Debate Questions

With the Green Party Presidential Debate now scheduled for Jan 13 in San Francisco, I am interested in giving the organizing committee some input on the questions that we, the grassroots of this party, would like to have answered by our candidates.

This is not a time for cheap shots, trick questions that might have come from the mind of an Ann Coulter or a even of a nice guy like James Carville. These should be serious questions that I would want to see any Green Party candidate answering so that I know, when I vote, that they will be representing me.

I will start this off with three question of my own. They represent several of the top concerns from a recent poll of likely voters. I would really like to have them all but I am limiting myself to only 3 for now. I have already solicited some questions from a few others and had a response from a 2004 Green Party candidate, Lorna Salzman. So, I will also list her's here.

After that, I hope that you all will use the comment capability on this blog to register your own.

My Questions:

• There is no longer any doubt that the world is warming and the we are the cause. As Pogo said, We have met the enemy and they is us. As President, what steps would you take, what changes would you make in energy policy to reduce our contributions to Global Warming.
• Immigration, trade policies and agricultural are all linked together. Changing one affect the others. Is there a way to achieve a satisfactory solution to all three? If so, what is it?
• The effect of the Iraq war and the way that the current administration has pursued it's reckless war on terror, has lost America the moral standing that it once had. How would you restore this country's soul?

Lorna Salzman's questions:

• Will you work for a universal single payer health care system?
• Will you work for a carbon tax on fossil fuels?
• Will you work for a revival and expansion of a government-run, national passenger rail system, including a high-speed passenger rail line on the east coast?

That is two takes on the debate. What do you want to hear about?

Green Party Presidential Debate

The first, and so far only, Green Party Presidential Debate will take place in San Francisco on Sunday, January 13. The announcement has not yet, as far as I know, gone out to press but it has shown up on the Alameda County Green Party web site and has been posted (by someone) to the Third Party Watch site as of very early this AM.

Time: 2 PM

Venue: Herbst Theater/Veterans Memorial Bldg
401 Van Ness (opposite City Hall)
San Francisco

If this announcement is correct, it is mostly good news.

I knew that the effort to organize this debate was underway. The last I had heard was the Nader's participation had not yet been confirmed. I hope that the inclusion of his name on the Alameda County announcement means that he has agreed to participate. His name is on the ballot for the California Primary. It is my understanding that he will be in attendance. What he does here will tell us a lot about what his intentions are.

This debate will take place on Jan 13. Absentee ballots will already be in the mail. Some may already have voted. Personally, I will not vote until after this debate and, if Nader wants me to vote for him, he will have to participate in this debate on an equal bass with other candidates. The risk that one would run is that Nader might choose NOT to actively seek the nomination as a Green and then my vote would have been wasted.

You may note that there are two candidates on the national GP web site whose names are not included in this list. I am assured by the organizers that they were invited and either had conflicts (Kat) or have not yet responded (Jesse).

I cross posted this at Green Commons. Some of the emphasis might change as these posts will be geared toward questions surrounding the California Primary. The one thing that will not change is my belief that a credible Green Party candidate needs to be able to respond to questions on a wide range of issues: Global Warming, Health Care, Economics including tax policies, Iraq War and other foreign policy questions, immigration and trade policy. This must not become only a matter of "electability" or in Green Party terms, of how many new voters they can bring in to the party. We need to recognize that we can only build this party based on what our candidates stand for now, today and what they will do to make this a better America, continent, world.

To that end, I will later today be posting at California Greening, a list of questions that I would like to see be answered by our candidates as well as soliciting questions from others.

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.

Retreat from Sonoma

From all of the anecdotal reports that I have heard, the Strategy Retreat in Sonoma could be considered a success. It even provided a place where Cynthia McKinney could continue her direction of introducing herself to the Green Party. That was timely as we have another Georgia political figure, Elaine Brown, declaring her intent to gain the Green Party nomination for President in 2008.

Maybe that is only the natural way of things as we are inundated by MSM announcements, prognostications, analysis and candidate hype over the entire range of presidential politics. It is not completely a good thing to have this level of media saturation this long before the real events. One of the things that the focus on presidential politics does is to distract us from the energy required just to keep us going.

What I do not understand is the fact that all of this strategy discussion too place without any communication to the grassroots of the Green Party afterward. Yes, everyone was invited to Sonoma. Anyone could have gone. Some did, most did not. I wonder what would have happened had 300 decided to show up rather than the approximately 50 (not confirmed, only what one attendee estimated when I asked.) that actually did. Would Warner and the Campaign and Candidates Working Group have accomplished as much?

I also wonder what might have happened if all of the previous statewide candidates had shown up. I note that at least one candidate who did not show up is questioning the basis for some of the decisions that were made, especially the question as to whether or not input had been solicited from candidates. The irony of that question does not escape me.

One of the elements of effective leadership is the ability to create a sense of shared purpose in an organization. I understand that one of the objectives in choosing the site was to get everyone into an environment where they able to develop a sense of shared purpose with the group. I do not understand how that sense of shared purpose will affect the grassroots of the GPCA if no one is communicating to the rest of the party what happened, what decisions were made, what new actions are going to be required, what we should be doing to implement any new strategic decisions.

There are some who intimate that the GPCA lacks a vision, or at least fails to communicate that vision to the public at large. Maybe the vision is described by the 10 KV, but it would be better to have a single phrase that encapsulates what the values mean. One of the things that Elizabeth May and the Green Party of Canada have accomplished is to establish such a vision at a very simple level. Go to almost any part of the Green Party of Canada web site and you get the message "Welcome to the Future." Just 4 words, but they accomplish a lot. They make you feel like you can be part of building that future. They are inclusive. They invite you in.

The success of organizations like moveon.org is that they invite you to participate, to take action and they communicate that your action will "make a difference." That is surely satisfying to the soul.

So, who is going to tell the rest of us what really happened in Sonoma, or will will allow the good things that (as I have been told) happened there dissipate as we continue our turf fights? I have suggested that the role of the media committee be expanded to include internal communications from events such as plenaries and retreats like this one. One result has been an improved GPCA web site. But there is still a lot of work to do as the lack of input from anyone at Sonoma illustrates.