Based on my 12 years of Green organizing, I offer the following personal opinions:
1. Candidacies, in and of themselves, do not build the party; on the contrary, they drain off volunteer time, energy, and resources from other activities such as tabling and issue activism. Candidates are what we SPEND our 'political capital' on; sustained organizing (including a tabling/phonebank/outreach program) is what builds that capital (new volunteers, donors, etc).
2. Green candidacies which lack a strong strategic reason (which is most of them) do NOT activate new members in a sustainable way - those who do come in generally leave once the campaign ends, often creating a sense of post-election depression or collapse among the core activists. My goal is not (as Chuck wrote) to "give our members a reason to attend our meetings" - meetings do not build the party, tabling and organizing does. Meetings are AT BEST a necessary evil; most Green meetings I've attended were unnecessary. We want people who are committed to a broad, long-term social transformation, not just a short horse-race election cycle.
3. Focusing on running for office, rather than on broader, more inclusive and empowering methods of social change, legitimizes the fallacy that change only comes through the ballot box. In fact, most deep social changes (civil rights, women's movement, anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-apartheid, etc) happened through mass movements relying primarily on education and direct action, not voting. With corporate-dominated elections, the ballot box is one of the LAST places change will occur at the state or national level.
3. Under the current system, Greens cannot win partisan office (except under highly unusual circumstances). Even if a Green does win legislative office, as with Audie Bock, we cannot have any significant impact on the current political process. The net result of most Green candidacies for partisan office is to reinforce the public's perception that third parties are not viable, and that Green votes are wasted. On the other hand, many Greens in local office are doing amazing, highly impactful things, and are building visibility and credibility for the Party at the local level. This is where we can organize, where we can win, and where we can make real change in the short term.
4. There are only a few strategic reasons for running a Green candidate:
- to elect someone to an office in which they can make some significant policy impact;
- to determine the outcome of the race ("spoiler") in a way which increases Green leverage, either over officeholders - to influence policy/legislation, or more broadly over the state Democratic Party - to influence their candidate selection, key policy positions, or stance on proportional representation;
- to raise key issue(s) during a campaign which results in a significant gain on those issues, either through forcing electeds to support the desired change, or through increasing grassroots awareness and activism around the issues;
- to challenge the electoral process and two-party duopoly, positioning the Greens as the viable alternative, and/or provide a focus for grass-roots party-building and organizing efforts.
Note that this last reason, which was the primary strategic reason for the Nader 2000 campaign, requires a resource base (money, expertise, visibility, etc) far, far beyond the reach of the current Green movement. It was Nader's credibility, national stature, personal and organizational connections, fundraising appeal, and message, (combined with the Bush/Gore repulsion factor) which made the gains of last year possible. In spite of all our hard work, Ralph carried us; without a Ralph Nader or a Medea Benjamin, we are not even on the public's radar screen.
Medea also gave the Green Party a profoundly generous gift with her campaign last year. To ask her to run for Governor seems ungrateful, almost as an attempt to exploit her hard-earned credibility and international stature as an activist. This may look like a 'short-cut' to party-building, but it's not. We cannot build a sustainable political organization merely by riding the coattails of public figures. If we do not do the slow, daily work of organizing, we will never have the grassroots base from which real, structural change can grow.
5. Candidates are the product, and can only be as effective as the campaign which carries them. This is MORE true of grass-roots, minimally funded campaigns, not less true. Those who blame Dan Hamburg for the outcome of that campaign clearly do not understand the nature of the electoral process in high-profile races. If a candidate has to carry the campaign organization, then something is very wrong. In the absence of a celebrity candidate, this means we need to look realistically at what WE can achieve with what we have, (not what we think might magically happen if the corporate media give us lots of air time and the voters suddenly change their minds about voting for third parties).
I would like to respectfully suggest that we call a moratorium on running for any partisan office until we have Greens on 100 city councils, 200 school boards, and 300 planning commissions. What we did in Sebastopol and Arcata is no mystery, and there is no reason that 20 or 30 or 100 other cities can't have Green majorities within a few years. If we achieve that, we could build a network of Green (and other progressive) municipal governments to move forward on affordable housing, living wages, renewable energy, reversing global warming, green building codes, sustainable general plans, watershed restoration, and much more. This would set the standard for all local governments, and provide the political leadership which we know won't come from Washington or Sacramento.
Forget running for Governor, or Congress, or Assembly. Look at your local offices, and your local issues, and ask how you can Green your neighborhood, town, or school district. Strategize globally, organize locally.
--Daniel Solnit