Run Ralph Run, But as A Green
[More stuff on the internal debate within the Green Party on a presidential nomination. -Thomas]
Run Ralph Run, But as A Green
We, the undersigned, are writing to urge Ralph Nader and the Green Party to work together to run a strong, united Presidential campaign in 2004.
On election day 2004, America needs a progressive alternative to the pro-corporate, pro-military, anti-environment agenda offered by the two major parties. Of the various progressive candidates presently considering running, Ralph Nader is by far the strongest. It is important that the Greens and Nader run together.
A strong Green Presidential campaign is needed to energize and mobilize progressive voters in America, to give an electoral voice to those who promote peace, democratic, social and economic justice. Without such a campaign, the political debate and the Democratic Party will continue to move to the right.
Among the reasons for a Nader Green Presidential campaign:
- Nader is the most prominent progressive spokesperson in America, long recognized as the most trusted person in the country
- the similarities between the two major parties are much greater than the differences.
- the Republicans stole the 2000 Presidential election and the Democrats didn’t challenge the theft. The Republicans are planning to do it again
- the world is threatened by America’s drive for corporate globalization and an American military / economic empire. Both major parties embrace this goal
- Nader and the Greens are both stronger if they work together. If would be a disaster for both and for the progressive movement if the two split
- if the Democrats win, as they should based on the polls, corporate interests will still be in power, not progressives. Our issues will only succeed if there is a strong independent progressive movement willing to challenge a Democratic administration, not apologize for their shortcomings.
“Anybody But Bush” is Not a Progressive Solution
The Democrats and their allies are urging the Greens to be silent, to sit on the sideline while the Democrats fight the Republican for control of the patronage that comes with control of the national government. Without a strong progressive electoral alternative, the Democrats have moved relentlessly to the right in a futile effort to win elections by offering similar policies as the Republicans but with a friendlier face.
Some self-declared progressives are running scared, demanding that the Greens not run a candidate, or that the Greens backhandedly support the Democrat by not campaigning in the swing states. To be sure, Bush is scary, particularly since 9/11. Invasions launched against Afghanistan and Iraq, pre-emptive wars against “America’s enemies,” a policy of an American global empire. A curtailment of civil liberties in America. More tax cuts and corporate welfare for the rich. However, the Democrats in Congress supported these steps.
We cannot rely on the Slick Soft-Right Democrats to fight the Crude Hard-Right Republicans. The Democrats haven’t done it during the first three years of the Bush administration. There is no good reason to start relying on them now. The best defense against the Hard Right is not defensive support for a Softer Right, but a strong offensive around a real campaign for a progressive alternative.
The argument that it is the wrong time for a progressive third party has been raised in virtually every election cycle over the last thirty years, that it is more important to defeat Nixon, to defeat Reagan, to defeat Bush I and II, than it is to build a party that reflect our principles. Yet no matter how many times they have pleaded with progressive third party forces to “wait til next time,” these voices have never said it is time to run, that it is time to admit that the Democratic Party will not support a progressive agenda.
There are differences between the policies of the Democratic and Republican Party. Just like there are differences between GM and Ford, General Electric and Westinghouse, the American and National League in baseball. But the similarity between the two parties are much greater than the differences. Both parties increasingly are financed by many of the same corporate and special interests, and act accordingly after the election, rewarding their supporters. The Democratic track record on issues they cite to attract progressive voters - the environment, women’s rights, labor, the federal bench - is much worse than their rhetoric at campaign time.
The list of the failures of the Democratic Party at the national, state and local levels is endless and is far too long to be repeated here. Their recent shortcomings include welfare, criminal justice, universal health care, campaign finance reform, global warming, child hood poverty, ERA, hunger, homelessness, pesticides, genetic engineering, progressive taxes, corporate welfare, nuclear power, Middle East, nuclear weapons, military budget, child care, consumer rights, banking, insurance, war on drugs, foreign policy, corporate crime, etc.
The Democratic Party seldom if ever takes principled stands. Instead, they make decisions based on how it will help them with voters and reward their campaign contributors. At best, the Democratic Party believes for some strange reason that most voters are more conservative than they are, and pander to “them” by moving to the right, while telling progressives not to worry, it will work out in the end, just vote them into power. It didn’t work with Clinton in 1992; why would anyone expect it will work with Dean in 2004?
The major party candidates will of course offer sound bites and photo opportunities on some of these issues. After all the first Bush President used polluted Boston Harbor as an effective environmental photo op against Dukakis. Their positions will just lack substance, fail to educate, fail to progress a true progressive agenda both during the election and afterwards.
The Democrats will not offer an alternative to America’s failed economic system that has greatly increased the wealth for a few, while making many poorer, with the middle class barely keeping pace over the last decade
For a long time the Democrats have been a right-of-center party. The likely nominee of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, fits the mold of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The few progressive Presidential candidates within the Democratic Party pull a few percentage points and are treated as fringe players, largely ignored by the media and the party leadership. Their role is not to make the Democratic Party more progressive but to try to pull progressives into the voting booth for the Democrats. These candidates will have been sent back to the sideline by spring time.
The Democratic Party is Not a Peace Party
The drive for war by the Bush administration since 9/11 is frightening. If ever we needed the Democrats to act like a true opposition party, it was in the days after 9/11. Instead they hopped on the bandwagon to bomb Afghanistan, curtail civil liberties, invade Iraq, lock up immigrants, increase corporate welfare to “restart the economy.”
The bipartisan approach to U.S. military interventions under both Democratic and Republican Presidents since 1950 have resulted in the killing of an estimated eight million individuals. It has resulted in a military-industrial complex that has continue to grow in power and tax expenditures, despite the warnings of Republican Dwight Eisenhower when he left the oval office. Under both parties the torturers were trained, the CIA plotted, the weapons became more deadly, democratic governments were overthrown, American imperialism expanded.
One can argue that, apart from the atomic bomb, some of the nastiest military operations, especially the overthrow of progressive foreign governments, came during the Republican administrations. Yet the planning and implementation of many of the military adventures stretched over both Republican and Democrat administrations. Some of the biggest misadventures, such as Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, the Balkan War, came primarily with the Democrats at the helm. Democrats were in charge of the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965; shooting peace demonstrators in Panama in 1966; supporting death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the late 1970s; supporting the mujhaden in Afghanistan in the late 1970s; the killing of 500,000 Iraqi civilians in the 1990’s; the bombing Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998. And the Democratic members of Congress have usually overwhelmingly supported the many military adventures of the Republicans when they controlled the White House, including the inv
asion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Democratic Party has long joined with the Republicans that has supported the one-sided American position in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, often isolating the U.S. from every other country in the world in votes in the United Nations. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Clinton administration refused to seek any cuts in the military budget and continue to support the development of new nuclear weapons.
Ralph Nader and the Greens Need Each other.
There is no progressive candidate than Ralph Nader to communicate the Green’s agenda to both progressives and the larger population. He has a strong track record of over 30 years of activism, with an incredible number of groups and issues he has helped launched. He has a strong staff team that has and can coordinate a national Presidential campaign. He demonstrated his ability four years ago to raise significant amount of funds and to generate thousands of volunteers. While there are some issues that we wish he would speak out on more, he is still good on those issues and getting better.
The 2004 Presidential election will be a challenging one for Greens, Nader and the progressives. Some feel that the best the Greens can hope to do is to survive. We need to run our strongest candidate. Without a doubt that is Nader.
Yes, there needs to be better coordination with the Green Party and the Greens should ask to sit down and negotiate this with Ralph and his campaign team. That also means that the Greens take on larger responsibilities for the national campaign than four years ago.
The Greens are a stronger entity than they were four years ago. They have obtained official ballot status in more states, and have run stronger and winning campaigns throughout the country. Electoral successes in places like Maine, California and elsewhere have generated more national attention. The national Coordinated Campaign Committee (CCC) has made some significant progress in strengthening our national political operations. While the party needs to get stronger, and its internal process can be difficult, the Party is an asset that Nader strongly needs.
It would be a major historical mistake for the Greens and Nader to run independently of one another, hurting both in the short and long term. The Green Party is now part of Nader’s legacy; anything he does that ends up weakening the Greens harms that legacy. The Greens and Nader need to built unity among progressives; if they can’t build unity amongst themselves, the 2004 Presidential election will likely be a disaster to both.
Bush Stole the 2000 Election - and is Ready to Do it Again
While Democratic partisans argue that Nader cost Gore the election, this is untrue for a variety of reasons, as most campaign experts know.
One, most progressives know that the election was stolen by Bush. Gore won the nationwide popular vote; he also won the Florida and Electoral vote. The U.S. Supreme Court gave away the election. The Democratic Party and the Gore campaign did little to prevent the theft of the election, starting with their failure to aggressively challenge the illegal disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Florida or even to demand that every vote be counted.
Nor have the Democrats made it a major priority to demand election reform since the election, starting with the failure to adopt fairer electoral systems such as preferential voting or to address the problems with the Electoral College. The proposals that have been adopted through the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) increases the likelihood that the election will be stolen again through manipulation of computerized voting results and disenfranchisement of many new voters through improper enforcement of ID requirements, but the national Democratic Party has been largely silent on these issues.
Second, the Nader and Green electoral efforts in 2000 helped the Democrats more than it hurt them. Polls show that more than a million people voted just because Nader was on the ballot. Many of these voters also cast vote for Democrat candidates for other offices, and helped provide the margin of victory in at least two U.S. Senate races, allowing the Democrats to reclaim control of the U.S. Senate. Without Nader on the ballot in 2002, the Democrats promptly lost control. In addition, whenever Gore responded to the Nader candidacy by articulating a more progressive, grassroots agenda, his standing in the polls went up. Whenever he tried to sound more like a Republican to attract the center-right votes, his standing went down.
For the record, polls showed that if Nader had not been in the race, of the three million Americans who cast votes for him, 25% would have voted for Bush, 38% for Gore, and 37% would not have voted. The net gain from Nader voters for Gore would have been 13% (=38% - 25%), not 100%. However, the Democrats have decided to throw away this 13% net gain by failing to embrace preferential or IRV voting.
Run Ralph Run - As A Green
Polls show that nearly 25% of the voters want Nader to run for President in 2004. The polls also show that people are with the Greens and against the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to specific policies like national health care, fair trade, renewable energy, progressive taxes, and cutting military spending to fund domestic needs. As the Greens have shown at the local level, they can beat both corporate parties. The biggest obstacle to progressives having the same results at the national level is our lack of confidence in ourselves. Progressives should be running confidently, not scared. There is no reason why Nader and the Greens can’t blow the whole spoiler argument out of the water by running a race that contends for victory.
Mark Dunlea, Poestenkill
Mike Emperor, Brooklyn
Howie Hawkins, Syracuse
Masada Disenhouse, Brooklyn
James and Leslie Farney, Warwick
William Peltz, Albany
Joe Lombardo, Bethlehem
Kathleen Bartholomay, Washington Co.
Robyn Sklar, Manhattan
Jerry Kann, Queens
Darin Robbins, Corning
Elizabeth Shanklin, Bronx
Rachel Treichler, Steuben County
Mark Jacobs, Westchester
Dani Liebling, Brooklyn
Ted Munn, Schenectady
Alison Duncan, Manhattan
Dick Marra, Schenectady
Ronald MacKinnon, New York
Julia Willebrand, New York
