Progressive Christian Straw Poll - Vote for your candidate

Oops, I forgot that you are bi-located Steve...and of course it takes generations before one is "from" here :-)

The Green Party in Massachusetts merged with the Rainbow Party a couple of years ago, so there is definitely a presence of people of color in the party. In fact, one of the office-holding Green-Rainbow Party members is Chuck Turner, African-American who was recently re-elected to the Boston City Council.

The Green-Rainbow Party is certainly outside the mainstream so I should remember that the reason I have any knowledge of the party is because I sought it out.

The Greens are basically a white, well-educated movement. And what backs up Steve's point is that I see virtually no involvement with the African-American and Latin community. Furthermore, they are virtually invisible on biological issues such as on choice (didn't Nader derisively call that "gonad politics"?). On stem cell research many Greens are actually bio-conservatives (Wesley J. Smith, Claire Nader, for example).

Steve,

Sure, a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand Greens would probably have voted for Gore if Nader hadn't run. But you can't just fixate on them. The flaw in your argument is that you don't take into account all those non-Green Nader voters whose second choice was Bush. That's why the exit-poll analyses are important.

The larger truth is that we'll never know what would have happened in an alternate universe. Without Nader, the dynamics would have been different. In many places, the turnout would have been less. Some Democrats would have lost Congressional seats in that alternate universe because of a reduction in the turnout of Greens who voted Democratic down-tickets. Maybe Gore would have won. Maybe the exit polls that showed Nader hurting Bush were right and that without Nader, Bush would have won clearly in Florida by a couple of percent. Or a Gore victory could have led to other versions of the bad situations that we're currently in and we'd be complaining about Gore and how Nader was right, just as we're complaining about Bush. What we're doing in these "what-ifs" is like saying that a baseball game would have been won if it hadn't been for that error in the 6th inning. We forget that the error changed the dynamics, the choice of pitches, the pattern of substitutions -- and that the guy who hit a home run might have struck out in the alternate version of the game, and the guy who struck out might have homered.

But we can agree that nothing good came out of Bush winning, for any of us.

Concerning the Socialist Workers, sure they're irrelevant. But they still vote. Why don't you go after them to vote for "the lesser evil"? Because they're impervious, I would assume, not because their political position is irrelevant.

So it would save Democrats a lot of tension if they considered a solid chunk of the Greens as equally impervious. The pleas and attacks and arguments and attempted bullying and demonizing have been quite effective -- but not on all Greens. I suggest that after the arguments are made, and the Democrats have done their best, they should just let it go and accept the results. Which is what they did vis-a-vis Bush and the Supreme Court. But not vis-a-vis the Greens. SOMEBODY has to take the blame.

Another comment: I don't believe that communism as an economic concept has been proven not to work. It hasn't been tried (and I'm not about to call for trying it now). What we've seen is what I call despotism and state capitalism. The proletariat never got to run anything. If there ever is to be something that could be called 'communism', I suspect that it won't grow out of the barrels of a lot of guns.

Bill

Steve, my comment on single payer was offered as only one example, with more to follow. So your title "conservative because he's not for single payer?" is over-reaching.

But since you've seized on it, let me try to make my case out of just this one example.

The fact that you call single payer "such radical change" is revealing. Single payer is common in other 'first world' countries. The US system is an anomaly. Polls indicate that single-payer is the most preferred way of reforming our healthcare system, despite the limited publicity it gets. And what it gets is mostly very negative.

The only way that single payer can be rated as radical is if the framework for rating it is itself "conservative" -- that is, if it's defined by the corporate interests that want to protect the health-insurance industry.

Obama operates within that conservative and corporatist framework. Within the framework, he's on the left. But the framework is status-quo preserving -- which is not to say it's radical rightist.

His position: quoted in Time by Joe Klein: when asked about the Massachusetts plan for mandatory health insurance, Obama said that voluntary plans "were more consonant with the American character", thus ignoring public opinion polls. He was for mandatory plans only as a last resort if private voluntary measures didn't work.

In the Illinois Assembly in 2003, he watered down a Health Care Justice Act in line with what insurance industry lobbyists wanted. He changed universal healthcare from a "state goal" to merely a "policy goal" to be studied.

A quote from the Boston Globe article linked above:

During debate on the bill on May 19, 2004, Obama portrayed himself as a conciliatory figure. He acknowledged that he had "worked diligently with the insurance industry," as well as Republicans, to limit the legislation's reach and noted that the bill had undergone a "complete restructuring" after industry representatives "legitimately" raised fears that it would result in a single-payer system.

"The original presentation of the bill was the House version that we radically changed - we radically changed - and we changed in response to concerns that were raised by the insurance industry," Obama said, according to the session transcript.

I agree with Paul Krugman that playing a broker's role in a state legislature is very different from playing a presidential role. A president, when confronted with an industry's hostility, has to be confrontantional. "Medicare for All", which is the only reasonable way to go, since the insurance industry adds costs and inefficiencies while limiting services, will require some pitched political battles. That's where movement organizing comes in. President Obama will need to feel the heat from a broad populist movement, one with a pronounced left-populist element.

By the way, I head Obama's post-primaries speech tonight. It was by far the best of any of the candidates. But it's only words until we make it a reality.

More later, on other issues.