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The Next Four Years - A Green Plan

© Ken Goldstein

The Presidential campaign is over, the bumper stickers removed, the signs taken down, the votes counted (and counted and counted), and the election done with for nearly a month. Perhaps, by the time you read this, we'll even know who won. Now it's time to start planning for 2004.

Ralph Nader, in his third Presidential run, and his second on the Green Party ticket, garnered a little over two-and-a-half percent of the popular vote. He had been polling quite a bit higher, but a close election, and a last minute guilt trip campaign from Gore and the Democrats, brought about a last minute defection of many Nader supporters.

As a Green loyalist, I would like to extend my thanks to Ralph Nader for his excellent work in getting out the Green message, and for running a clean campaign that we can be proud of. I'd also like to ask him to not run again. That's right: Not to run again.

As much as I admire Ralph Nader, and as big a debt as I feel the Green Party owes to him, I think it is vitally important that we concentrate on our strengths, and not risk becoming a "cult of personality."

It was the Reform Party's reliance on the personality of Ross Perot that both gave it strength, and led to its downfall. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the power vacuum left by Ross sitting this one out turned out to be the "giant sucking sound" that he had so long ago predicted. Because there was no party structure preceding Perot, there was no glue, no history, to keep it together post-Perot.

The Greens have that structure. Before Nader, there were already a couple hundred Greens sitting on town councils, school boards, and special districts across the country. Before Nader, we already had a strong progressive platform built around the ten key principals. These strengths, the people and the message, are what we need to concentrate on at this time.

Thanks to Nader, we now have the momentum to move the existing elected Greens into higher office (such as state legislatures) and bring a new generation of Greens into the local offices. Rather than spending the next four years figuring out how to get Nader to five percent nationally, we should be working on electing two Green Governors by 2004.

Besides avoiding the dangers of the cult of personality within the Green Party, we also need to demonstrate to the rest of the country that have more to offer. If we run a Presidential candidate in 2004 - and that is a big "if" - I would love to see a big name Democratic Party defector; someone who could articulate our message of political reform, fight for universal health care and locally-based economics, and have the political credentials and clout to win.

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