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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
The Green Party's goal: Ensuring that Republicans take over the Senate.
Jun 10, 2002 | Ralph Nader can talk out of either side of his mouth about the consequences of his Green Party presidential candidacy and third-party spoiler strategies. What he says at any moment depends on whether he is avoiding blame for Republican advances or promoting himself and his followers as the inexorable progressive vanguard.
In the immediate aftermath of the November 2000 election, there were moments when Nader celebrated the defeat of Al Gore as his own victory. But there were also moments when he insisted that his third-party campaign didn't affect the outcome. He occasionally cited a poll that shows he took relatively few votes from Gore, although most surveys indicate that he drained away more than enough to "elect" Bush (for a convincing analysis, read this Reason article by Matt Welch).
Nader often threatens to deliver both houses of Congress to the Republicans unless the Democrats surrender to his ideology. But sometimes he will claim -- as he did not long ago in Slate -- that Green votes actually helped the Democrats gain control of the Senate, by mobilizing left-leaning voters who otherwise wouldn't have showed up at the polls.
In other words, he wants to have it both ways. As the self-appointed scourge of the Democratic Party, he feels entitled to destroy it for its political sins, without assuming any responsibility for the ill consequences of his moralistic posturing.
That convenient ambiguity will no longer be available to Nader after this year's electoral returns come in, which is why certain prominent Greens -- most notably his 2000 vice-presidential running mate Winona La Duke are seeking to soften their party's destructive vendetta against the Democrats. But so far, the great Green guru himself has remained silent about the potential price of the party's midterm crusade, which may return the Senate to Republican control and preserve Republican power over the House of Representatives. Nader evidently feels no qualms about handing the country over to Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, those most faithful servants of corporate power, so long as the hated Democrats are ousted.
There isn't really much else that the Greens can hope to achieve. Whatever their utopian platforms may say about renewable energy, corporate responsibility, diversity rainbows or frogs in top hats, the ruin of the Democratic Party is their only feasible aim. The first Democrats to be taken down, if the tiny party's plans are effective, will be the most progressive.
In Wisconsin, for instance, a pair of Democratic representatives with strong environmental and labor voting records will face both Green and Republican challengers. Gerald Kleczka of Milwaukee has a perfect rating from the League of Conservation voters, while Ron Kind's record is almost as pristine. Yet they are being targeted by the Greens, whose national co-chairman resides in Madison, solely because of their party affiliation (and because the party may be able to create an illusion of mass support in their progressive districts).
Similar Green candidacies around the country, targeted opportunistically at certain Democrats, may well affect the exceptionally tight struggle for control of Congress. Every extra dollar needed to defend an otherwise safe Democratic seat against a third-party challenge, of course, makes a fall offensive against the better-funded Republicans more difficult.
Even in conservative Texas, where black Democrat Ron Kirk is regarded as a potential upset winner to fill the Senate seat of retiring Republican Phil Gramm, the Green vote will make a difference for the worse. Nader took slightly more than 2 percent of the Texas presidential vote two years ago, a number that was meaningless then but might represent the margin of victory for the Republicans next November. Again, the opportunism is blatant, with the Greens likely to nominate an African-American activist to run against Kirk.
And in their most appalling move, the Greens are running a candidate for the Senate in Minnesota, where incumbent Democrat Paul Wellstone is facing a well-funded challenge from Norm Coleman, a popular former mayor of St. Paul (and former Democrat) who enjoys strong support from the White House. Experienced observers believe this important race will be decided by a very small margin.
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