United States Green Party |
Green parties are parties with strongly ecologically-minded, and
usually left-leaning, platforms. An important difference between many Greens and most traditional leftists is that Greens
(particularly those coming from an ecology perspective) tend to reject centralized control or management. Perhaps as a result of
this philosophy there are currently two different organizations in the United States that can be referred to as "the
Green Party": The Green Party of the United States, which was formerly known as the Association
of State Green Parties, and Greens / Green Party USA. However, in the years since the 2000 presidential election, the Green
Party of the United States has become considerably larger and more influentially than the G/GPUSA.
Current national ticket
In the 2004 presidential
election, the candidate of the Green Party of the United States for President is lawyer David Cobb of Texas, and its candidate for vice-president is labor activist Pat LaMarche of Maine.
Ralph Nader, the Party's 2000 candidate for President, had announced an
independent candidacy, but he did attempt to gain the Party's 2004 endorsement. When that did not happen, his announced Vice Presidential running mate,
Peter Camejo, said, following the Green Party convention in Milwaukee, "I'm going to walk out of here arm in arm with David
Cobb."
Although many Party members were upset and expressed "embarrassment" that Nader was not their candidate, others said that the
Party needed to concentrate on creating a party at the local level, instead of trying to win the presidency.
History
Largely inspired by the success of the German Green Party,
political activists in the United States formed the Committees of Correspondence in 1984, later to be known as the Green Committees of Correspondence (GCOC). The GCOC adopted the
Ten Key Values as their
philosophical basis, loosely based on the Four Pillars that most European Greens use. They organized themselves around bio-regional lines.
The GCOC held national gatherings of green activists in 1987, then annually starting in
1989. At the 1991 national gathering, the GCOC was
disbanded, and a new structure was put into place, named the Greens/Green Party USA (GPUSA), which was organized with delegates
from local and regional green groups, in addition to individual members.
In 1990, Jim Sykes ran as a green for governor in Alaska. He received 3.3% of the vote, enough to grant official ballot status to the Green Party in the state. The
California Green Party would follow, attaining official ballot status in 1991. From
1992 to 1995, the number of candidates in local and
state-wide elections identifying themselves grew, in addition to the number of organized local and state-wide green groups.
At the 1995 national gathering of the GPUSA in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a measure to run a candidate for president was defeated. However, those
who wished to run a candidate for president continued to pursue this possibility. They selected Ralph Nader as their presidential candidate and Winona LaDuke as their vice-presidential candidate. The pair were on the ballot in twenty-two states and
received 685,128 votes, or 0.7% of all votes cast. [1]
In the aftermath of the 1996 election, representatives from eleven state Green Parties
joined to form the Association of State Green Parties (ASGP). The focus of the ASGP, while still including issue activism and
non-electoral politics, was more clearly on getting greens elected. In the years from 1997
to 1999, more local, regional, and state-wide green parties continued to form. Many of
these parties affiliated themselves with both the ASGP and the GPUSA.
In the year 2000, the ASGP nominated Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke for President and
Vice-President again. This time, the pair were on 44 state ballots and received 2,882,897 votes, or 2.7% of all votes cast
[2] .
In October of 2000 (during the campaign), a proposal was made to alter the
structures of the ASGP and GPUSA to be complementary organizations with the ASGP focusing on electoral politics and the GPUSA
focusing on issue advocacy. The Boston Proposal (so named because it
was negotiated at Boston in the days before the first presidential debate) was passed
by the ASGP at its next annual gathering, but did not pass at the GPUSA Congress. The ASGP then changed its name to "The Green
Party of the United States" and was granted status as the official National Committee of the Green Party by the FEC in 2001.
Today the GPUSA survives as a small membership organization, led by the few Greens who opposed the Boston Proposal. Though they
often represent themselves to the contrary, they do not represent the vast majority of Greens, and only a handful of state
parties are affiliated with them.
In 2002, John Eder became the highest elected official in the history of the Green Party in the United States when he was
elected to the Maine State House of Representatives. He was personally congratulated by
Ralph Nader on election night.
Late in 2003, Ralph Nader declared that he would not be the party's nominee for
president in 2004. However, in February,
2004, Nader announced his intention to run as independent. A few months later, Nader stated
that he would accept the "endorsement" rather than the "nomination" of the Green Party, as well as of other third parties.
Several prominent Greens, including Peter Camejo and Lorna Salzman, endorsed this plan
(Camejo would later accept a position as Nader's vice-presidential running-mate). The most notable opposition came from lawyer
and activist David Cobb, who wanted to run a campaign focused on building the party. On June 26 the Green Party of the United States convention rejected the idea of an endorsement for Nader and chose
Cobb as its presidential candidate.
Geographic Distribution
The Green Party is most popular in the far-western and northeastern United States, as judged by percentage vote in the 2000
presidential election [3] and number of candidates elected [4] . The California Green Party has the largest number of greens,
receiving 405,722 votes in the 2000 presidential elections, and electing 67 of the 204 office-holding greens nation-wide as of
January, 2004. In the 2002 Governor's race, the city of San Francisco gave more votes to the Green Party candidate than to the Republican candidate. The president of the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors, Matt Gonzalez, is also a Green Party
member. The Alaskan Green Party has the highest number per capita of Greens, receiving 10% of the votes statewide in the 2000
presidential elections.
See also
External links
Sources
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