I'm no Nader "fan," but I believe that the Green Party would have gotten more out of the Nader/Camejo campaign than the Cobb/LaMarch one, so I blogged a couple of entries on the topic, one of which is getting a lot of hits as it is listed at Cursor.org.
* Tuesday, June 29, 2004 Missing the "Walter Cronkite Moment"
One of the most eloquent indictments of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, memorializing both acclaimed sacrifice of privilege and anonymous suffering of privation, came from an unexpected source -- Sports Illustrated. SI columnist Rick Reilly wrote in the magazine's May 3, 2004 issue:
The Hero and the Unknown Soldier
All day, in San Jose, the parents of late NFL star Pat Tillman were seeing their son get the kind of attention he would've hated: his face on CNN, teddy bear memorials, a tribute from the White House.
All day, in Bellaire, Ohio, the grandmother of former high school football star Todd Bates was living with a solitary ache she can barely describe: The boy she raised as her own came back from Iraq in a box, and nobody broke into a newscast to announce his death to the nation.
Since 9/11, all Arizona Cardinals strong safety Pat Tillman wanted was to fight for his country. He took a potential $1,182,000 annual pay cut to jump from the NFL to the Army Rangers in 2002, and he refused all attempts to glorify his decision. He told friends that he wanted to be treated as no more special than the guy on the cot next to him. ("He viewed his decision as no more patriotic than that of his less fortunate, less renowned countrymen," Arizona senator John McCain said.) Tillman even forbade his family and friends from talking to the press about him. News crews begged for photos, mere shots of him signing his induction papers or piling out of a truck at Fort Benning, Ga., or getting his first haircut -- anything. They got nothing.
Since he was a kid, all Bellaire High linebacker Todd Bates wanted was "to be somebody," his football team chaplain, Pastor Don Cordery, told the Associated Press. When you grow up poor and without your parents around, you get hungry to make your mark. He wasn't a good enough player to get a scholarship, yet he desperately wanted to go to college. So in 2002 he took the only road available to him -- he left home and joined the Ohio Army National Guard. Nobody wanted to take a picture of him getting his haircut.
Tillman, 5'11" and 200 pounds, joined the only team tougher than the NFL -- the 75th Ranger Regiment. He served a tour of duty in Iraq, then went to Afghanistan. He was killed last Thursday in an ambush in the remote eastern Afghan province of Khost. His younger brother Kevin, also a Ranger, escorted his body home.
Bates, 6 feet and 250 pounds, walked eight miles a day with a 50-pound backpack to lose enough weight to join the Army, recalls his grandmother Shirley Bates, who raised him from a baby. He made it to Baghdad and was on a boat patrolling the Tigris River when his squad leader lost his balance and fell overboard. Without a life jacket Bates dived in to rescue him. Both men drowned. It took 13 days to find Bates's body, on Dec. 23, one month before his unit returned home.
Tillman's death shook the country like no other in this war. Makeshift memorials sprang up at his alma mater, Arizona State, and at the Cardinals' offices in Tempe. The club announced that the plaza around its new stadium will be named Pat Tillman Freedom Plaza. At the NFL draft in New York, commissioner Paul Tagliabue wore a black ribbon with Tillman's name on it. Some people talked about retiring his number, 40, league-wide.
Only friends and family grieved for Bates, but deeply. It so tormented Shirley's companion, 61-year-old Charles Jones -- the man who helped her raise Todd -- that he refused to go to the funeral. "If I don't go, then Toddie can't be dead," he kept saying. He refused to leave the house. He refused to talk much. He refused to eat. Four weeks later he dropped over dead without a word. "He died of a broken heart," says Shirley. She buried them in the cemetery up the hill from her home, side by side.
Tillman died a hero and a patriot. But his death is a wake-up call to the nation that every day -- more than 500 times since President Bush declared "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," more than 800 times since the invasion of Afghanistan -- a family must drive to the airport to greet their dead child. The only difference this time is that the whole country knew this child.
In the little house in Bellaire, any patriotism was swallowed up by sorrow. "There was no reason for my boy to die," says Shirley. "There is no reason for this war. There were no weapons found. All we have now is a Vietnam. My Toddie's life was wasted over there. All this war is a waste. Look at all these boys going home in coffins. What's the good in it?"
Athletes are soldiers and soldiers are athletes. Uniformed, fit and trained, they fight for one cause, one team. They take ground and they defend it. Both are carried off on their teammates' shoulders, athletes when they win and soldiers when they die.
Pat Tillman and Todd Bates were athletes and soldiers. Tillman wanted to be anonymous and became the face of this war. Bates wanted to be somebody and died faceless to most of the nation.
Both did their duty for their country, but I wonder if their country did its duty for them. Tillman died in Afghanistan, a war with no end in sight and not enough troops to finish the job. Bates died in Iraq, a war that began with no just cause and continues with no just reason.
Be proud that sports produce men like this.
But I, for one, am furious that these wars keep taking them. (Reilly, Sports Illustrated, May 3, 2004)
Jonathan Tasini called reading the Reilly essay a "Walter Cronkite moment":
I experienced a Walter Cronkite moment last week that signaled to me that something is in the air about what people feel about the Iraq war. . . . My moment came after reading Rick Reilly's column in Sports Illustrated. Yes, SI, magazine to the sports-obsessed (to which I proudly belong).
What's important here is that Reilly's audience is not the typical Nation reader. He speaks to the so-called NASCAR dads, the Sunday golfers, the Monday-morning quarterbacks and the couch-potato referees. He speaks, SI estimates, to 31 million people (3.1 million subscribe to the magazine, 21 million adults read the magazine as it is passed around the family and 10 million more see the column on SI's website). It's a sizable audience -- of Cronkite-like size -- which can fairly be described as generally mainstream, and, on the whole, slightly more conservative than the average America. . . .
The response to Reilly's column has been overwhelming -- both pro and con, he says. Reilly usually gets a couple hundred responses to his columns; so far, he's received more than 2,000 -- most of them messages of agreement. It may be an overstatement, today, to say Reilly's column had the same impact as Cronkite's national commentary more than 36 years ago. But, as Reilly told me, sports is a tightly woven part of the fabric of our lives, an activity through which we can converse and reach huge swaths of the public. Who knows who Reilly touched? ("A Cronkite Moment?" TomPaine.com, May 7, 2004)
I wish that the delegates at the Green Party's national convention had all read Reilly's column and considered the public opinion reflected in it. Never before in the history of US wars have the conditions for giving an electoral expression to an anti-war movement through a third party been more promising, as far as public sentiments are concerned. Alas, the Green Party appears to have missed the "Walter Cronkite moment." By choosing David Cobb over Ralph Nader by a slim majority and handing the swing states to John Kerry on a silver platter, the Green Party essentially elected to divorce itself from Americans who wish to vote against the pro-war candidates of the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Update:
Apparently, the Green Party is in worse shape than I thought. The Green Party vice presidential candidate Pat LaMarche announced to the press that "she would not commit to voting for herself and her running mate, Texas lawyer David Cobb" ("The Green Party's Political Suicide," June 30, 2004).
* Wednesday, June 30, 2004 The Green Party's Political Suicide
Yesterday, I lamented that the Green Party missed the "Walter Cronkite moment" by refusing to use the Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo campaign for the purpose of giving an electoral expression to the anti-war movement ("Missing the 'Walter Cronkite Moment,'" June 29, 2004). Apparently, the Green Party is in much worse shape than I thought. Rather than simply missing an opportunity to raise the party's political profile in preparation for 2008 by running a strong anti-war campaign nationwide in 2004 when both the Democratic and Republican Parties are stuck with pro-war candidates John Kerry and George W. Bush, the Green Party committed political suicide, by selecting a vice presidential candidate who does not take her own candidacy seriously and announces her lack of seriousness publicly: Pat LaMarche, the Green Party's newly nominated candidate for vice president, said Tuesday that her top priority is not winning the White House for her party, but ensuring that President Bush is defeated. She is, in fact, so determined to see Bush lose that she would not commit to voting for herself and her running mate, Texas lawyer David Cobb.
LaMarche, who won 7 percent of the vote when she was the Green Independent candidate for governor of Maine in 1998, said she'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating Bush.
But "if Bush has got 11 percent of the vote in Maine come November 2, I can vote for whoever I want," she said in an interview with the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.
And if the state is, as it is now, a toss-up between Bush and presumptive Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry?
She could well vote for the Democrat.
"I love my country," she said. "Maybe we should ask them that, because if (Vice President) Dick Cheney loved his country, he wouldn't be voting for himself."
A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign said the vice president is certain to vote for his and Bush's re-election.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist who directs the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said, "It's a rare thing, even for a splinter party, to have a nominee for vice president indicate she is not sure for whom she is going to vote." (emphasis added, Joshua L. Weinstein, "LaMarche Says She'll Vote for Whoever Can Beat Bush," Portland Press Herald, June 30, 2004)
Who the hell is going to vote for a candidate who says she may vote for a rival candidate rather than herself??? LaMarche lost her radio job after her DUI arrest and conviction in 1997:
[A Photograph of Pat LaMarche]
[The Photo Caption] Pat LaMarche served four days for operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. Since her arrest, her life has gone into a tailspin of uncertainty. Staff photo by Jack Milton (Barbara Walsh, "Former Radio Host's New Identity: The Drunken Driver," Portland Press Herald, October 22, 1997)
For a Green Party candidate, what's worse than driving under the influence is campaigning under the influence, i.e., under the influence of the Democratic Party. Fortunate individuals can survive DUI, physically and politically. No such luck in the case of CUI, a self-destructive behavior which sets a third party on a sure road to certain political death.
<http://montages.blogspot.com/> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>