Musings on Presidential Politics

I have posted a couple of entries at Green Commons concerning the search for a Green Party presidential candidate. It seem that everyone has a gut feel that we need a candidate with national name recognition and that is a very limiting fact. Those with the name recognition and a real desire to win the presidency will not be likely to abandon the Democratic Party for the Greens. It may be more useful to seek that in a well known disgruntled Republican, like Pete McCloskey.

This week, the speculation arose about a rumored conversation between Nader and Al Gore in which Nader supposedly tried to interest Gore in running for President as a Green. Coming so close to April 1, I would hazard a guess that this was something that was "leaked" earlier than was intended. Still, it did appear in Insight Magazine. It was even discussed at the center of Democratic bloggins, DailyKos.

So, the list of possible candidates with a national name recognition is now:

• Elaine Brown
  
• Al Gore?????
  
• Dennis Kucinich?????
  
• Cynthia McKinney?????
  
• Ralph Nader
  
• Cindy Sheehan

Note: All of those with the ????? are Democrats. While all three have expressed some frustration with the current state of affairs in this country, or even with the Democratic Party, only McKinney has shown any interest in talking to Greens, with Greens on any occasion.

Note 2: Of that list, only Elaine Brown has announced that they are a candidate.

I have my personal doubts that we will have any luck in getting any of those Democrats to actually run as a Green. Based on previous statements and committments, we know that Kucinich will not abandon the Democratic Party. I doubt that McKinney will either. We know that Nader will not join the Green Party.

Maybe the best course is to make this a campaign of issues rather than personalities, to define the issues around which we want to run this campaign, and then to select the candidate who can best articulate those issues. We might field a different candidate if we want to make the Peace the number one issue as opposed to global warming / environment as opposed to corruption and excessive corporate power.

Personally, I would like to have seen Winona LaDuke remain more active in Green Party politics. She is also a candidate that I could very easily support.

Science and Public Policy

Just two additional comments here:

First, in yesterday's post I mentioned that I wanted to hear Al Gore's speech to the American Geophysical Union. Well, it is online, both text and video, at the KGO-TV. Maybe it is a bit long (52:18) on self-deprecating humor, and the audio has a large room echo, but interesting never the less. His point about the divergence of science and culture is well taken. He quoted someone as saying "John Stuart Mills was the last man to know everything."

Along with this disjunction, there comes the fact that we have politicized science so that (Yes, here he used that term.) inconvenient truths need not to be discussed. This is not a new, 21st Century phenomenon. The story of Gallileo attests to the fact that scientific truths, when convenient, are always challenged by some power structure. The question is rather what we do about it.

As Greens, we need to begin to take leadership in restoring a scientific view of the world as a basis for policy. What better basis is there for policy than a factual view of the world as it really exists, or as close to that as the best minds of our time can achieve?

I am not sure that many Greens are ready to do that. There is an orthodoxy in progressive thought that is just as rigid as the orthodoxy of church in Gallileo's time, one that would deny those truths that challenge their assumptions about how the world really is.

One of the things that I do is to watch the number of people who read this blog, especially those who read more than the latest post on the home page. Those numbers go up when I post about internal Green politics and go down when I post about ecology. From this I conclude that either people are not interested in the subjet or, conversely, assume that there is nothing that they can do about such big, not so easy to understand issues.

To return to Gore's speech, it is his view the the current "Climate Crisis" is only a symptom of a greater, underlying conflict between human kind as a species and our planet. If that is true, then there is no political structure that is better positioned to "frame" these issues and suggest solutions to the problems that they present, than the Green Party. I really pains me that we are not exerting any kind of leadership here.