The demise of the Green Party.

• Author: St. Clair, Jeffrey
• Position: Thinking Politically

"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive." --Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) So this is what alternative politics in America has degenerated to: Pat LaMarche, the newly minted vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party, has announced that she might not even vote for herself in the fall elections. The Greens, always a skittish bunch, are so traumatized by the specter of Bush and Cheney that they have offered up their own party--born out of rage at decades of betrayal by Democrats from Carter to Clinton--as a kind of private contractor for the benefit of those very same Democratic Party power brokers

Take a close look at what LaMarche, a not-ready-for-primetime radio "personality," had to say to her hometown newspaper in Maine only days after winning the nomination in Milwaukee. "If the race is tight, I'll vote for Kerry," LaMarche said. "I love my country. But we should ask them that, because if Dick Cheney loved his country, he wouldn't be voting for himself." This is the sound a political party makes as it commits suicide.

LaMarche's running mate, David Cobb, is no better. The obscure lawyer from Texas is a dull and spiritless candidate handled by some truly unsavory advisors. In action, he functions as a kind of bland political zombie from a Roger Corman flick, lumbering across the progressive landscape from Oregon to Wisconsin and back again to the tune of his liberal political masters. The tune? The familiar refrain of "Anybody But Bush."

Bland, yes, but it worked, thanks to the likes of Medea Benjamin and the pompous Ted Glick. At their recent convention in Milwaukee, the Green Party, heavily infiltrated by Democratic Party operatives, rejected the ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo in favor of the sour campaign of Cobb and LaMarche.

This will not harm Nader much. Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the Green Party's encyclopedic platform, Nader can now distill the themes of his campaign to the most potent elements (war, jobs, corruption and the environment) and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader can, if he chooses, focus his efforts only on the battleground states where Kerry must either confront Nader's issues or lose the election.

The fatal damage in Milwaukee was done to the Green Party itself, where Cobb and his cohort sabotaged the aspirations of thousands of Greens who had labored for more than...