The Greatest Gift I Could Offer: Quotations from Barack Obama on Parenting and Family Book

The world of progressive politics changed in 2000, when Nader took the left by storm, educating many people of the complicit injustices of both major parties. I was one of those people, a Libertarian at the time, and I found Nader extremely persuasive. He either argued for my Libertarian views, or else he persuaded me, but when all was said and done, I changed my voter registration to Green.

By 2004, it started becoming clear that Nader wasn't a typical Green. In fact, he wasn't a Green at all. He only played one for that election to help build it as an independent third party. In 2004, the Greens allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Democratic Party for fear of another term of Bush. This seemed to me like a suicidal move. What's the point of campaigning if your strategy is to avoid being too successful? Nevermind that Nader did not in fact spoil the election for Gore in 2000. In this winner-take-all system, "election spoiling" is the only possible way a third party could succeed. Exactly how bad does the Republican need to be before the Greens go running back to the Democrats? If they're unwilling to spoil elections for another party, why not just pack up and move in with that party? In fact, that's exactly what many Greens did in 2004.

This book helped me make sense of this whole charade. It's a collection of articles by various Greens, making up the gist of the debate between running a "safe states" strategy versus being a truly independent party. It's well-balanced, and presents all arguments, although the editor was arguing for independence. Peter Camejo did a beautiful job at articulating the independence argument in the Avacado Declaration. In other articles, it was argued that the primary election for David Cobb and the "safe states" strategy was unfair and biased. I didn't before realize just how many internal problems the Green Party has.

My verdict is that the Green Party is an immature, scattered, disorganized, harmless little party consisting mostly of socialists and disgruntled Democrats. Aside from Nader, they don't seem to take themselves very seriously. The Democrats in the Greens will ensure that they never really upset their chosen party, which basically renders them irrelevant. When they're not busy bickering with each other, or trying to avoid speaking up too loudly for fear of the Democrats, they make some good arguments. But they're not Nader, and I'm neither a Democrat nor a socialist, so I probably won't be voting Green anymore.