On Waiting

In 2004 we had the craziest situation in the state committee of the Green Party of NY where we were facing a conflict over what to do in the presidential election such as: (1) sit it out so as not to “spoil” the election, (2) focus on “safe” states (most of them) where we couldn’t spoil the election, (3) run an “all out” campaign.

We had people wanting us to take a clear stand on the issue in February which I thought was insane because we didn’t know who the Democrats would nominate, didn’t know who the the national Green Party would nominate, didn’t know what the position of the national GP would be, etc.

My case was that one advantage we had as a little organization was being able to put decisions off to the last minute and be opportunistic which was something that our local was able to use to put a lot of pressure on the local establishment and also get a lot of perception that we had power.

But no, we had to make some grandiloquent statement about what we thought we should do in November and it turned out the national green party took a turn that we disagreed with so strongly that we had to retract that statement later on. And that’s a big “I told you so”.

We shut our local down that year because we kept splitting right down the middle on the question of “should we run candidates when we run the risk of spoiling?” over and over again and I dropped out, we lost our ballot line not long after.