The time is now.

• Author: Dolack, Pete
• Position: Election 2004: Green Analyses

Starting in late spring, Anybody-But-Bush liberal friends, already showing early signs of panic, started asking me if John Kerry was ever going to go onto the offensive. "Sure he will," I replied; "they know they need more than 'I am not Bush' to win." As the summer wore on, I began to realize that I was wrong. It takes a certain perverse talent to run against arguably the biggest disaster that has yet occupied the White House and lose.

Kerry probably did win in Ohio and New Mexico, and perhaps in Florida, but let's set aside that debate. Even if we concede that the Republican Party stole another election, it still won half the vote. Given that the Democrats' main electoral activity was a savage attack on Ralph Nader, perhaps it was not realistic to think the Democrats would try to put forward any sort of positive program. Just to prove the party is incapable of learning anything, the Democrats have already anointed a new scapegoat--San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, for stirring up the Christian right by sanctifying same-sex marriages.

A probable outcome of this trend is for the Democrats to move still further to the right. Such a development opens new opportunities for third parties. Will there be a third party to take advantage? While Anybody-But-Bush proved to be another step in the gradual disintegration of the Democratic Party, it has led to an implosion of the Green Party. A September headline on the CounterPunch website, "Cobb Polling at 0%, Exceeding Expectations," says it all.

If the Green Party truly didn't want to run a campaign, it should have done the intellectually honest thing and sat it out. The party's membership, however, largely did want a real campaign, in the form of a third Nader presidential run, while the party's bureaucracy did not, and got its way. It's widely said that if Nader had shown up at the Milwaukee national convention in June, he would have won the party nomination. He would have had it anyway, were it not for the skillful way David Cobb and his backers used the party rules to anoint himself against the obvious will of the rank and file.

How is it that a party that is supposed to be a grassroots expression of engaged activists using electoral campaigns to promote ideas and not personalities became the captive of a bureaucracy in which candidate decisions are based in large part on personalities? Can such a party have any future?

To provide a painful example, the New York State Green Party began imploding...