So how?

I'll stop there.

This is terrible shame for both parties, as well as for Nader.  The enormous contribution he has made to American society and politics has virtually been nullified by the disastrous results produced by his arrogance in 2000.  

It's not that I'm enthusiastic about what Gore might have done if he were elected.  It's just that Bush is the worst President ever, and Gore, quite obviously, would not have been.  And, regardless of all the other factors one can point to, we very clearly have Nader to thank for that.

What happened to the Green Party was almost-incidental collateral damage.  I must say that I'm not surprised. I was involved in Green organizing in the pre-party era in California, but I opposed becoming political party, for the simple reason that the US system made it a zero-sum game between Greens and Democrts.  

I might have stayed actively engaged with the Greens for a lot longer, but there was virtually no one arguing for party status who seemed to understand the problems involved.  Instead, it was almost wall-to-wall utopian/idealist rhetoric, symptomatic of treating politics as if it were a form a group therapy.  

With Adam and Eve, Man fell from grace but never hit rock bottom until George W. Bush came on the scene.

Gore would have been a GREAT president!!!

Any candidate besides the main two is a vote wasted. Only a small portion of the population is willing to waste their votes.

In a PR system I would be a Green or something like that...but Greens should stop trying to build from outside, and instead work on moving the country to the left. Kind of like the conservative movement within the Republican party that sparked Goldwater, then Reagan...

Finally, I had to go meet the Greens. I thought they would be a sure fit for Open Space. Hell, the local GOP and everyone to the left agreed that it was important to extend the Open Space fund.

But the assholes in the Green Party were -- of course -- inept. They didn't have enough losers attend their meeting, so they couldn't make a decision. When it came time to make a decision, over email, they emailed out the designation of each proposition without any information so the ill-informed Green Party leadership (in San Francisco) came out against Open Space.

Literally, every single political organization in San Francisco endorsed, but the Green Party.

P.S. I still won. The Open Space fund extension received 75% and the Parks Bond (tax increase) scored 79%. The moral is don't waste your time talking to the Green Party losers. Fuck the Green Party.

1. All but very few US elections are run on "first past the post" basis where the candidate who gets the most votes wins, regardless of what percentage of voters he/she gets.  

2. Greens had nuclear disarmament as an issue to ride.  This was THE issue (understandably so)for many people in Europe during the Greens formative years. Lack of such an issue in the US and an electoral format where championing of this issue results in gains at the ballot box will keep the Greens as a party with a laundry list of idealistic left wing goals and no viable way to enact them

It's that he did it with a whopping 2% of the vote!

We are having a discussion about the future of the Green Party.  But with all due respect, the Reform Party, which wasn't much to write home about itself, was a much bigger force at its peak.  They actually got a governor (Ventura) elected, and Perot got 19% and 7% for his 2 presidential runs, respectively.  In 1980, John Anderson got 7% of the vote as an independent candidate for President

The Greens?  Well, they did get to the mayoral runoff in San Francisco, so I guess that's something.  But it's San Francisco, and if they can't do it there, they can't do it anywhere.

As for Nader?  He's a cockroach.  He can't do anything useful (i.e. 2% of the vote in 2000), but he can sure screw things up (see 2000).  And he actually had the nerve to come back in 2004!

Goodbye and good riddance, Mr 2% (now 1%).
You will not be missed.

As for the role of Nader, he was so anxious to show that Gore was flawed that he failed to really zero in on Bush's faults.  Gore was slammed as an environmental zealot but Bush was never slammed as a corporate stooge who aimed to wreck the environment and underfund the national parks.  The GREEN candidate was sure deficient in not going there.

There were multiple causes for Gore's defeat.  The psychological term is "over-determined."  I kind of like that better than the legal terminology but both work.  Oddly enough, Bush's one-on-one abilities to charm are supposed to be formidable (who would know?).  In this campaign it may have helped with the fund-raising and the high muckety-mucks of campaign journalism.  In a mass media era, possibly one-on-one was the difference.  

Gore may have been despised because he was too similar to the journalists only smarter and better connected while W came from an entirely different world and got a huge pass.  Why that continued in the next presidential campaign is beyond me.

I'm not sure we want multi-party representation in the national government because it just delays where in the process the consensus-building has to happen.

But if we do want it, then this is the only recipe I can think of:

1. Fix gerrymandering by finding a way to draw district boundaries fairly
   
2. Support better voting systems for the election of every office except for the presidential vote
   
3. Wait until we actually have sane representation in the House and Senate
   
4. Use that sane reprsentation to somehow reform the E.C.  It sure won't happen with the Congress we have now.
   

Greens enthusiastically endorse a national healthcare system. Republicans and Democrats have failed to do so.

Greens whole-heartedly support election reform. Republicans and Democrats have failed to do so.

Greens support sustainable growth. Republicans and Democrats continue to suppress the issue.

Environmentalism has continually lost ground during the last three decades under the watch of the two corporate parties. Greens unequivocally support reversing this trend.  

Despite only having been in existence for approximately three decades, The Green party has more candidates elected at the local level than at anytime in its brief history and continues to make progress in gaining access to ballots across the country. In doing so, unlike the two corporate parties, the focus of the Green party remains a comprehensive fifty state campaign strategy.

Without an incumbent president or vice president from either of the two corporate parties in the next presidential election, the dynamic should  become increasingly decentalized as that election nears; consequently, the Green party should have an outstanding opportunity to further solidify its growing base at the national level. Furthermore, under this scenario, Greens will see their most meaningful chance to date to eclipse the five percent mark in a presidential election.        

Recent votes on both the Bankruptcy Bill and the Energy Bill which recently passed the House indicate that these differences are not sufficiently significant to create meaningful change in these respective areas.  

In the case of the Bankruptcy Bill, a recently released Green press release blasting the 72 Democrats who handed President Bush a significant landmark victory to kick off his second term is indicative of the lack of collective differences between the two parties.

In the case of the Energy Bill which recently passed the House, an amendment to amend CAFE standards in order to increase current federal requirements for MPG on automobiles failed by approximately seventy votes with Democrats contributing to the sizeable margin by which this amendment failed. This failure transcends Democrats being the minority party in the House. It's representative of a larger problem in which these stock and trade progressive issues don't possess a launching pad under the current representation within the Congress from which to gain minimally required traction for either enactment or implementation.

Thirdly, there's a commonly held misperception among mainstream Democrats that there is general agreement on environmental issues between Democrats and Greens when nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the contrary, with Repugs in New England  being more friendly towards environmental reform than a vast number of Democrats in the South, it's extremely difficult for those of us down here to recognize a difference between Repugs and Democrats on these issues.

The difference between Greens and the two corporate parties on environmental issues is that Green support is based upon soild ecological considerations as opposed to political expediency on any particular issue. Two of the ten key provisions of the Green party platform provide a clear distinction between the short-term outlook of the corporate parties and Greens.

Fourthly, Greens boldly support social justice and equal opportunity for all Americans.

While the Repugs have purposefully maintained a divisive racist and discriminatory posture under veiled language in order to harvest the lowest common denominator in election cycles, Democrats have continually failed on a collective basis to live up to expectations in support of the principles which supposedly guide their own party.
For example, the Democratic party's support of civil unions for gay couples can best be described as shallow at best. This is particularly disturbing given that LBJ, a southerner, set the party on the right track in regard to civil rights at considerable political expense when he put pen to paper on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lastly, Chris stated in the beginning of this thread that "Nadar voters from 1996 and 2000 are "over-represented in the blogsphere." This statement implies that Ralph Nadar represents the future of the Green party. Ralph Nadar was not on the Green party ticket in 2004 nor will he be in 2008. More importantly, I don't see how Green party members are currently overly-represented in the blogsphere. I can count all of the openly-Green contributors in this forum on one hand out of perhaps over 7000 members in this entire forum: That statement simply doesn't bare fruit.

In conclusion, current Green party support is derived from a core belief among its members in the value structure and proposed policies of the national Green party, nothing more or less. It's from this base that Greens will continue to expand our base and hopefully have an ever increasing impact upon our political process.          

Here in the US, political parties are not as strongly ideological, and we elect people to a congress that is not structured to handle more than two parties. Successful american political parties allow well-to-do people a chance to Network with each other, and with government officials at the expense of strong ideological stands.

The Greens will always fail in the US, because they don't understand how American political parties work. US parties really exist to allow rich people to network together -- and not to establish public policy or even to select candidates.  Until the Greens start providing a way for "important" people to network the way Republicans and Democrats do, they won't grow beyond their status as a lobbying group that is accidentally listed on some State ballots.

sc

That does not mean we will always have the same 2 parties.  If one party fails to change to meet the evolving beliefs of its supporters, a party dies (see Whigs).  Though this hasnt happened in over 150 years, that does not mean it wont ever happen.  In fact, if the Dems meet the growing economic problems with its same corporate, Republican light policies of the 1990s, it may well go under.  I am not predicting this.  The 2 parties have survived so long because of their ability to change.  Still, If the Democratic Party runs a series of DLC type Democrats as our economy continues to worsen, you could seethe Dems go belly up.

The Greens will never replace the Democratic Party as the progressive alternative to the theo-fascists.  The very name "Green," with its obvious emphasis on one issue, begs to be taken as a fringe, protest vote only.

Yet, combine the creation of a well rounded progressive party, worsening economic conditions and a Democratic Party refusal to come up with real answers and you could see a dramatic change.

That being said, it's going to take many years of blood, sweat and tears to overcome the obstacles the two major parties created (and continue to reinforce) to keep the Greens, Libertarians and others down.

The way the Greens will have impact is at the local level.  We have already seen Green influence on the Gay Rights issue, from Matt Gonzalez pushing the issue in the San Fran Mayor's race (ultimately picked up by Newsom when he won), to New Paltz Mayor Jason West (G-NY).

To pick up on another diary upthread, the Greens will gain power by being an 'opposition party' where the democrats haven't had any opposition for a generation.  We see this happening in Brooklyn, where the corrupt political machine that is the Brooklyn Democratic Party has gone unchallenged for decades.

Case in point, Marty Markowitz, our blowhard media slut of a Boro President, has lined his pockets with something over 80% donations from developers and real estate interests.  Funny that he supports the biggest land grab in Brooklyn History - throwing 1000 people from their homes and destroying a brownstone residential neighborhood, while giving billions of tax dollars to Bruce Ratner and his stooges (Ratner's cronies also give lots of money to Pataki, Bruno, and Bush).  Along comes Gloria Mattera, who ran against Bill Diblasio in 2001 & 2001, and pushed the Republican into 3rd place with 20% of the vote, to raise the level of debate, get some attention paid to Ratner's basketball-disguised landgrab, currently suffering in the lee of the Westside Stadium fight, and oppose some of the other awful policies that Marty is championing.  

Will Gloria win this time - not likely - given Marty's deep pockets, but if we make matching funds ($50,000 threshhold could mean $250,000 after the match), we'll have a bigger budget than David Cobb had in 2004, and Greens can make that money go a LONG way.  If she doesn't win this time, we'll see her or another Green in Brooklyn win a city council seat or two very soon, and perhaps a congressional seat in the next few cycles.

The Greens in Brooklyn (and elsewhere) are bigger (our registration in New York has doubled since 2002) better organized and active, and needed more than ever.

That doesn't mean that all third party or independent canidates are DOA automaticly; just that most of them are.  Those that run from the middle, or with a combination of far right and far left stances, have an honest shot.  Examples: Perot, Jesse Ventura, the Libertarians.

But anybody on the extreme edges just make the mainstream party closest to them weaker.  You may not like this, but face fucking reality people-it's true.