The Democrat-Green Death Struggle

In 2000, George W. Bush won 48 percent of the national vote, against a combined total of 52 percent for Al Gore and Ralph Nader. Can Democrats and Greens figure out how to play the politics of addition, rather than subtraction, in 2004?

Right now, the prospects for any kind of modus vivendi are grim. All over the country, Democrats have been trying, with little success, to drive the Greens out of existence. In Maine, the Democrat-controlled legislature drew new district lines to deprive State Representative John Eder, who was elected as a Green in 2002, of his seat. They've done the same thing to Green city councilors in Minneapolis. In several locales, they've rebuffed efforts to enact instant-runoff voting, which would take away the Greens' ability to "spoil" races, and instead tried to make it harder for Greens to retain their ballot status without running candidates for offices like President or governor. In San Francisco, where the Green Party's Matt Gonzalez is the popular president of the city's board of supervisors and made it into this fall's mayoral runoff, the Democratic county central committee actually issued an edict forbidding party clubs from endorsing non-Democrats in local races, even though activists from both parties often cooperate harmoniously.

Democratic pundits and activists have been equally antidemocratic. Take three examples from recent months. When the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) held its conference for progressives in Washington this past June, not a single Green was invited to speak. Writing in Salon, Paul Berman argued, "In order to defeat Bush, the Greens really have to be crushed politically." (Ironically, Berman is a contributor to a new book called The Fight Is for Democracy.) Writing in the American Prospect Online, my friend Michael Tomasky called on liberalish Democrats to attack Nader with "lupine ferocity" in order to make themselves look tough, suggesting for one that Nader should be blasted for wanting to halt aid to Israel and thus cause it to cease to exist. (When I asked Michael for his source for this particular slander, he referred me to the Green platform of 2000, which he claimed "advocated an end to US aid for Israel." Informed that the platform did no such thing, and only called for "peace in the Middle East based on respect for civil liberties and human rights," he did not reply.)

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