Green Party shifts into reverse: a report from Milwaukee.

• Author: Maass, Alan
• Position: Thinking Politically

The Green Party rejected the independent campaign of Ralph Nader at its convention. Instead, the Greens nominated a little-known attorney and activist from California, David Cobb, as their presidential candidate. Cobb won the party's presidential nomination by a narrow majority of the nearly 800 delegates voting at the convention, heading off a further vote that could have led to an endorsement of Nader's independent campaign.

Nader and his vice presidential running mate, Peter Camejo, a Green Party veteran who ran twice for governor of California, winning more votes in these elections than any Green candidate in the US other than Nader, had asked for an endorsement of their independent presidential campaign, rather than the party's nomination. As close as the outcome was, the contrast between Cobb and Nader/Camejo--and what these campaigns mean for the future of the Green Party--was stark.

The most important issue is that Cobb and his supporters represent a so-called "safe states" strategy. The idea is that the Green Party presidential candidate should help defeat George Bush in the November election by not running an all-out campaign in "battleground states" where the Greens could do well enough to tip the balance to Bush, as Nader is accused of doing in the 2000 election. An online columnist for a newspaper in nearby Racine, Wisconsin, summed up the implications when he suggested that Kerry supporters should "put on a Cobb button" to show Greens coming to the Milwaukee convention "where you stand." "If you want John Kerry to be president, you should hope David Cobb wins big in Milwaukee," wrote the columnist.

Medea Benjamin, a leader of Global Exchange and the Green Party's US Senate candidate in California in 2000, says explicitly that Greens are justified in supporting a vote for Kerry, even though he is opposed to most everything on the Green Party agenda. "In the swing states, where this election's going to be determined, [Greens should] recognize that we owe it to the global community to get rid of George Bush," Benjamin says, "and if people in those swing states support that strategy of getting rid of George Bush, then voting for Kerry might be the strategic vote for them."

Supporters of Nader and Camejo at the convention rejected this argument. "We're the Green Party," Gloria Mattera, co-chair of the New York state Green Party, told a Nader/Camejo rally. "It's not our job to elect a pro-war Democrat into the White House." As Jason West, the Green Party mayor of New Paltz, New York, who came to national prominence by defying state law to marry gay and lesbian couples...