The Camejo Vote

posted to www.marxmail.org on October 9, 2003

Today the LA Weekly has extensive coverage on the California elections.

http://www.laweekly.com/

This is an "alternative" newsweekly with many of the same contributors and editorial outlook as the Nation Magazine and salon.com. I used to know the guy who started it in the 1980s, who was a stand-up radical of sorts who backed the Nicaraguan revolution. He sold it for a bundle to the same kind of hustlers who run the Village Voice in NYC. Both newsweeklies are free and rely on pages and pages of massage parlor ads in order to support their editorial content, which is a combination of postmodernist drivel and social democratic politics.

The article on Camejo is predictably snide, describing him as "either too strident or too Jack Lemmon–y, as he fiddled with his statistics about how the poor pay a higher share of income tax than the state’s rich."

I could hear Camejo's voice as he told the interviewer off:

"It’s not a surprise [Schwarzenegger landslide] to me. I told Davis to resign in June so that the disaster he had created would not lead to a Republican recall. No one, including the L.A. Weekly, paid any attention. Now the Republicans have a clear mandate. This is the kind of disaster you have when a paper like the L.A. Weekly won’t stand up to the Democrats."

Meanwhile, Marc Cooper who has a weekly column in the LA Weekly summed up the California election prospects in the Nation Magazine in August 2002:

"With the two major-party candidates inspiring little excitement or loyalty, the November election ought to be fertile territory for third-party movements like the California Green Party. But while recent statewide polls show a surge of support for third-party contenders, Green gubernatorial candidate Peter Camejo, a Marxist-Leninist turned socially responsible investment banker, has yet to emerge from anonymity; his support is estimated at no more than 4 or 5 percent...As for progressives and other disillusioned Democrats, they have few appetizing choices."

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020819&c=1&s=cooper

In other words, Cooper was instructing his readers to vote Democrat, just as you would expect from this bastion of liberalism. This was the ONLY REFERENCE to Camejo found in the magazine's archives. Considering their hostility to Nader, one can only assume that this blackout was not accidental.

Then you have the stampede from the Committees of Correspondence, urging everybody within earshot about the need to "stop Bush". With this perspective, it is fairly obvious that a large section of the left has gone into panic mode about the need to prevent fascism in the USA. In other words, a vote for a Green candidate is almost analogous to "third period" Communism--an act of suicidal ultraleftism.

For all the talk about "middle-class" Greens, the signs point to a large-scale retreat by members of this class from this promising new party. People are looking for an explanation of why Camejo's vote total went down. It is clear to me that we are dealing with liberal and social democratic spinelessness and nothing else.