You Democrats have a lot to answer for: your God-damn party hierarchy in California spends more time getting in the way of the Greens that opposing the Republicans–and you say nothing about it. Figure it out, already: either the Greens are too small to be significant, and should be left alone in local races (the SF mayor’s run, for example), or they’re big enough that you need to deal with them and make the appropriate deals. Thunder, you most especially–it’s rectal craniectomy time: your party is the one making deals with the Repugs and helping to bring forward their agenda. How about being an actual opposition party and opposing the Rs?

Save your fire for the real enemy, not for your likely allies. If you feel that Greens are stealing votes that should go to Dems, then the Dems obviously need to move left, not right. If you’re a Dem, and you’re not very, very actively opposing the influence of the DLC and the corporatists in your own party, you have no business criticizing any other party.

Clean up your own shit, then come talk to us Greens.

Here:
http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml

Click on the link “Current Green Office Holders”

It’s never steered me wrong. Well, OK, that may not be entirely true. But I maintain that it’s central to any point I may have. Or any pint I may have, for that matter.

Presented in the interests of spiritual healing for the S,N! reality based commune.

I’m gonna go with the drinking concept…

mikey

Of course elections matter; of course keeping the WH out of the GOP’s hands in ’08 is crucial (and while Obama is my guy, if Hilary wins the primaries I will not only vote for her but try to convince everyone I know to do the same). I didn’t think I needed to say any of that but I guess I did.

The proven model for progressive change is bottom-up, not top-down; that effective progressive leaders are pushed out front by mass movements, not pied pipers who lead the public in this direction or that.

All I’m saying is that the way to effect change is to get your neighbors riled up and all pointing generally in the same direction. That’s where the political mandate come from to elect good people to office and where the pressure comes from to make sure they do the Right Thing™ once they are there.

Expecting electoral politics alone to effect progressive change is unrealistic; it takes both sustained direct, grassroots action and elected allies. We (and by that I mean people like me who became politically active in the Intarwebs Age) seem to have lost sight of the fact that a lot of politics has little or nothing to do with elections.

And there wouldn’t be a holiday in his name, either.

As for what he’d be doing now at the age of 79, I’m going to guess enjoying his retirement.

If I were a Democrat, I’d be spending a lot of time working to reform my party: running for local and state committee positions, working on primary campaigns to unseat “DINO”s, organizing progressive Democrats and so forth…though truth be told I’m not a Democrat in part because I think such efforts are largely a waste of time

I don’t doubt that you’re sincere, IB, but kee-rist! First you tell us what to do (three things that, by the by, I actually do) and then tell us not to bother because we’re wasting our time? Because, what, being an active member of the Green party is so much more effective in terms of changing the political landscape?

OK, that thing I said earlier about not drinking? That’s over. The day’s not young anymore.

I live in Ohio, d00d. I’m already chillin’.

As for the mostly on roughly the same side, tanx for nottin, splittuh!1one!

As for King, Jackson’s contention seems to be that he would vote for whoever had the most rocksolid antichoice platform. These people don’t do sophistication.

How does it happen then, kingubu?

I’ve seen this country’s democracy steadily flushed down the toilet since Richard Nixon, with brief interruptions from Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Certainly, I won’t question I.B.’s piousness, or your’s.

But wtf, exactly, are any of you contributing to a solution?

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp.

Where is ANY evidence that the Green Party, in whatever incarnation, has done a thing besides bring more alligators?

Rock the fuck on, Ms. Buttocks.

Progressive Dems are still mostly looking through the wrong end of the telescope, waiting to elect just the right mixture of politicians to lead the country into a new progressive era. It just doesn’t– and can’t– happen that way.

Let GWB’s suckcessor appoint a couple more judges to the Supreme Court, and this whole worrying about who to vote for thingy will be a distant memory.

Anytime the greens want to run a candidate against a viable Democrat, I’m sure they’ll be able to get money from some Richard Mellon-Scaife funded astroturf organization.

Because Richard Mellon-Scaife is gullible like that.

Not like you.

By that, I meant that in my mind he is someone who would be able to fairly weigh that strategy on its merits, and apropos to particular electoral circumstances … that he would neither endorse ‘less of two evils’ nor dismiss it forever and always on purist ideological grounds.

It’s interesting, IB, because I guess I always just assume that if Dr. King were active today, he would be leading a national ministry. But in our own more fractured time, perhaps it’s more likely he would a leader at the local level. It’s difficult for me to imagine a single umbrella issue, i.e. civil rights, that today might be rallied around to achieve change in the relatively linear fashion that the Civil Rights movement accomplished.

But that’s probably just my lack of imagination.

At any rate, if he’s acting more locally, there’s less reason for King to collaborate with national politicians. In that imagining, it’s certainly harder to see him endorsing and campaigning for any of the current candidates, as you say.

But who does he, himself, vote for? Or does he vote at all?

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

With someone who would vote for the lesser of two evils, when both evils are rooted in American military imperialism…

Well this thread wasn’t about my suggestion. It was about what we might imagine Dr. King would be doing. And I’d imagine that, rather than focusing on the presidential race, he’d be organizing various forms of direct political action because that’s what he spent basically his entire damn career doing. And given his extraordinary record, I also imagine that whatever ideas he’d have for such direct action would be a whole lot better than anything I, or anyone else on this thread, could come up with. The greatest tragedy of King’s assassination is that we lost a leader who had decades of vision and political creativity left in him.

As for what I would suggest? There are always tried-and-true, always good ideas like registering voters or working with single-issue organizations promoting necessary changes (from The Center for Voting and Democracy to United for Peace & Justice and many, many more).

If I were a Democrat, I’d be spending a lot of time working to reform my party: running for local and state committee positions, working on primary campaigns to unseat “DINO”s, organizing progressive Democrats and so forth…though truth be told I’m not a Democrat in part because I think such efforts are largely a waste of time given the powers and money arrayed to keep the party committed to its corporate and militarist orientation.

I wish I could more enthusiastically say “work for the Green Party,” but I fear that my party, while standing for the right values, is pretty adrift at the moment.

But, as I said, I’m sure Dr. King would have much, much better ideas.