'Future Hope' Column
By Ted Glick
I have been an active member of the Green Party for 18 years, mainly
on a local level for the last dozen years. Before that I had been
working with it for about a decade. I remember the beginnings of Green
Party organizing efforts in the early 80’s, about the same time as the
historic first Jesse Jackson for President/Rainbow Coalition campaign in
1984.
Some Greens look upon me as a kind-of traitor because, in 2016, I was
very critical of the kind of campaign Jill Stein was running. I was
particularly critical of her repeated refrain that Trump and Clinton
were “equally terrible,” and her bewildering statements to the effect
that she had a chance of winning the Presidency. By the end of October,
between my problems with her campaign and the closeness of the race
between Trump and Clinton, I ending up writing a column, “Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton,” and then did so on election day.
Unfortunately, I was right and Stein was wrong. Trump is
off-the-charts terrible. Clinton would have been
OK-to-problematic-to-bad, but nothing like the lying, pathological,
narcissistic, sexist, racist poor-excuse-for-a-human-being currently in
the White House.
However, I have continued to stay active with my local GP group in
Essex County, NJ. For a long time our main focus was education and
activism to combat the climate crisis. Some of us are still doing that,
but for a number of the newer and younger members who joined in 2016 or
2017, running in elections is what they want to do.
The position I’ve taken within this group, one shared by a number of
others, is that our focus should be on running people for school boards
or city councils, local races where there is a real chance of winning or
doing well through hard work and smart organizing. We should not be
running candidates for Congress who have zero chance of winning and
little chance of getting more than a few percentage point share of the
vote. Campaigns like that show weakness, not growing strength.
Click here for the full article.
Source: tedglick.com
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