>a) bush is a particularly vicious menace to the world and replacing
>him with kerry would make a small but significant difference (i will
>throw in a simple example of something that may improve:
>environmental protection).
John Kerry voted against even Kyoto in 1997, even though Kyoto itself was a very weak protocol severely circumscribed by the market principle (cf. <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/06/day-after-tomorrow-greenwashing.html>). The only hope for the environment in the near future as far as climate change is concerned may be that gas prices will likely remain high and may even rise higher, which should motivate at least small changes in production and consumption.
>b) the best (and perhaps only) way to make third-parties and their
>candidates viable is to start at the state/county/town/city level,
>both in terms of growing such parties, and fighting the practices
>(winner-take-all, lack of runoffs in elections, etc) that make them
>infeasible.
Here's a paradox: it is difficult to put left-wing candidates on the ballots in the general elections, to say nothing of electing them, for the highest offices, whether they are members of the Green Party (who need to overcome restrictive ballot access), the Democratic Party (who need to raise a lot of money to win in party caucuses and primaries), or something else; and it is much easier to elect left-wing candidates, whether they are members of the Green Party, the Democratic Party, or something else, for lower-level offices, but lots of lower-level elections are non-partisan elections, so it matters much less to voters of which parties candidates are members.
In any case, though, if you want to aim only for good and clean government at local levels, it is indeed advisable to focus on lower-level elections, but if that's your only goal, it doesn't seem to me to be absolutely necessary to build a third party.
The difference between the programs of the Democratic Party and the Green Party (or the Labor Party or any other party on the left that existed in the past and may come into being in the future) is the clearest at the level of national politics, not at the levels of school boards and city councils.
So, it all depends on what you want the Green Party (or any other third-party on the left) to do. If your sole aim is good and clean local government, by all means focus on local elections, though I'm not sure why you need a third party for that purpose. If your aim is to build a political party that is an electoral arm of social movements such as an anti-war movement, a Green movement, etc. that have political agendas for social change at the national level (which cannot be addressed, much less achieved, at local levels), it doesn't make sense to run candidates only for school boards and city councils. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * 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/>