Green Party rising

With four wins in the November elections, and two viable candidates for governor, the Maine Greens are poised for legitimacy

By Noah Bruce

The November elections treated the Green Independent Party of Maine pretty well. In Portland, Ben Meiklejohn won an upset victory over incumbent Jeffrey Peters for a seat on the school board. Out in the suburbs, municipal governments in Brunswick, Topsham, and Richmond will now have a Green perspective added to the standard brand politics.

These are encouraging wins for the Maine Greens, one of the leading state Green parties in the country. But compared with what’s on the horizon for the Maine Greens, and consequently the Green Party of the United States (GPUS), these local victories are small potatoes.

Media in the state have already picked up on the fact that, for the first time, it looks like there will be two Green candidates for governor and therefore a Green primary. What the media have not been so outspoken about is that a Green could actually win the race.

The Green candidate most likely to win the potential primary and challenge the favorite, Democratic Representative John Baldacci, is Jonathan Carter.

Carter, who ran unsuccessfully for the US House in 1992 and for Maine governor in 1994, says this run will be different. “The ’92 and the ’94 campaigns were clearly statements,” he says. “[In 2002] I’m in a good position to win it. I’m not interested in running to make a statement. I would run to win.”

The difference between ’94 and 2002 will be clean election money. In his 1994 run for governor, Carter received nearly seven percent of the vote after spending $32,695 on his campaign. In 2002, because of the Clean Election Law, if Carter is able to secure the required 2500 $5 contributions, he will have access to as much as $1.2 million. In an era where TV ads win campaigns, that buys a lot of TV ads.

The other factor in Carter’s favor is name recognition. Through his failed bid for the US House in ’92 and the governorship in ’94, and his three referendums (one successful, two not successful) to protect the forest, Carter (with the help of smear campaigns led by big paper) has succeeded in establishing himself as a household name in Maine.

According to veteran Republican pollster and Bowdoin College professor of political science, Chris Potholm, the only candidate who has more recognition is Baldacci.

Potholm, one of the most respected political observers in the state, states that Carter can win, but with a caveat: Carter has to avoid seeming weird. “The less he talks about duopolies and paradigms, the better . . . He can put a Green cast on his message, but it can’t sound weird.”

Potholm says if he can play to the middle and run a serious campaign, Carter has a legitimate chance at the Blaine House. “If someone gave me one million dollars to run his campaign, and he did what I said and ran a professional campaign and didn’t go off on some crazy woods idea, he could win 30 percent . . . Anybody who gets 30 percent in this race will win.”

On the other hand, “if Carter goes off on an ego trip,” says Potholm, “[The Green Party] will remain marginal and get five percent.”

The pragmatism recommended by Potholm, and the compromising of values this can imply, is a crucial theme not only in the upcoming Carter campaign, but in the story of the rise of the Greens on the state, national, and international levels. As the party grows and Greens assume power, they will be forced to wrestle with questions of idealism versus practical reality.

Potholm’s old Bowdoin College political science department colleague, John Rensenbrink, agrees with Potholm’s assessment that Carter must not appear to be “a one-note, woodsy kind of guy.” Rensenbrink — Fullbright scholar, retired Bowdoin professor, author, one of the founders of the GPUS and the Maine Green Party, and Green Party candidate for US Senate in 1996 — is, somewhat like Jimmy Carter is for the Democrats, the senior statesman of the Green Party. Though he says Jonathan Carter has some “baggage from the past” — namely the two failed referendum campaigns where the paper companies painted him as an extremist — he believes Carter will be successful at marketing himself as a versatile candidate. “I think it will become pretty loud and clear that he is strong on healthcare, energy, small business, and social justice issues. He will convey that and score on the clean money issue.”

Listening to Carter talk about his agenda, he sounds progressive, but not radical. “Mostly [my campaign] will be focused on the economy and how we can bolster Maine’s economy and reduce the burden of taxes to make it more equitable and make corporations pay their fair share,” he says. “I believe strongly that integrating environmental protections with economic growth is a key component of where we need to go . . . But we’ve got real fiscal problems. [State government was] talking about 300 million [in shortfall]. It’s going to be half a billion by the time red ink stops flowing.”

A Green primary?

Carter, however, is careful to remind that he has not officially announced his candidacy. Once he does that, he will need those $5 contributions to qualify for the clean election money. At the same time, to get on the ballot as a Green Party candidate, he will need to collect 2000 signatures from registered Maine Greens, a group that only numbered 8700 at last year’s count.

Carter calls collecting the $5 contributions “a huge task,” and this task, and the collection of the 2000 Green signatures, is made more difficult by one Steven Farsaci (pronounced far-sosh), who is also vying to be the Green candidate for governor. On one hand, the potential for a Green primary brings a measure of respect and maturity to the party.

That’s the way Rensenbrink sees it. “I think it’s a great thing, for two reasons,” he says. “The Greens will have to assess two candidates and what they believe . . . [and] more people than ever will hear the Green message.” Rensenbrink says he does not see a Green primary descending into “name calling and defaming.”

On the other hand, two candidates, even if both run a positive campaign, will make it more difficult to secure the 2500 $5 contributions from the voting public, and especially the 2000 signatures from an already small pool of registered Greens.

Farsaci says the benefits of getting out the Green message outweigh the potential downside of dividing an already fledgling party. “If some greens feel electoral politics are hurtful, that’s perfectly fine,” he says. “It’s more important to persuade ordinary Mainers that this is an important and viable alternative than it is to get everybody who thinks of themselves as a Green on the same page.”

Farsaci is a newcomer on the political scene, with an intriguing past. A minister from Farmington, he was at one time part of the military establishment. As a nuclear weapons officer on a submarine, part of his training included signing a document that said, given the order, he would push The Button. For Farsaci, this caused a period of reflection and a questioning that eventually led him to the ministry and to the Green Party.

“It’s one thing to consider theoretically,” he says, “it’s another to push the button and launch the weapons. Imagine causing seven million deaths, wiping New York or Moscow off the map and leaving a radioactive crater forever.”

Farsaci refused to sign and was eventually granted an honorable discharge and worked as a bureaucrat in Washington’s state government before earning his doctorate in divinity and becoming a minister in Maine. “As a pastor,” he says, “I committed myself to walking with, and being an advocate for, people treated as marginal, such as the homeless, mentally handicapped adults, people with physical and mental illnesses, and victims of domestic abuse.”

Farsaci says his campaign will have three interwoven themes. First, he wants to ensure a more fair sharing of power in society (i.e. take power from corporations and give it to the citizenry). This, he says, will allow for the germination of his second issue: the protection of citizens’ “freedom to make decisions.” He cites the example of workers at the Bass plant in Farmington. With more power, says Farsaci, they might have been able to prevent the closing of the factory and the loss of their jobs. This leads to his third point: Freedom to make decisions ensures “my most important goal — the vitality of every Mainer and our local communities.”

On his chances at the Blaine House, one Green insider says Farsaci is simply much less well known than Carter and therefore stands less of a chance. However, if he can secure the 2500 $5 contributions, he will be entitled to just as much public money as Carter and can use advertising to get his message out.

Potholm is not willing to count him out. “I don’t know the Green world well enough to say if this guy has a good chance or not, or whether some in the Green party are tired of Jonathan Carter,” he says.

Regardless of Farsaci’s chances against Carter, it is indicative of the Maine Greens’ political strength that there are two Green candidates willing to undergo the rigors of the clean elections process.

Green Party values

The importance of a Green win for Maine governor cannot be overstated. It would be the GPUS’s first major political victory and would represent an enormous jump in status for the young party.

“That would be huge,” says Rensenbrink. “It would bring an influx of people into the party . . . It would be a tipping point. People will say ‘I see there’s a Green governor in Maine.’ That makes the Green party a player in other states.”

Of course, a key ingredient in a serious Green campaign for governor is the Clean Election Law, something most other states don’t have (Arizona’s law is similar to Maine’s; Vermont’s affects the governor and lieutenant governor only; Massachusetts passed a law in 1998, but it hasn’t been implemented yet). Without public funds or a wealthy candidate, Greens in other states will most likely be badly outgunned by the Democratic and Republican fund raising machines. Rensenbrink admits that public money “is very important” to Green success.

A truly powerful Green Party will not exist in the US until more states adopt clean election laws or, much less likely, the US, as advocated by Greens, abandons the winner-take-all election system in favor of a proportional representation system like those that exist in many European democracies. Still, the Greens have other things going for them, not least their values.

Rensenbrink makes the point that, though many people consider the Greens a fringe party, Green values are mainstream values.

The Greens trace their values to the formation of independent state parties in the mid-1980s. The original American Greens came largely from the social justice and environmental activist communities and their values (combined with a desire to reduce the power of corporations, a belief in grassroots democracy, and a global perspective) form the essence of today’s Green Party.

These are not radical beliefs: Organized labor has recognized the need to reduce the power of corporations, and joined the Seattle anti-WTO protests. The auto industry has recognized environmental concerns and has finally stopped trying to debunk global warming theories. Concern for social justice issues forms the basis for the Bill of Rights. John McCain carried New Hampshire in the 2000 Republican Primary on the strength of his campaign finance message, and, of course, Maine, Arizona, Vermont, and (kind of) Massachusetts now have clean election laws. Most glaringly, following September 11, not a soul in this country can deny the United State’s existence in a global community.

Even Rensenbrink’s statement that “the democracy is broken” does not sound too far-fetched when you consider the monumental political apathy that resulted in a 51 percent voter turnout for the 2000 election.

It seems imminently possible that a good chunk of that apathetic 49 percent could be swayed to the Green side. Because, much of the time, the Green Party seems to be the only party with the balls to stand up and say what is right.

Consider two examples: the exclusion of Afghani women from the Bonn talks on the future government of Afghanistan, and Fast Track legislation which would limit Congressional debate on the acceptance of the Free Trade of the Americas treaty (FTAA), which would increase NAFTA to include Central and South America.

On the former issue, the GPUS issued a press release demanding that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a group that has worked to end the suppression of women’s rights in Afghanistan, be allowed to participate in the Bonn talks between the US, UN, and five Afghan groups. The press release notes that the exclusion of RAWA from Bonn and the fact that “not a single women was invited to join 1200 representatives of various Afghan ethnicities, religious groups, and political factions at a peace and unity conference in Peshawar, [Pakistan] last month . . . bodes ill for the future of women and women’s rights groups in post-war Afghanistan.” Gee, you don’t say? The question is: why aren’t the Republican or Democratic parties saying anything to this effect?

Regarding Fast Track authority, the Greens issued a series of press releases naming US representatives who will face Green challenges next election cycle if they vote in favor of the legislation. Fast Track, the press release reads, “would grant trade negotiation powers to the President and represents a substantial transfer of Congress’s constitutionally mandated authority over trade to the executive branch.” Fast Track is a blatant attempt to limit debate on the FTAA, an agreement that, among other things, would allow large corporations to sue governments if they create “unfair” barriers to trade, such as certain environmental protections. Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, the Green Party is not bankrolled by big corporations and can afford to denounce Fast Track. But is anybody listening?

To grow to the point where more people do listen, Rensenbrink says the task is now “to connect people’s perceptions with the Green Party.”

Rensenbrink is talking about the gradual process of recruiting the people who have Green sympathies, but who either don’t know much about the party or think that a vote for a Green is a throwaway vote — or worse, a vote for a conservative Republican, as some characterized a vote for Nader in 2000.

It’s not a big leap to believe there are lots of untapped Greens in America. Consider that, between 1998 and 2000, the Maine Green Party grew over 400 percent. Nancy Allen, an activist with the Maine Greens and a spokeswoman for the National Greens, attributes much of that growth to the Nader campaign, but a Green primary and potential Green governor could do much to further increase the number of Maine Green Party members.

Internal challenges

Aside from the possibility of a Green governor in Maine, there are two reasons for Greens to be optimistic. First, state Green parties across the country — there are currently 34 — did well in the November local elections, winning 55 new offices, bringing the total number of Greens in local office to 123. Though they would like to win a big-ticket election, the local growth is indicative of the Green strategy.

“Even though we ran a presidential campaign,” says Mike Feinstein, Green mayor of Santa Monica, CA, “we are a bottom-up party, unlike the Reform Party, which was top-down. As a result, we have built a slow, quiet, under-the-radar-force on the municipal level.”

Granted, some of the Green municipal officials hold offices like Drain Commissioner of Charleoix County, Michigan, but five are mayors, including Feinstein, mayor of Santa Monica, and the mayor of Santa Cruz, California. Plus, there are Green city council members in three large cities —Minneapolis, Minnesota and Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut. For a party that began around 15 years ago, these are significant gains.

The second positive development for Greens was the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) decision to grant the GPUS official party status. Technically this does not represent a large change for the party, though it does allow it to receive contributions of up to $20,000, whereas without the status the maximum was $5000.

owever, the decision also helps legitimize the GPUS as it allows them to claim that they are the “official” American Green party. Prior to the FEC decision, a different, more radical, national Green party called the Greens/GreenPartyUSA also claimed to be the real Green party, though with decreasing legitimacy.

he Greens/GreenPartyUSA represents the fringe element the GPUS must take care to divorce themselves from in the public’s mind if they are to be seen as a serious party. However, this sometime proves difficult, as the recent incident involving the banni™g of Nancy Oden — a woman active in the Greens/GreenPartyUSA, but identified in the media simply as Green — from a flight out of Bangor Airport proves.

o understand the incident, a bit of lore is in order. Since early in American Green history, there have been two national Green organizations, the GPUS (known before the FEC decision as the Association of State Green Parties) and the Greens/GreenPartyUSA. The former group has been focused on running candidates and becoming a force in the political arena, while the latter has served as more of a protest group.

n 2000, there was an attempt on the part of members of both groups to merge, but a radical faction of the Greens/GreenPartyUSA prevented the combining of the When Ralph Nader ran as a Green candidate in 2000, he was nominated by both parties, but accepted only the nomination of the more mainstream GPUS. Texas radio commentator and Nader strategist Jim Hightower once described the difference between the two paåties this way: “There are two Green party organizations — the [GPUS] whose nomination Ralph accepted and the much smaller one [Greens/GreenPartyUSA] . . . on the fringes . . . [with] all sorts of damned-near-communistic ideas.”

Despite the fact that both groups call themselves Greens, there is clearly a wide gulf between them. Yet, when Oden was prevented from boarding an airplane at the Bangor National Airport after a verbal altercation with airline personnel searching her bags and national guardsmen, the Bangor Daily News ran the story under the headline “Green Party Activist Denied Flight to Chicago,” without making the distinction between Oden’s Green party and the GPUS.

While some readers may have sympathized with Oden’s story of being persecuted for her political affiliations, it’s a good bet that many others, like the Internet rumor debunker www.snopes.com, put the case in the “never attribute to bad behavior what you can blame on political persecution file.” Snopes, like the Bangor Daily News, did not explain that Oden was not a member of the more mainstream Greens.

It’s the kind of situation that, if it gets any attention, it makes you look really stupid,” says Allen. She makes the point that when the Greens/GreenPartyUSA attempted to get FEC status in 1996, the FEC denied their request. Allen feels that the GPUS’s recent success in securing FEC recognition “will most likely end the split in the Green Party.”

ven without disturbances from the Greens/GreenPartyUSA, the GPUS itself sometimes take positions that are simply not mainstream. For instance, on November 15, the Green Party issued a press release calling for the end of US bombing on Afghanistan. While this may be in keeping with Green values, it is not a belief held by the majority of Americans. According to an LA Times poll conducted on the same day as the GPUS press release, 87 percent of Americans supported the bombing. Rensenbrink says he believes that most Americans “accept the bombing, but they wish there was another way.” Perhaps, but it is likely that positions like the anti-bombing stance will serve to alienate the Green Party.

Because the Green Party has no members in the US legislature, their position on the bombing is, at this point in their evolution, mostly academic. However, a look at the German Green Party provides an example of the kind of internal moral struggling a party like the Greens undergoes when it actually assumes a measure of power. Germany, like most Western European countries, utilizes the proportional system of representation. While each European country employs a different version of proportional representation, the basic idea is that parties win seats in the legislature based on the percentage of votes they receive. Therefore, if Green Party candidates won five percent of the national vote in an election for the House of Representative, they would win five percent of the seats. This is why there are Greens in the governments of most Western European countries.

In Germany, the Greens hold seven percent of the seats in the lower house of their legislature, the Bundestag, and are part of a coalition government with the dominant Social Democratic party. A major rift in the party occurred when German Prime Minister and Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder committed German troops to Afghanistan. German Greens, who have their roots in the peace movement, generally oppose sending German troops to fight foreign wars and were divided on the question of leaving the coalition on principle or pragmatically going along with Schroeder . After agonizing internal debate, the party decided to follow its leader, foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and support Schroeder’s decision to commit troops.

The US Greens, like the German Greens in this instance, may have to sacrifice ideals for realities if they want to gain popular support. This would probably prove even more true in the US, as American Greens, unlike their German counterparts, operate in a winner-take-all system and must appeal to mainstream Americans.

Not surprisingly, the Green national platform endorses proportional representation. “The electoral process should be reformed,” says Anne Goeke, a member of the GPUS’s international committee. “There needs to be proportional democracy. It shouldn’t be winner take all. That is an undemocratic process.” Greens argue they’d get more votes in this type of system because, in the current system, many voters won’t vote for a candidate they know won’t win. “We think Nader would have had 20 to 25 percent of the vote” under a proportional system, says Feinstein.

In reality, proportional representation would require amending the Constitution, so don’t expect it anytime soon. Some, like Potholm, feel that institution of the proportional system is a pipe dream. “If what the Greens want is to totally change the system to get power,” he says, “that’s never going to happen.”

Rensenbrink, who says he has put a good deal of thought into the strategy question of winning in the present system or working to change that system, believes that right now, the question is somewhat irrelevant.

“In the backs of our minds, if we think we are going to [work within this system] or widen the playing field [by instituting proportional representation], I don’t think it matters as to how we are working now. We are in a winner-take-all situation. What we need now is to appeal to a broad spectrum of American voters. Europeans try to get seven percent. In the US we have to appeal to 60 to 70 percent of the voters if we are going to get anywhere.” And to do that, the Greens must appeal to the middle and, most likely, endure internal struggles like the one recently faced by the German Greens.

External challenges

Wrenching as they may be, self-definition issues pale in comparison with the institutional hurdles Greens must jump in the current system. Consider, for example, the Maine Greens’ struggle for official party status. According to state law, to be recognized and have registered voters, a party must have a gubernatorial or presidential candidate win five percent of the vote in Maine. The Maine Greens satisfied this requirement in 1994 when Jonathan Carter, who ran as an independent for governor, gave his seven percent of the vote to the party.

But when Ralph Nader, running as a Green, failed to get five percent of the Maine vote in the 1996 presidential election, the Maine Secretary of State withdrew official status from the party, and the Maine Greens lost all of their 2600 registered voters. The state’s argument was that a party needed five percent in both the gubernatorial and presidential races. The Green Party sued to establish the meaning of the word “or,” and, according to Allen, “lost at every level,” including an appeal in the First Court of Appeals in Boston. “The judicial system really supports the two party system,” says Allen.

Still in court fighting to get their status back, the Greens began to collect signatures for Pat LaMarche’s 1998 gubernatorial campaign. However, they were afraid that the court would invalidate any signatures they received under the Maine Green Party name and so they were forced to change the name of the party to the Green Independent Party of Maine. Predictably, the name change, says Allen, confused onlookers.

Finally, the Maine Greens were successful in getting the law changed in the legislature instead of the courts. “It took us four years of court action,” says Allen in an email, “and most of our limited funds, in both state and federal courts, and four separate tries in the legislature to change the ‘or means and’ law.”

Needles to say, the battle to win back official status took steam out of the nascent party. “When you’re constantly defending yourself from attacks meant to keep you down,” says Allen, “it’s difficult to build your own party.”

But the difficulty keeping official status is only one impediment the Greens faced while creating a viable new party in Maine. Another hurdle was the stipulation that an official party must hold a caucus in each of the state’s 16 counties. The logic to this rule holds that if you have committed members in every part of the state except Aroostook County, you can’t be a legitimate party. Then there was the failed attempt by Maine Democrats to require that the 2500 $5 contributions necessary to receive Cleún Election money must come from within one’s own party (See “The Baldacci plot, http://www.portlandphoenix.com/archive/features/01/06/15/feat _clean.html). Imagine the difficulty of Carter and Farsaci both trying to secure 2500 $5 contributions from a potential pool of only 8700 people.

The institutional impediments exist at the national level as well, and the exclusion of Nader from the debates provides a favorite Green example. At one time, presidential debates were run by the League of Women Voters. However, in 1980, third-party candidate John Anderson received six percent of the vote, which scared the Democrats and Republicans into getting into the debate game themselves so as to exert control. They formed the Commission on Public Debates (CDP), a non-profit group which would organize and set rules for the debates. In 1988, the League of Women Voters pulled out of sponsoring the group saying: “We have no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people.”

What did they mean by hoodwinking? How about keeping Nader out of the debates in 2000, despite an NBC poll that said 64 percent of Americans wanted him in the mix. They maintained that a candidate needed to be favored by 15 percent of the voters in three major polls to be included. Mayor Feinstein says this is circular logic. “Minor party candidates have to be in the debates to show up in the polls,” he says.

According to Allen, the attempts made by the two-party system to impede the Green Party demonstrate the necessity for the Green Party in the first place. “We have to confront the current system,” she says “to show people how unfair the current system is. Starting a new party is confronting the unfairness of what is basically becoming a one-party system.”

So far, the Greens have been successful building the foundation of a serious challenge to the current system. So far, like Feinstein said, it’s been “quiet” and “under-the-radar.” But with a Green candidate for Maine governor with a legitimate shot to win, the Green political movement is about to get noisy, at least in Maine.

A Green win would do wonders for the legitimacy of the party nationally, but even a narrow loss would prove that, given clean election money, the Greens can be a force in American politics. Meanwhile, the Greens will continue to build their base by attracting voters who are fed up with the Democrats and Republicans, and continue to place more officials in local office. The strategy should eventually allow them to capture offices in state government, and success there will open the door to national office.

This growth may not happen quickly, but if the Greens can continue to grow, keep their core values, and make pragmatic compromise to appeal to middle America, there could one day be a Green voting bloc in the Senate or even, though the prospect looks dim today, a Green in the White House.

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com.