[lbo-talk] 2002-2004: Education and Motivation, or Lack Thereof

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Sep 10 09:41:13 PDT 2004


[lbo-talk] Re New Economist Poll: Bad News For Bush, Nathan Newman nathanne at nathannewman.org, Fri Sep 10 07:58:59 PDT 2004
>From: "Michael Dawson" <mdawson at pdx.edu>
>>I'm going to vote for Kerry, but I won't walk across the street to
>>campaign for him unless and until he promises something worthwhile.
>>He has not done so yet.
>
>Which is just the bizarre position for any progressive to take.
>Your individual vote is almost meaningless, but whether you campaign
>for a candidate-- even to the extent of praising or dissing him in
>emails-- has the potential to have a far greater effect by changing
>multiple votes.

I agree with Nathan that vowing to vote for a candidate while refusing to campaign for him in a very close race -- even when the polls begin to show that the candidate is slipping down -- is a bizarre position, but it is a position that is widely held by the Anybody But Nader gang and other would-be Kerry voters among activists and intellectuals on the liberal left. If you want a candidate to win, at least more than half of what you say about the candidate has to be positive, even if you wish to remain critical of him. If the majority of what you say about the candidate is negative (as in the case of most Kerry supporters here and elsewhere), regardless of your professed intention to vote for him, you end up discouraging others from voting for him.

<blockquote>Even the people who tell me they will vote for Kerry take pains to stress that they don't like him. CounterPuncher JoAnn Wsypijewski, who marched against Bush in New York Sunday phoned me to say that though she didn't like Kerry but would vote for the man, "I know now he's definitely going to lose."

"How do you know that?"

"<strong>There were maybe 450,000 people on the streets of Manhattan, all of them hating Bush and I saw maybe ten people with Kerry/Edwards signs.</strong> Maybe two with Nader/Camejo signs. People don't connect hating Bush with voting for Kerry." (emphasis added, Alexander Cockburn, "The Stench of Doom: Kerry's Slippage," <em>CounterPunch</em>, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09012004.html">August 21, 2004</a>)</blockquote>

[lbo-talk] thoughts about kerry and the election, Seth Ackerman sethia at speakeasy.net, Fri Sep 10 08:19:44 PDT 2004
>2) I doubt Kerry could gain anything now by being forthrightly
>antiwar. Not only would he be even more of a flip-flopper, but he
>would probably alienate more votes than he'd win. The fact is, the
>time for educating the public ended a long time ago. You can't
>reeducate 300 mil. people in 6 weeks. Had Kerry and the Dem
>leadership denounced the war - or even just the way Bush fought it -
>*at the time it started* , and then stuck to it, they would have
>gotten much more credit once the the "anti-war" posish (or
>"anti-this-war" posish) became vindicated Instead, the mess in Iraq
>ended up hurting Bush without making the Dems look much better.

Quite right, and the election year when "the mess in Iraq ended up hurting Bush without making the Dems look much better" would have been *a golden opportunity* to make a great leap forward in third-party organizing, but too many activists, organizers, and intellectuals -- inside and outside the Green Party -- refused to seize the day.

Left-wing activists, organizers, and intellectuals who have been pushing Nader/Camejo 2004 -- including myself -- have only ourselves to blame, however, by failing to begin organizing two years ago.

Ideally, a meeting to bring together socialists, left-wing Greens, and others committed to independent political action should have happened about *two years ago*, shortly after 110 Democrats voted for the invasion of Iraq on October 10-11, 2002 (29 Democrats voting for the war and 21 against in the Senate; 81 Democrats voting for the war and 126 against in the House) and the consequent electoral debacle for the Democrats in November 2002. That's when we (socialists, left-wing Greens, and others committed to independent political action) should have drafted Nader/Camejo for our campaign, begun to promote them at every local and national anti-war action, initiated the work of drumming up Green Party member support for them, got on the business of hammering on the crucial importance of independent political action on the electoral front for anti-war and other social movements, and started to organize a nationwide network of at least 15,000 organizers and activists (inside and outside the Green Party) who could collect roughly 1.5 million signatures (the number sufficient to put Nader/Camejo on the ballots in 50 states even in the event of Green Party bureaucrats' successful sabotage of left-wing Greens). That wouldn't have been easy, but it was doable, and if we had done that, we would have had a campaign that we should have had -- or *at the very least a very good foundation for such a campaign*.

Since we *never even tried* to create such a nationwide network of organizers and activists (which includes left-wing Greens as its core members but does not solely consists of them), our inaction -- our inability to give any sizable and organized support to left-wing Greens who were and still are largely disorganized -- helped Green bureaucrats consolidate their stranglehold on the leadership positions of the national and state parties. (Given Nader/Camejo's loss of the GPCA ballot, it will be hard for us to get us out of the hole that we dug in part ourselves.)

Also, socialists, left-wing Greens, and others committed to independent political action have the unfinished task of clarifying -- first to ourselves -- what it is we hope to achieve. Let's suppose that we have the kind of campaign that we should have had (but actually don't this year). Such a campaign gives Nader/Camejo a chance of winning 5-10% of the popular votes this year, max. What does that mean politically? What can we do with it? How do we build on it? We've never articulated a clear and consistent answer to such questions on which all of us agree, let alone explain it convincingly to others. Nader, Camejo, assorted socialists, left-wing Greens, etc. have given a variety of answers to them, many of them mutually contradictory. Such a muddle won't do. We need to get together, clarify our main message jointly, and stay on it.

My comrades and I have begun an effort to do better in 2004-2008. -- 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/>



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