> On my description of Gonzalez as "the second highest elected
> official": Why "problematic"? It is literally true for the reason
> you give.
Literal truth can sometimes be misleading. Was Matt Gonzales picked by the voters to be president of the Board of Supervisors? Or was he picked to be one of eleven equal members of the Board, and then picked by the Board to be president? There's s a difference. It's like calling Dennis Hastert the third-highest elected official in the US Government. It's literally true, but hides the fact that he was elected to be a member of Congress, and that the House chose him for speaker. The Hastert analogy even leaves out the complication of there being other elected city officials in San Francisco. (Perhaps the District Attorney should be called the second highest--she's certainly the second most powerful.)
> As for the question on the accounting of local Green officeholders:
> Many if not most local elections do not identify party affiliation on
> the ballot. This does not mean that elections are non-partisan, as
> we saw in the Gonzalez campaign. I presume you would agree that
> Gonzalez, a registered Green who received the party endorsement
> should be considered a Green officeholder even though the race was
> officially non-partisan. Many of the 218 local officeholders are in
> this category, though there may be a few problematic instances.
I agree with this, except that there are two words in the last sentence--"many" and "few"--which cover a wide speculative range. What I was talking about was people who did not run as Greens, did not publicize themselves as Greens, and (in at least one of the two cases) were not members of the Greens. I bet there are a lot more of these than are acknowledged.
> On the question of Nader running as an independent: I would certainly
> prefer that he run as a Green for the reasons you mention. Why isn't
> he? Well, blame me, if you want. I was
> listening too much to liberals like Henwood and Norman Solomon and did
> not support those members of the national Green Party who were
> lobbying for an early unofficial endorsement of Nader's candidacy as a
> Green.
This I don't get. (Okay, I get the humor part.) Why is Nader so important to the Greens? Why shouldn't the party have a chance to pick a candidate other than Nader?
Here's a likely scenario: Suppose Nader runs as an independent, and the Greens run their own candidate.
Who will you vote for? Nader? Or the Green Party candidate?
All the best,
John A