In The American Prospect (7/23/03), Michael Tomasky wrote, "Here they come again. As if the last two and a half years have been some sort of game show with no real consequences for America and the world, the Greens signaled at their national committee meeting this weekend that they have every intention of running a presidential candidate in 2004."

I disagree with his premise, but concur with Tomasky's conclusion. Yes, the Green Party activists meeting in DC this past July overwhelmingly expressed support for running a presidential candidate in 2004 (we are, after all a POLITICAL party) but no, we are not blind to the "real consequences" of our actions--we are motivated by them. If it was not clear before, 911 and its aftermath, and especially the Democrat's capitulation to the Bush junta, has only confirmed our conviction that almost all of the Democratic Party leadership oppose everything the Greens stand for: nonviolence, grassroots democracy, social justice, and ecological wisdom.

What ARE the real consequences of a growing Green Party in the U.S. and around the world? We are exposing people to the Green philosophy--a real alternative to the Republicrats, we are registering new voters, running candidates, and winning some elections. In short: We are building an alternative political party in the U.S., and in more democratic countries Greens already hold national office and help to set national policy. In this regard, many US Greens were especially proud of Green Party member and German Foreign Minster Joschka Fischer's principled stand against President Bush's unilateralism in the lead-up to the latest Iraqi war. By contrast, from the Green vantage, the Democratic Party's response was truly pitiable.

Tomasky wrote that, "Some [Greens] were young people, whose idealism is to be admired but who were by and large demographically insulated from some of the harsher realities of American life. But most were older, white, left bourgeoisie, tenured and cocooned in the carapace of self-righteous satisfaction, whose own lives wouldn't change much one way or the other no matter which party won. In fact, if anything, Bush's elevation was good for them personally, because they wouldn't suffer directly from federal budget cuts and were probably in a bracket that benefited from his tax cuts (as was I, but at least I had the sense to vote against my own interests)."

Here some of Tomasky's premise is correct, although not all of it, and his conclusion is dead wrong, at least for my home state of Maryland, where I am compiling a statistical analysis of Green Party support. As Tomasky implied, in Maryland at least, the modal average age of registered Green Party voters is 19--just about as young (and probably about as idealistic) as you can get. The average age of Green Party activists in Maryland is 47, and they are majority white. While a bare majority of Maryland Green Party activists could be considered "left bourgeoisie," a more accurate description of the entire cohort might simply be "concerned middle class." These activists are probably much less likely to be "tenured and cocooned in the carapace of self-righteous satisfaction," than is Mr. Tomasky himself, whose biography indicates is currently a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Some of us run our own businesses, some of us are retired, some of us work for others in the private sector, and others are public sector employees; our average 2002 personal income was under $40,000--in other words, unlike Mr. Tomasky's cohorts, Maryland Green Party activists lost whatever small break we might have seen in our federal taxes to increased property taxes, higher college tuition fees, declining interest rates on our savings, etc.

Tomasky stated that, "Among people who were directly affected by which candidate won, Nader was seen as the ornament of frippery that he was. I promise you, you could not have gone to the corner of Lenox Avenue and 145th Street in October of 2000 and found four Nader voters. And at that intersection and the many others in America like it, by my lights, the moral case for Nader crumbles to dust."

Tomasky's allusion to a predominately black community is telling, and he points to a real challenge for the Greens--many African Americans are convinced that the Greens, "care more about saving trees and owls than black people." Although our party platform is far ahead of the Democrat's in issues of critical importance to African Americans (like support for reparations for descendants of slavery, a living minimum wage, universal health care, etc.) the perception is that we are a "lily- white" party. Therefore, it is precisely in poor and middle class neighborhoods across the country, and especially at intersections where women and people of color dominate, that the Greens have the greatest opportunity to expand our base of support. To exploit this opportunity, at the July National Green Party Conference, we approved funding for a bold new project developed by our Black Caucus to reach out to the African-American community--our natural allies against the duopoly that dominates American politics, and is destroying American democracy.

Tomasky wrote, "Nader is obviously out to kill the Democrats. The collateral damage, to regular citizens whose lives are directly affected by which party is in power, is not his concern. He has long since quit caring about that."

Tomasky is quite wrong here: I suspect that Nader, who is not a Green, has not given up on the Democrats, does not want to "kill" their party, and still hopes to pull the Democrats back into the liberal camp where Nader himself resides, for the sake of the "regular citizens" Tomasky writes about. Maryland Green activists, on the other hand, have either given up on the Democrats (and to a lesser extent the Republicans, Socialists, Libertarians, etc.) or, like myself, never supported any other political party. It may come as a surprise to liberals that most Greens are not focused on them, but are instead resolutely building locals, organizing state parties, recruiting candidates, registering voters, and running election campaigns at the local, state, and yes, national levels.

In the spirit of comity, I'ld like to propose a solution, if not a compromise, to Mr. Tomasky and his ilk. The Green party is growing, while the Democrats are shrinking. Almost every day of the year, election years and off-years, Greens are tabling somewhere in the U.S. to register new members; why don't you do the same? I actually go out and talk with citizens, and get them to register Green. Why don't you, Mr. Tomasky, register one new Democrat for every new Green I register? Why don't you get the citizens at Lenox Avenue and 145th Street to all register Democratic and undercut Green Party efforts by "stealing" our voters before we can get to them? Why don't you try to convince them about how great the Democrats have been for their family over the past quarter century? With big money from your corporate donors, the Democrats should have no problem fielding a whole army of paid voter-registration workers. Strangely, I rarely see them at the tabling events where Green volunteers are out building our membership base, registering one new Green at a time, enrolling new voters who, very often, are young men and women who had never voted before.

Finally, I want to thank Mr. Tomasky and other political writers for the attention! Having struggled for years (and for some Greens, decades) in obscurity, it is empowering to finally have some exposure in the larger alternative publications, and especially in the mainstream press; all this, and the primaries have yet to begin! It's enough to make this Green imagine the unimaginable: that the Greens might actually win the presidency in 2004!

Michael Tomasky's "Gang Green":
www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/07/tomasky-m-07-23.html

Exchange between Tomasky and critics:
www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/08/readers-p-08-19.html