Stop blaming the Greens for a f**ked up, undemocratic system

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:53 PM on August 3, 2006.

As Lindsay points out in Peek, TPM Muckraker figured out that it was conservative supporters of Rick Santorum who funded the $40,000 signature drive to get Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli on the Pennsylvania Senate ballot.

Shocker. Even though it's happened time and time again.

And, of course, on cue, the liberal bloggers are pulling out their knives.

Holden at First Draft, begging for a shot to the kisser, asks: "Is there any magnet for whores in this country larger than the Green Party?"

The non-evil Roger Ailes repeats the conventional nonsense that Nader was responsible for Bush and now cries about tricky Rick Santorum courting a "Selfish Green Rogue."

John Aravosis at Americablog also blames Nader for not one but "two Bush presidencies," and demands that the "Green Party candidate return the money and pull out of the race." (Recall how snippy John got when some of his readers had the nerve to question his ethics for accepting a bloggers' trip to Amsterdam paid for by the Dutch government.)

And Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money thinks "the Republicans are funding a Useful Idiot Party candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate."

[OK, deep, calming breath.* These are otherwise good people, Holland, and it's not the time for an obscenity-laced tirade.]

Of course Repubs help Greens get on the ballot. That's the way the system's set up. And is that somehow the Green candidate's fault? Or is it the fault of the Dems and Repubs? Are the Greens somehow responsible for the fact that you need to collect 100,000 friggin' signatures to get on the Pennsylvania ballot? Why not put the blame where it belongs?

This whining has become a maddening tradition, and it just makes me crazy how short-sighted people are.

You'd think from reading those clips that these bloggers hate spoilers, but they don't. Spoilers -- a constant stream of Republican-backed Green Party candidates -- don't bother them in the least.

If they did, they'd talk all the time about the clean elections model, they'd talk about Instant Runoff Voting and they'd talk about how ludicrous these onerous ballot requirements are.

They'd talk about what an unbelievable joke it is to call the U.S. a democracy and guarantee everyone the right to participate, and then set the price of entry at $40,000 dollars.

But we hear so little about those things that we can only conclude that they love spoilers. After all, it's something to bitch about, and it's someone to blame when the Dems ignore the issues most important to Americans, roll over for the Repubs and lose.

If we had a couple of hundred Ned Lamonts -- people who can throw one and a half mil into the ring along with their hat -- then it wouldn't be an issue. But we don't, so it is.

Now, I'm pragmatic enough to hold my nose and root for a Casey win, because Santorum's among the most odious of wing-nuts and I want to see a Dem Senate that won't rubber stamp Bush's madness. (And whoever thinks some no-name, no-money Greenie is going to swing the Pennsylvania vote to Man-on-dog Santorum needs to share what he or she's smoking with the rest of us. Seen the polls lately?)

But I can promise you, as a former Green who's now a disgusted, Dem-leaning, independent liberal swing-voter -- I've been on both sides of this question -- that if progressives and Greens and Dems can't get together on the basics of small "d" democracy, we have zero chance of ever creating a broad coalition in the American left. We simply will never see eye-to-eye as long as the Dems are indistinguishable fro the Repubs on these basic questions of American political participation.

*I'm grumpy because the heat index is at 105 degrees. I'm going to head to the damn supermarket and hang out in their industrial-strength AC until I'm my usual perky self.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.