FLIRTING? MORE LIKE SUCKING FACE:

Flirting with disaster: Brash and controversial, former US representative Cynthia McKinney could lead the Green Party to prominence in 2004--or right over a cliff (SETH GITELL, Boston Phoenix)

QUESTION: WHICH WAY is the national Green Party headed these days? Answer: toward Cynthia McKinney.

When the party's presidential exploratory committee put out feelers to Greens around the country about whom they wanted to run for president, the number of recommendations McKinney received was second only to those for Ralph Nader, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000. McKinney, a former Democratic US representative from Georgia who lost to Judge Denise Majette in a primary challenge last August (Majette eventually defeated Republican Cynthia van Auken in the general election), has yet to change her party affiliation or indicate she's willing to run as a Green. But the Greens want her. Her name was high on a list of potential candidates compiled by the national Green Party (other names included MSNBC talk-show host Phil Donahue, actress Susan Sarandon, and filmmaker Michael Moore). If the Greens do run McKinney--either at the top of the ticket or with Ralph Nader--it will be a new, high-risk strategy for a party that has heretofore focused on building itself from the ground up.

The Greens, in theory, are well-positioned to build on their plan, instituted in the late 1990s, of running candidates at the national and local levels with the goal of constructing a permanent electoral apparatus and a real third-party alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. The Greens won national recognition--and derision from Democrats, who blame them for former vice-president Al Gore’s narrow defeat by President George W. Bush--in 2000, when Nader won 2.7 percent of the national vote. In 2002, moreover, the Greens did well on the statewide scene. Here in Massachusetts, Lexington physician Jill Stein, running for governor, garnered 10 percent of the vote. In Maine, the Green Independent Party elected John Eder to the state House of Representatives; meanwhile, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter won nine percent of the vote. In California, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Peter Camejo received 5.3 percent of the vote and came in second to Democrat Gray Davis in San Francisco.

Nader is still playing coy about a presidential run next year. Co-hosting CNN's Crossfire last week, he told Tucker Carlson that "it's too early to say" whether he would run again, adding he would decide "sometime later in the year." As Nader has kept his cards close to his vest, some national Greens have gone looking elsewhere for a 2004 presidential candidate. And they seem to be looking in the same place: Georgia, where McKinney resides. McKinney has several assets that appeal to Greens: she's progressive; she's an articulate and seasoned politician who knows how to campaign; and she is black and from the South, an area of the country where the Greens are weakest. Most important, however, is that she can tell the story of how the Democratic Party is no home for progressive politics.

There's no reason that the Green's should not replace the Democrats as the main opposition party to the GOP. The Clintonized Democrats have abandoned most of the "progressive" platform--from Universal Health to gay marriage to anti-capital punishment to anti-war to large tax and spending increases and so on. It's strange but even as the Third Way in Britain has destroyed the Tories, Tony Blair having co-opted the middle on most issues, Bill Clinton's New Democrat agenda has destroyed the Democrats. It would seem that the GOP has been more successful at painting the Democrats as a party of me-tooism and then pulling them even further towards the Right, effectively alienating their base, than has the Tory Party (which, for reasons that no one can explain, has claimed the me-too mantle for itself, rather than forcing Blair and Labour to the Right by coming out forthrightly against the EU and the Welfare State). But in both cases you have what were once main parties that no longer even bother to enunciate the political visions that led most of the membership to them in the first place.

Here in the States that offers a chance for one of two things, either a genuine progressive will emerge in the Democrat presidential primaries, maybe a Hillary Clinton, or, if the party turns instead toward the New Democrat-type candidates (Lieberman, Gephardt, etc.), the Greens could ride a groundswell on the Left. However, they need a plausible candidate to rally around, which means not a Nader or a McKinney. In fact, there don't seem to be many professional politicians who are true progressives and are also charismatic. The Greens might do better to look to someone like a Robert Redford or a Martin Sheen who would immediately capture massive media attention and who can at least pretend to be presidential.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2003 3:14 PM