora, he was blocked from entering on the first day, and on the second day, as Mazza put it, "Hawkins was told in no uncertain terms the new organization is a fait accompli."
Rensenbrink announced that it "has been a long, arduous, often agonizing journey," but the Middleburg Meeting "heralds the emergence, at last, of a viable, vigorous, and facilitative Association of State Green Parties (ASGP)."
Nader told the sixty-two ASGP founders at Middleburg that "whoever's going to go for the Democratic nomination in 2000 has got to realize they are going to lose if they don't stop the drift into the corporate maul." [2] The cards were all on the table four years before Nader's second Green campaign, but as the election neared November 2000, the GPN veterans and some Nader novices began to urge their candidate to take a dive.
Nader had written the forward to Rensenbrink's Against All Odds: The Green Transformation of American Politics in 1999, and had told left Greens that the author was a sterling radical and to be trusted, but within a year Rensenbrink was openly venomous toward his former mutual admirer. Rensenbrink conceals his personal rancor in a jumble of indictments that are taken at face value by the liberal media and Green novices: "[Nader] doesn't want to be a Green, he runs with his coterie rather than party organizers, he doesn't involve local Green leaders and he doesn't get the racial issue. I fear if Nader runs, he'll drag down every other Green in this country."[3]
As the A.P. wire reported on June 23, 2004, "Delegate John Rensenbrink of Maine said he was a Nader adviser but had to break with the candidate over his insistence on running an aggressive campaign in swing states, believing it could lead to Bush's reelection. While no backer of John Kerry, Rensenbrink believes the Democrat is the lesser of two evils." Apparently even less of an evil than Nader himself.
Pot-Boiling the Twigs
Various anti-Nader, Anybody-But-Bush, and openly pro-Kerry Web sites and listservs all tried to influence gullible Greens before the convention. The GreensforKerry.com Web site (registered through Go-Daddy.com) was revealed as belonging to NextGeneration.org, a campaign consulting firm mostly for environmental causes but also working for Democratic politicians. [4]
A mass e-mail letter was sent to Greens by Jeff Bennett in San Francisco, who claimed to be a member since 1998, saying: "It is shocking to me that the Green Party would even consider endorsing Ralph Nader for president this year. ... But now I see that the Green Party leaders might not be working for environmental protections and social justice at all. Maybe they just want to break the two-party system, even if they break the planet in the process." No one in the Greens in the Bay Area recalled ever seeing or hearing the name of the sender.
Not to be outdone by covert Democrats, seven Green Party politicians, headed by David Segal, a city councilor in Providence, Rhode Island, formed Greens for Impact (GFI) to "encourage voters in swing states to vote for John Kerry in the general election." Segal revealed that the real aim of the Rensenbrinkians was not independent political action but dependent political action, as with the German Greens: "Though small, the Green Party sometimes has enough sway to change the outcome of an election, but as a party that does not believe in fascism and extortion, our segment of the progressive movement must work together with the dominant left-of-center party, as our fellow Green Party members in Europe and many other nations have done." [5]
The most ambitious effort was funded by George Soros through the Democrats' 527 groups, [6] three of which combined to focus their anti-Nader TV advertising firepower on six states that were decided by two percentage points or less in 2000 -- Wisconsin, New Mexico, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Oregon. In addition the groups formed TheNaderFactor.com to also beam Internet pleas by repentant Greens and Naderites. [7]
The Real Strategy
To deny those six or more states to Nader, primary battles had to first be won in as many of the forty-five states with delegates as possible, even though only twenty-three states have a ballot line at the moment. In fact, some of the key skirmishes were in states that failed to get a Green line this year, such as Texas and Illinois. Other delegates were selected by relatively small Green formations in the South, stretching from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia to North Carolina and Virginia, all states without a ballot primary which nevertheless chose and sent delegates to keep Nader off the ballot in other states.
Belinda Coppernoll, secretary of the Green Alliance, the left tendency in the Green Party, and a delegate from Ellensburg, Washington, summed up the process:
The GPUS Coordinating Council (aka GPCC), which is the national leadership and governing group, is made up of two GPUS reps from each state; was heavily dominated by pro-Cobb leaders who pushed the pro-Cobb agenda for the last year relentlessly. Several in the GPUS leadership were responsible for Nader not seeking the GP nomination last fall when he went out on his exploratory committee. These same aggressive anti-Nader Greens dominated the Steering Committee as well, and the Rules/Procedures, Convention committees. They used their internal power to get the nominee they had pre-selected (Cobb) and tried to use a variety of manipulative tactics and undemocratic processes in their quest to stop Nader/Camejo from winning the GP endorsement or even sharing it with David Cobb, so there would be two progressive choices on the ballot lines. Little was fair or balanced in the conduct of this nominating election process. [8]
The unlikely candidate who defeated Nader, forty-one-year-old David Cobb, said that he would campaign vigorously for all Green candidates in the forty states not considered critical to the outcome of the presidential race. [9] He will be the Green Party candidate on the ballot in all the states that supported Nader, including the biggest, California, as well as Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont. The spectacle of rural states blocking progressive states is an old one in America: it appears in the guise of the electoral college, which overrides any popular vote. The breakdown of the delegate allocation at the convention reveals exactly how that worked. [10]
Had the contest been decided by "one person equals one vote," the Nader/Camejo ticket easily would have been the overwhelming winner; among Greens, the polls show 70 percent support for Nader. [11] While California only had about one-seventh of the delegates at the convention, they represent over one-half of the registered Greens in the country. David Cobb, a Texan who moved to California, won only 5,000 votes, or 10 percent, in the California primary. As a stand-in for Ralph Nader, Peter Camejo won 76 percent, or 33,000 votes, in the California primary, but nationally he had less than half the number of delegates that Cobb claimed. This was on the basis, in many cases, of meetings of less than a hundred Greens in various states without a ballot primary. Those who could afford to go were given delegate status, regardless of whether they faithfully reflected the vote on the candidates.
Moreover, many of the delegates claiming to favor other candidates or to be uncommitted in order to be sent to the convention may have intended to vote for Cobb all along, as soon as they were released from their state mandates after the first round of voting. Some of the most prominent longtime allies of John Rensenbrink, like Tony Affigne from Rhode Island, arrived in Milwaukee as nominally undecided delegates. In several states a significant number of Nader/Camejo or Lorna Salzman votes in the first round turned to Cobb/LaMarche votes in the second round.
As Kevin McKeown, mayor of Santa Monica, California, explained: "In the first round on Saturday, our California delegates were bound to the statewide primary results from March. California cast thirteen votes for Cobb out of our 132 delegate seats, based on his 10 percent showing in the California primary."
"In the second round, it became apparent that Cobb had organized at the county level, particularly in the Bay Area, to get his delegates appointed. When they were released from the primary vote mandate of all California Greens, they switched to Cobb." This meant an extra twenty-six votes for Cobb. "The shift in the California vote alone was enough to put Cobb over the top. If California had again voted the primary outcome of 10 percent Cobb in round two, Cobb would not have had a majority." [12]
As one delegate, Ken Smith, reported: "The only other person waiting with me was sitting two chairs over to my right, and she was our Lorna Salzman team leader. I could swear she also had a Nader/Camejo poster, but in the second round it somehow transformed itself into a Cobb sign.
"The first person to arrive on the left of this so-called Lorna Salzman California delegation row ... was Medea Benjamin. Medea placed three Cobb posters on the chairs to my left, and a second woman with a Cobb sign then sat down on my right. Now why would I think that maybe there was some type of a preplanned conspiracy?"
It's Too Late, Baby, by Carole King
Stayed in bed all mornin' just to pass the time.
There's somethin' wrong here, there can be no denyin'.
One of us is changin', or maybe we've just stopped tryin'.
And it's too late, baby now, it's too late,
Though we really did try to make it.
Somethin' inside has died, and I can't hide,
And I just can't fake it, oh, no, no.
It used to be so easy, livin' here with you.
You were light and breezy, an' I knew just what to do.
Now you look so unhappy, and I feel like a fool.
And it's too late, baby now, it's too late,
Though we really did try to make it.
Somethin' inside has died, and I can't hide,
And I just can't fake it, oh, no, no.
There'll be good times again for me and you,
But we just can't stay together; don't you feel it too?
Still I'm glad for what we had and how I once loved you.
And it's too late, baby now, it's too late,
Though we really did try to make it. (we can't make it)
Somethin' inside has died, and I can't hide,
And I just can't fake it, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's too late baby, it's too late now darling
It's too late.
In the decisive second round, in which Nader/Camejo delegates and those of other candidates supporting that ticket were asked to vote for no nomination, the tally was Cobb, 408; No Nominee, 308; Mesplay, 43; Beeman, 8; abstain, 3.
John Rensenbrink's Maine delegation cast all but one vote for Cobb. In Missouri, a state which has long had a large left Green community in St. Louis that is not actively involved in the party, Dee Berty of Kansas City delivered all her state's votes to Cobb.
Blair Bobier of the Pacific Green Party in Oregon delivered virtually all his state's votes to Cobb. Texas alone cast 34-1 votes for Cobb on the basis of a meeting not much larger than the number of delegates. Georgia chose its delegates at a small meeting far removed from Atlanta during the heightened security of the G8 Summit when travel and lodging were difficult to arrange. As a result, the Georgia State Green Convention that sent twelve delegates to Milwaukee -- eleven obligated to voting for Cobb -- had a grand total of seventeen people in attendance.
In Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Montana the influence of the old New Party chapters that entered the Greens there was decisive.
The Anybody-But-Bush syndrome prevailed at this convention, and John Rensenbrink was honored in the final moments with an orchestrated homage. The Greens will probably come to regret their rigging of the tally in order to stop Nader. The low vote in November for the Cobb/LaMarche ticket will disappoint and anger those Greens who have invested their hopes in the party. There will be a considerable price paid in ballot lines by the less-secure states who depend on a certain percentage of the vote to stay on the ballot.
On the other hand, it is clear that the Greens for Nader and the Green Alliance do not intend to leave the party or allow themselves to be pushed out by the Rensenbrink wing. To the would-be terminators, the left wing of the Greens promises, "We'll be back."
***
Suicide Right on the Stage: The Demise of the Green Party
By Jeffrey St. Clair Published on http://www.counterpunch.org, July 2, 2004
"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive."
-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
So this is what alternative politics in America has degenerated to: Pat LaMarche, the newly minted vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party, has announced that she might not even vote for herself in the fall elections. The Greens, always a skittish bunch, are so traumatized by the specter of Bush and Cheney that they've offered up their own party -- born out of rage at decades of betrayal by Democrats from Carter to Clinton -- as a kind of private contractor for the benefit of those very same Democratic Party power brokers.
Take a close look at what LaMarche, a not-ready-for-primetime radio "personality," had to say to say to her hometown newspaper in Maine only days after winning the nomination in Milwaukee.
"If the race is tight, I'll vote for Kerry," LaMarche said. "I love my country. But we should ask them that, because if Dick Cheney loved his country, he wouldn't be voting for himself."
This is the sound a political party makes as it commits suicide.
LaMarche's running mate, David Cobb, is no better. The obscure lawyer from Texas is a dull and spiritless candidate, handled by some truly unsavory advisers (more on them in future columns). In action, he functions as a kind of bland political zombie from a Roger Corman flick, lumbering across the progressive landscape from Oregon to Wisconsin and back again, to the tune of his liberal political masters. The tune? The familiar refrain of "Anybody But Bush."
Bland, yes, but it worked, thanks to the likes of Medea Benjamin and the pompous Ted Glick. At their recent convention in Milwaukee, the Green Party, heavily infiltrated by Democratic Party operatives, rejected the ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo in favor of the sour campaign of Cobb and LaMarche.
This won't harm Nader much. Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the Green Party's encyclopedic platform, Nader can now distill the themes of his campaign to the most potent elements (war, jobs, corruption, and the environment) and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader can, if he chooses (and he should), focus his efforts only on the battleground states, where Kerry must either confront Nader's issues or lose the election. It's as simple as that.
The fatal damage in Milwaukee was done to the Green Party itself, where Cobb and his cohort sabotaged the aspirations of thousands of Greens who had labored for more than a decade to build their party into a national political force, capable of winning a few seats here and there and, even more importantly, defeating Democrats who behave like Republicans (d. Al Gore). The fruits of all that intense grassroots organizing were destroyed in an instant.
But behold: the rebuffed Nader continues to poll nearly 6 percent without the Green Party behind him. Yet, you can't discern Cobb's numbers with an electron microscope. Of course, the pungent irony is that's precisely the way Cobb and his backers want it.
So, the Greens have succeeded in doing what seemed impossible only months ago: they've made the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich, which still chugs along claiming micro-victory after micro-victory long after the close of the primaries (indeed there have been more victories after the polls closed than before), seem like a credible political endeavor. Of course, Cobb and Kucinich share the same objective function: to lure progressives away from Nader and back into the plantation house of the Democratic Party.
But at least Kucinich remained a Democrat. Cobb and LaMarche were supposedly leaders of a political party that formed not in opposition to Republicans, but from outrage at the rightward and irredeemable drift of the Democratic Party. Apparently, the Green Party has not only lost its mind, it's lost its entire central nervous system, including the spine -- especially its spine. They've surrendered to the politics of fear. And once the white flag is raised there's little chance of recovering the ground you've given up.
Always nearly immobilized by an asphyxiating devotion to political correctness, the Green Party has now taken this obsession to its logical extreme by nominating a pair of political cretins at the top of its ticket. Under the false banner of the Cobb/LaMarche campaign, the Green Party is instructing its members to vote for its candidates only in states where their vote doesn't matter. This is the so-called safe-state strategy.
Safe? Safe for whom? Not for Afghan or Iraqi citizens. Not for U.S. troops. Not for the detainees at Gitmo, Bagram, or Abu Ghraib. Not for migrant farm laborers or steelworkers. Not for the welfare mother or the two million souls rotting in American prisons. Not for the spotted owl, the streams of Appalachia, or the rain forests of Alaska. Not for the residents of Cancer Alley or the peasants of Colombia or teenage girls slaving away in Nike's toxic Indonesia sneaker mills. Not for the Palestinians, the Lakota of Pine Ridge, or elementary school students from the hard streets of Oakland. Not for the hopeless denizens of death row or three-strikers in for life for a gram of crack or gays hoping to unite in marriage or even cancer patients seeking simple herbal relief from excruciating pain.
A crucial player in this unsavory affair was Medea Benjamin, the diva of Global Exchange. In rationalizing her decisive vote backing the Cobb/LaMarche ticket, Benjamin emitted this profundity: "John Kerry is not George Bush." Apparently, that tiny sliver of genetic variation is all it comes down to these days.
Yes, Medea, you're right. Kerry is simply Kerry, a bona fide war criminal, with a record of political infamy that is just as malodorous as that of George Bush -- only it's longer. Over the past four years, Kerry has been complicit in the enactment of some of Bush's most disgusting policies. Indeed, these days Kerry offers himself up mainly as a more competent manager of the Bush agenda, a steadier hand on the helm of the Empire.
Kerry stands unapologetically for nearly every issue that caused the Greens to bolt the Democratic Party. He was present at the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council, the claque of neoliberals that seeks to purge the Democratic Party of every last vestige of progressivism and reshape it as a hawkish and pro-business party with a soft spot for abortion -- essentially a stingier version of the Rockefeller Republicans.
Kerry enthusiastically backed both of Bush's wars and now, at the very moment Bush is signaling a desire to retreat, the senator is calling for twenty-five thousand new troops to be sent to Iraq, where under his plan the U.S. military will remain entrenched for at least the next four years.
Kerry supported the Patriot Act without reservation or even much contemplation. Lest you conclude that this was a momentary aberration sparked by the post-September 11 hysteria, consider the fact that Kerry also voted for the two Clinton-era predecessors to the Patriot Act, the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Counter-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which were just as bad if not worse.
Although he regularly hams it up in photo ops with the barons of big labor, Kerry voted for NAFTA, the WTO, and virtually every other job-slashing trade pact that has come before the Senate. Kerry, who has courted and won the endorsement of nearly every police association in the nation, regularly calls for putting another one hundred thousand cops on the streets and even tougher criminal sanctions against victimless crimes. He refused to reconsider his fervid support for the insane war on drug users, which has destroyed families and clogged our prisons with more than two million people, many of them young Black men, whom the draconian drug laws specifically target without mercy. Kerry backs the racist death penalty and mandatory minimum sentences.
A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Black Caucus jeered Ralph Nader when he spoke to them about his campaign, a bizarre reception for a man who has been a tireless advocate for civil rights and poor people. If this group of legislators actually cared about the welfare of their constituents, instead of merely their sinecure within the party, they would hire the twin dominatrixes of Abu Ghraib, Lynddie England and Sabrina Harman, to clip a dog leash on Kerry (who disgustingly said he'd like to become the second Black president) to interrogate him about his dreadful record on civil rights when he comes calling seeking their support. Of course, they won't. The Congressional Black Caucus is perhaps the only political conclave with clout as vaporous as the Greens.
Kerry, and his top adviser Rand Beers (a veteran of the Clinton and Bush National Security Council), crafted Plan Colombia, the brutal and toxic war on Andean peasants, waged for the benefit of oil companies under the phoney rubric of drug eradication. His scrawny energy plan, devoid of any real emphasis on conservation or solar power, calls for more offshore oil leasing, widespread natural gas drilling, transcontinental pipelines, and strip-mining for coal. His deficit-fixated economic policy, scripted by Wall Street bond tycoon Robert Rubin, is even more austere than Clinton's.
Like Joe Lieberman, Kerry markets himself as a cultural prude, regularly chiding teens about the kind of clothes they wear, the music they listen to, and the movies they watch. But even Lieberman didn't go so far as to support the censorious Communications Decency Act. Kerry did. Fortunately, even this Supreme Court had the sense to strike the law down, ruling that it trampled across the First Amendment.
All of this is standard fare for contemporary Democrats. But Kerry always goes the extra mile. The senator cast a crucial vote for Clinton's wretched bill to dismantle welfare for poor mothers and their children and, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he continues to hail the mean-spirited measure as a tremendous success.
This is merely a precis of the grim resume of the man the Green Party now supports through the proxy candidacy of David Cobb. The message of the Cobb campaign is: a vote for Cobb is a vote for Kerry. Translation: a vote for Cobb is a vote for war, and everything that goes along with it.
It's also a vote for political self-annihilation. David Cobb is the Jim Jones of the Green Party. Form a line and pass the Kool-Aid.
Risk-free voting? I wouldn't bet your life on it.
***
Why I Changed My Voter Registration Today
By Norman Solomon
Published on http://www.commondreams.org
June 28, 2004
This morning I mailed a form changing my party registration from "decline to state" to the Green Party. It's a tiny individual step in response to a hugely important collective action -- the party's decision at its National Convention to nominate David Cobb for president.
A majority of the delegates went for a candidate who relied on grassroots organizing and respectful debate. Cobb won the nomination after proving his capacity to engage in substantive dialogue with Green Party activists and other progressives. Without that capacity, he probably wouldn't have ended up taking his position in favor of a "safe states" approach to this year's presidential race.
How thoroughly Cobb and his running mate, Pat LaMarche, will implement such a strategy remains to be seen. Hopefully, history will record that in 2004 the Green ticket boosted the party's strength among progressives nationwide while making common cause with the wide array of movements determined to prevent a victory for the Bush-Cheney gang on Election Day.
As a practical matter, ending the George W. Bush presidency on November 2 will require sufficient votes for John Kerry in most of the twenty or so swing states: Oregon and Washington; Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado; Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Delaware; New Hampshire and Maine; West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana; and, of course, Florida.
(Since I live in California, where Kerry is running twelve to fifteen points ahead of Bush, I'm safely voting for Cobb. But if I lived in one of the twenty closely fought swing states, I'd vote for Kerry.)
With the swing states all too close for comfort, activists should be emphatic that the Green Party's presidential campaign this year ought to concentrate its efforts on "safe states" -- where the Bush-Kerry race isn't close.
The Green Party should not be at cross purposes with the progressive movements struggling to end the Bush presidency. People in those movements will long remember, for good or ill, how the Green Party conducts itself between now and the day that seals the fate of the Bush White House.
One of the potential key benefits of Cobb's nomination is that he seems genuinely interested in hearing -- and being responsive to -- grassroots activists. This is a refreshing and vital departure for a Green Party presidential nominee. So, more than ever, it's time for activists to speak up.
If strategic thinking prevails, the possibility exists that the Green Party in 2004 will strengthen itself from the bottom up while also providing tangible solidarity in the national effort to defeat Bush. If the Green Party proves equal to this momentous task, it could open up new possibilities for the years and decades ahead.
***
A Reply to Norman Solomon and Medea Benjamin: Believing in a Green Resistance
By Todd Chretien Published on http://www.counterpunch.org, July 26, 2004
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
-- Thomas Paine, The Crisis, 1776
The great immigrant revolutionary, abolitionist, and supporter of women's rights Thomas Paine made the point in 1776 that in order to win any meaningful battle, it is necessary not only to fight when it is easy. It is necessary to fight, and in fact, it is especially important to fight, when all "pragmatic" opinion counsels compromise, retreat, and surrender. Had Washington's army sued for peace in 1776 at Valley Forge, then the world's first representative democracy would never have been born.
Visionary abolitionist Frederick Douglass advised John Brown to abort his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry not because he opposed the rebellion, but because he believed it could not succeed in its tactics. However, when John Brown was executed by the slave power, Douglass lauded him as the "man who started the war that ended slavery."
In 1937, Congress of Industrial Organizations union leader John Lewis dared the government to break the auto sit-down strikes and "shoot him first." The auto bosses and Roosevelt backed down, and we can thank the Flint rebels for the remnants of unions we still have today.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, touching off a direct-action movement that bucked those who advised to let the apartheid courts work with "all deliberate speed." The racist backlash was intense and led to the deaths, beatings, and jailings of thousands of young Black and white freedom fighters. But Jim Crow died as well.
Any serious consideration of American history shows that Thomas Paine was right. Independence, abolition, unions, civil rights, suffrage, abortion, Stonewall. All great rebellions and reforms came into being because the minority who advocated "unreasonable" demands refused to disorganize their forces under the pressure of majority opinion. Instead, they held to their principles, gathered their forces, weathered the storm, and showed friend and foe alike that "truth and not lies are the motor force of history."
Today, we are at an historical crossroads. Bush has set the world on fire. He has invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti; cheered on the Israeli war against the Palestinians; shredded our civil liberties with the Patriot Act; and wants to codify his version of the Old Testament into a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He wants to outlaw abortion and doesn't believe in global warming. No doubt, he is a danger to the planet.
However, rather than opposing this madness, John Kerry has helped Bush light the matches. He voted for the invasions and wants to send more troops. He promises more, more, more of the same for Sharon's dirty war, and adds that we should get tough with Venezuela. He voted for the Patriot Act and vows to intensify the "war on terror" if elected. There are, of course, some differences. Kerry does not want to write his anti-gay marriage bigotry into the form of an amendment. He believes in global warming but thinks any radical action to reverse it will hurt American corporate power. He says he will appoint pro-abortion federal judges, but will follow Clinton's policy of slowly outlawing abortion to the young and the poor.
Unfortunately, many "sunshine patriots" are demanding that the antiwar movement that put over a million people in the streets in the spring of 2003 now line up behind a pro-war candidate. This is especially wrongheaded timing because the majority of the country is turning against the war and occupation. Medea Benjamin, Peter Coyote, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich, Norman Solomon, and many other liberal and progressive leaders tell us that a Kerry regime "would be less dangerous" than Bush. This may or may not be true. Remember, it was LBJ who escalated the war in Vietnam, not Nixon. But, even if Kerry is "less dangerous," he will be more capable of wreaking havoc on Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, abortion, gay rights, civil rights, and unions if we sacrifice our political movement to getting behind him.
Tragically, rather than building on the great start we made in 2000 when Ralph Nader won 2.7 million votes for peace and justice, many of the very same people who helped that effort are trying to wreck it this time around. Rather than encouraging the Green Party and all antiwar organizations, unions, and civil rights groups to unite for a progressive campaign aiming to get millions of votes, they are condoning, if not actually leading, a campaign to vilify as "Republican dupes" those movement organizers and ordinary people who believe Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo are right to fight for the chance to carry our mobilization for peace and justice into the ballot box.
In Los Angeles in 2000, Democratic Party leaders stood on the balcony of the Staples Center and watched the LAPD teargas thousands of protesters. It seems to me that if we can't build a movement that learns not to vote for a party that directs police assaults on us, we don't have much hope of ever building a political challenge to corporate America. No doubt, the debate over presidential tactics will sharply separate many of us who have worked closely together in the past and will again in the future. While all of us who want a better world should argue respectfully, debate we must because the stakes are too high to hold our tongues.
Norman Solomon wrote last month that he was registering Green precisely because its National Convention nominated a candidate who promised not to challenge the two-party system where it counts. He joins the chorus of liberal voices who warn us that "this is not the year." But he is wrong. As Paine, Douglass, Parks, Lewis, Malcolm, Mario, Gurley-Flynn, and countless others understood, any movement that ever aims to win must learn to stand up for itself precisely when it is darkest. That's the only way the millions of people who hate the system that oppresses them can ever gain confidence in us to join us and transform our movement from a minority affair of protest into a majority tide of power. For whatever my effort is worth, I am registering Green this year because most of the people I know in the Green Party refused, and are refusing, to submit to the duopoly blackmail. Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo can't change tile system by themselves, but every vote they receive will show the world that there are millions here in the United States who intend to conquer the hell of corporate power and the tyranny it rains down on the planet.
Hang on Citizen Paine, we're coming.
***
Growing the Green Party
By David Cobb
In These Times
July 16, 2004
Here's a story that you won't see in the corporate media: The Green Party is growing -- getting bigger, stronger, and better-organized in every election cycle. Even after the infamous 2000 presidential election, when the media and Democrats blamed us for Bush's selection and ignored the blatantly illegal and biased behavior of Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and a Republican Supreme Court majority, our numbers have grown.
In 1996, the Green Party was organized in ten states, guaranteed a ballot line in just five, and had elected forty officeholders. Today, we have parties organized in forty-four states, twenty-three with guaranteed ballot access, and hundreds of Greens elected to public office, including the mayors of Santa Monica, California, and New Paltz, New York, and the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And, for the first time in our party's history, we have two registered Greens as our presidential and vice presidential candidates, myself and Patricia LaMarche, respectively.
The goals of the Cobb/LaMarche campaign are to present a genuine, progressive alternative, grow the Green Party, and have this year's election culminate with the removal of the White House's illegitimate occupant.
We are speaking truth to power in this campaign. We are the only party calling for decisive action on catastrophic global climate change and our addiction to fossil fuels, a living wage, universal health care under a national insurance plan, real steps toward racial equality, an end to the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, and the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
We are also confronting the "spoiler" issue head-on. When this question is raised, it provides us with an opportunity to talk about reforming a flawed electoral system. There isn't a spoiler problem. The problem is an antiquated, antidemocratic electoral system that forces people to vote for a candidate they really don't support in order to keep an even worse candidate out of office. We deserve a more democratic and more efficient electoral system, representing the diversity of people and opinions in our country.
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is one solution. IRV allows people to rank candidates in order of preference so that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win enough votes to make it into a runoff, your second-choice vote is automatically considered. IRV is used to elect officeholders in Australia, Ireland, and London, and is soon to be implemented in San Francisco. (Learn more about IRV, proportional representation, and other reforms to ensure fair elections on the Web site for the Center for Voting & Democracy at http://www.fairvote.org.)
Third parties have played a critical role throughout American history. In their heyday, third parties elected mayors, governors, and members of Congress. In fact, the entire social fabric of our society was woven from ideas that originated within third parties: the abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, Social Security, the 40-hour workweek and the direct election of U.S. senators, to name just a few.
What we are trying to accomplish through our work with the Green Party is greater than anyone campaign or anyone election. We are in this for the long haul. One of the key steps to growing our party and eliminating a dangerous global threat is ensuring the removal of George W. Bush from office. Bush is a huge problem. But he is not the problem. The problem is a corporate-military-industrial-prison-judicial system that is destroying the planet. We need to address the larger problem, but we also need to remove the most immediate threat to global peace -- and that means getting Bush out of office.
I am in no way suggesting that anyone vote for John Kerry. Kerry is a corporatist and a militarist who supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the passage of the Patriot Act. He also opposes real universal health care and a living wage. However, although the differences between Bush and Kerry may be incremental, they are not inconsequential.
In forty or so states the electoral college votes have, for all intents and purposes, already been cast. For example, Massachusetts, California, and New York will go to the Democrats; Utah, Wyoming, and Texas to the Republicans. In these states, where our message is "Don't waste your vote," a vote for the Green Party is a powerful tool. In the battleground states that will decide the election, we understand if you won't vote for our ticket this time. That's okay. A vote is a powerful and personal decision. You can register Green and support us in every other way possible, especially with votes for state and local Green candidates and contributions of your time and money.
With the strategy we have articulated, we will grow the Green Party, provide voters with a genuine alternative, and make the world a safer and saner place to live.
***
Rigged Convention, Divided Party: How David Cobb Became the Green Nominee Even Though He Only Got 12 Percent of the Votes
By Carol Miller and Forrest Hill
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
August 7, 2004
How did David Cobb become the Green Party presidential nominee against the overwhelming majority of the Green Party?
The answer is quite simple. The Green Party followed a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic and allowed the will of its members to be manipulated.
Primaries: The Will of the Voter
In five states, registered Green Party members, who are the rank and file of the party, had the opportunity to vote in a presidential primary. These five primaries represent the majority of registered Greens in the country.
The five primaries took place in California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island. The total number of votes cast for a presidential candidate as recorded by Ballot Access News was 45,733.
The results from these primaries for the leading three candidates are as follows:
Camejo / 33,255 / 72.7 percent
Cobb / 5,569 / 12.2 percent
Salzman / 4,953 / 10.8 percent
Others / 1,956 / 4.2 percent
In the three largest states, California, Massachusetts, and New Mexico, David Cobb was defeated. In California he was beaten six to one by Camejo, and Lorna Salzman almost tied him for second place. In Massachusetts he was beaten by Lorna Salzman and in New Mexico by Carol Miller. Both Lorna Salzman and Carol Miller endorsed the Nader/Camejo campaign.
In D.C., Cobb received 37 percent of all votes cast. The total number of votes cast in the Washington, D.C., primary, including write-in votes, was 374. Cobb faced only one local opponent, yet received only 138 votes!
In Rhode Island, the one state in which Cobb actually won more than 50 percent of the vote, only eighty-nine votes were cast. The primary ballot included only Kent Mesplay and Cobb. It did not even include New York's presidential nominee, Lorna Salzman. The vote was seventy-one for Cobb and eighteen for Mesplay.
Overall, the total primary vote for candidates who support Nader/Camejo was over 83 percent compared to Cobb's 12.2 percent. Where Greens actually were able to vote, Cobb was roundly defeated.
Nominating Meetings: The Will of the Few and Selected
In all other states Green Party delegates were chosen at nominating meetings. These meetings varied in size but were overall quite small. The national Green Party Web site never reported the number of votes cast at any of the state nominating meetings. This cover-up, whether intentional or not, hid from Greens the small number of voters that were determining how large numbers of delegates were proportioned between the candidates.
Nor did the Web site explain the delegate formula or justify the size of each state's delegation so that Greens could follow the process. In fact the formula completely ignores the number of Greens registered in each state as a determinant for the number of delegates. Most Greens assumed that delegates were proportioned according to a one person, one vote system as any democratic organization would normally assume.
Only the Cobb campaign organized a turnout of their supporters for these nominating meetings. This enabled Cobb to appear to have a higher percentage of support than he would gain if local Greens had an easier way of expressing their views, such as a primary.
In caucuses where the turnout was relatively large, Cobb often did poorly. But in some cases Cobb supporters were able to get around their low vote count by packing the delegation selection. For example, in Maine, where Nader's name was on the ballot, Nader defeated Cobb 52-42 (the remaining sixty-five votes went to thirteen other candidates). These votes represent 33 percent for Nader and 26 percent for Cobb. Yet during the vote at the convention in Milwaukee, eighteen out of nineteen Maine delegates voted for Cobb and one voted for Nader, or 95 percent for Cobb and 5 percent for Nader.
Democratic Violation of "One Person, One Vote"
Even this one-sided, basically one-candidate campaign could never have led to a Cobb victory at the convention without the help of a second undemocratic factor. The Green Party does not use a one person, one vote system but instead has an electoral college system that punishes states like California for its success in recruiting tens of thousands of Greens, while rewarding states that have only a small membership. Unlike the national electoral college, the Green Party's weighted voting gives some states hundreds of times more votes per Green member than other states.
For example, in Iowa there is officially no Green Party. The state liquidated it after they failed to reach the 2 percent threshold for their gubernatorial candidate in 2002. However, Iowa had nine delegates to the Green Party convention. There are ninety people registered as Greens in Iowa and over 150,000 registered Greens in California. Thus, in Iowa for every ten registered Green Party members there was one delegate to the nominating convention. If the party were to weigh all its members equally, then California would have received over 16,500 delegates instead of 132. The ninety Greens in Iowa had as much power in the party as 11,363 members in California.
Imagine a party in which candidate A gets 11,300 votes and candidate B gets 90 votes, and candidate B is declared the winner. Unfortunately, that party's name was the Green Party at the Milwaukee convention.
It is disturbing that while the Green Party platform opposes the electoral college and favors "one person, one vote," it does not practice what it preaches. Without the undemocratic voting process implemented by the national coordinating committee, Cobb had no chance of winning after the primary vote in California and the heavy opposition to his candidacy in other major states like New York and New Jersey.
Denying Candidates the Right to Appoint Their Delegates
But even taking into account this undemocratic ratio of representation that worked mightily for Cobb, he was still unable to win outright. He just didn't have enough delegates. To win the nomination, his supporters were allowed to alter the decisions of the small state meetings and primaries. This last nondemocratic step was achieved because Green Party rules do not allow a candidate chosen by its rank and file to appoint their delegates like all other parties have in American history. The only requirement for becoming a delegate is simply having the ability to attend the convention. Thus, whichever candidate can get their supporters to the convention can end up winning regardless of the votes of the primaries or caucuses, as in Maine.
In this manner Cobb was able to take delegate votes from other candidates. This was achieved simply by having his supporters show up and cast their votes for him after the first round of voting. Examples where this practice was highly evident include Maine, Missouri, California, and Texas.
In Maryland, two Cobb delegates attempted to become a Nader delegate and a Carol Miller delegate prior to the convention. They were only stopped because a Nader supporter prevented them from doing so by making it publicly clear that they were in fact Cobb supporters.
In California Cobb supporters were able to turn his 12 percent support in the primaries into a delegate vote of 26 percent by packing the delegation. Specifically, twenty-two votes shifted to Cobb during the second round of voting. These votes are equal to the margin by which Cobb won the election.
In effect the Green Party picks its presidential candidate not based on the will of its members but by discriminating against Greens in some states, and in the end, by allowing anyone to become a delegate who can show up at the convention. Cobb's support at most reflects but a small percentage of Greens. The overwhelming majority of the rank-and-file members opposed his candidacy.
Fighting Back
Cobb's amazing rise from 12 percent in the primaries against 83 percent for pro-Nader candidates to a majority at the convention was due to a well-organized campaign to turn a minority view in the Green Party into what appeared as a majority decision at the convention.
Behind the Cobb phenomenon is a very real political difference in the Green Party. As many articles have pointed out, the party is divided between those who want to oppose the two parties of money and those who support voting for the lesser of two evils to help prevent a Republican victory. Cobb represents a political capitulation away from our independence from the two corporate-controlled parties.
The nomination of Cobb is a step backward, away from an uncompromising challenge to the two-party "duopoly" and away from the prominence that the Greens have achieved, thanks in good part to Nader's 2000 campaign. It is time we take back the Green Party from those who want to capitulate to the Democratic Party!