Greens missed opportunity to support Kerry.

• Author: Coleman, Dan
• Position: Election 2004: Green Analyses

Twenty years ago, Skip and I helped found the first Green Party local in North Carolina. Today, Skip lives in Pennsylvania where the Green Party is on the ballot. He was conflicted about the presidential election. His button said simply, "Green Party." I still live in North Carolina, a state whose draconian ballot access laws consign a ballot line for the Greens to the unforeseeable future. When I saw Skip, I had already voted for John Kerry. My pin said, "Kerry Sucks Less."

Skip was conflicted about his roll in the final days of the campaign. A Democratic Party activist had called him and asked him to phone voters identified as Nader supporters in 2000 and ask them to vote for Kerry. Skip was hamstrung by ambivalence, an inability to reconcile his Green Party principles with such a headlong leap into realpolitik.

Even as Election Day 2004 drew near, many in the Green Party failed to understand the vital importance of a Kerry victory to their efforts. By allying themselves with center and left supporters of Kerry, the Greens could have demonstrated sensitivity to the real issues that impact the lives of Americans as well as those of billions more around the planet. Perhaps the biggest mistake that Nader and the Greens made in 2000 was understating the distinctions between Bush and Gore.

By fall 2004, we had three years to see what Bush-style newspeak means for the environment. We had seen him de-fund family planning programs and appoint a host of reactionaries to the nation's courts. Bush rewarded his friends among the filthy rich and the "captains" of industry and he took the nation to war on a mess of lies in furtherance of the neo-conservative vision of US empire.

Another critically important factor for the Greens is that without Democrats in office, it becomes difficult for us to point effectively to the need for a progressive third party. Had the first George Bush been re-elected in 1992 and been able to pass NAFTA, many progressives would have moaned, "if only Clinton had won."

When Clinton pushed NAFTA through a reluctant Democratic congress, the Greens were in a position to say to labor, human rights activists, and environmentalists: look what you get with the Democrats; you need the Green Party alternative. The same was true for much of the key legislation of the Clinton Administration from welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act to the 1996 Antiterrorism Bill. That is why we...