Reply to Ted Glick on examining the motives of Nader and Camejo

posted to www.marxmail.org on August 10, 2004

Ted "Realo" Glick's full article can be read at: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-08/10glick.cfm. I am responding to selections below:

Glick: In late June in Milwaukee I was very encouraged when the Green Party chose the Presidential candidate who I thought was the best available option for 2004, David Cobb. But I was also impressed that it was able to do so in a healthy and mature way, democratically, with much debate and occasional sparks, but with relatively little overt rancor between the pro-Cobb and the pro-Nader delegates.

Comment: Democratically?!??!?!! Haven't you read Forrest Hill and Carol Miller's "Rigged Convention; Divided Party How David Cobb Became the Green Nominee Even Though He Only Got 12 Percent of the Votes" on Counterpunch? The least we can expect from you Demogreens is to engage with such critiques rather than sweeping them under the rug. Your smug, self-congratulatory posture flies in the face of the case being made by Hill, Miller and others that the Green realos abandoned one-person/one-vote democratic procedures in order to come up with an impotent slate that would not discomfit the pro-war, anti-gay marriage Democrat from Massachusetts.

Glick: In other words, the Nader/Camejo campaign is willing to risk disaffiliation, at least, if not a seriously divided Green Party nationally, for the short-term purpose of getting Nader on the California ballot. And there are a few other states where something similar is occurring.

I happened to spend yesterday at the New Jersey shore. All day, on the way down, on the beach, and coming back up I kept thinking about why they would be doing this.

Comment: I would say that the Medea Benjamin, Ted Glick, David Cobb forces are welcome to the burned-out shell of the Green Party, which is destined to go the route of the New Party and every other half-assed attempt to temporize with the Democratic Party, the burying ground for radicals. In your meditations at the New Jersey shore, did it ever occur to you that Nader and Camejo run because they consider the occupation of Iraq and trade agreements like NAFTA to be inimical to working people? Rather than examining their motives, it is incumbent on you to explore why the section of the left that you are associated with has collapsed like a cheap suitcase.

Glick: It can't be because they believe Ralph Nader has any chance of either winning on November 2 or getting the 5% of the vote needed to get federal matching funds. Nader is currently polling at 3 or 4% in national polls; in California a Field poll released this week had him at 2%.

Comment: The fact that he is running at 3 to 4 percent has the Democratic Party running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It is really pathetic that people like you are running around after the chicken trying to scotch tape its head back on.

Glick: A second possibility, and I fervently hope this is the reason, is that they are under so much pressure, the campaign is so intense, what with the demands of raising money and getting on the ballot, the attacks from the Democrats and everything else, that they have temporarily lost sight of the bigger picture and are doing whatever they can to get state ballot lines wherever they can, however they can.

Comment: I think that they have a grasp of the big picture. That's why over a thousand people attended their rally in San Francisco. Meanwhile the Cobb-LaMarche campaign is not only beneath the radar screen; it does not even get reported on in venues that are favorable to ABB. It is the kind of campaign that Browder ran "against" Roosevelt. At least Browder's followers were building the labor movement. Pat LaMarche's main accomplishment seems to be raising money for apolitical charities and getting arrested for drunk driving.

Glick: I really hope that what is happening is not an opening salvo in a less-than-principled campaign on the part of **some of** the pro-Nader forces within the Green Party to confuse and disrupt the efforts of the Cobb/LaMarche campaign, a kind-of "rule or ruin" approach to politics.

Comment: Disrupt the Cobb/LaMarche campaign? That would be akin to waking the dead.