>And there was the Green run against Wellstone, and the loss of ballot
>access in varoius states. At this time, how many states does the Green
>party retain a position on the ballot?
I have to say that many of the Greens quoted in Micah Sifry's Nation piece <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031124&s=sifry> sound pretty thoughtful and mature. The opposite of those Greens who want to run Cynthia McKinney.
>"I don't think Ralph Nader should run again," says Elizabeth Horton
>Sheff, one of the party's slowly increasing number of
>African-American elected officials. Sheff, the majority leader of
>the Hartford, Connecticut, city council, adds, "Our message of
>grassroots inclusion did not get through with this candidate. His
>appeal is not broad enough to reach my community."
>Larry Barnett, a Green who is the former mayor of Sonoma,
>California, and a current member of its city council, calls any
>presidential bid "an ego-centered exercise in futility."
>Harsh words, but they're matched by Robert McChesney, co-editor of
>Monthly Review, member of Nader's Citizen Works' Corporate Reform
>Commission, president of the professors' council of the US Campus
>Greens since 2001 and a leading media democracy activist. "I don't
>think Ralph should run," he e-mailed me a few weeks ago. "It would
>be bad for him personally; I doubt he would get half the number of
>votes he got in 2000. And it would be bad for the Greens.... Core
>elements of progressive constituencies, exactly the groups that the
>Greens need to build upon, will revolt with open contempt--far worse
>than 2000--to anything that helps keep Bush in office." McChesney
>concludes, "Running a presidential candidate in 2004 for the Greens
>is probably a quantum leap off a cliff. It is the Greens' Jonestown."
etc.
Meanwhile:
>Nader has not ruled out leaving the Green fold and running as an
>independent. Nor is it inconceivable that he would file against Bush
>in some Republican primaries, and then try to switch to an
>independent line for the fall.
He's become a full-fledged jerk.
Doug