Showdown in the Green Party.

• Author: Smith, Ashley
• Position: Thinking Politically

The Green Party's National Committee meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on July 21-24, was a heated struggle over internal organization and political strategy. This was the first national meeting of the Green Party since the 2004 Milwaukee convention that nominated David Cobb as the Party's presidential candidate over Ralph Nader. With Cobb running a "safe states" campaign that didn't challenge Kerry or Bush in battleground states, the Green ticket managed only 100,000 votes, leading to the loss of ballot lines in some places.

Cobb won the nomination despite the fact that a majority of Greens--led by the party's largest affiliates in California and New York--wanted to endorse Nader and advocated a campaign challenging both corporate parties in all states. The nominating rules that skewed the voting strength of smaller state parties allowed a minority to impose Cobb on the Party.

Since the Milwaukee convention, the Green Party has been approaching a fork in the road. The Cobb wing of the party, which controls the national leadership based on the current undemocratic system, has developed a close partnership with the liberals who have created the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) in an attempt to corral third-party advocates back into the Democratic Party.

The other wing of the Party, led by Nader's vice presidential candidate Peter Camejo, initiated the project Greens for Democracy and Independence (GDI) to address the organizational and political problems that compromised the Greens' challenge in 2004. The GDI developed proposals submitted to the national committee to require proportional representation, delegates accountable to the will of the membership, and independence from the two corporate parties.

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The Tulsa meeting was essentially a contest between these two wings. The conflict first erupted over the seating of delegates from Utah, where two Green Parties claim affiliation, one that supported Nader and another that supported Cobb. The Cobb wing rallied its forces to vote down the Florida delegates' proposal to allow each party one vote and resolve the disputed affiliation later.

Speeches by Camejo and Cobb on the 2004 election and the future of the Green Party laid out the different strategies. Camejo stressed the significance of building the Green Party as the political expression of mass social...