[Iowa-dx] Good article by Scott McLarty (national GP media coordinator) Fwd: Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 2008 (Re: Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate)

[Iowa GreenRon]

This is pretty much what I've been posting on Iowa Green Party and
Johnson County Green Party list-serves.  Scott really hit the nail on the
head.  Following this sage advice, we will know how to proceed with
improving, promoting and developing our party.

I learned of a process from my business administration professor, at
San Bernardino Valley College in San Bernardino, California, and I never
knew if this was my professor's process or something he learned from
someone else.  Dr. John Kubota taught us IGPODE, an acronym as
follows:

I   = INFORMATION:  get all of the information for a project that you can
G  = GOAL: from that analyzed information, set a goal
P  = PLAN: create a rational strategy and write it into a plan using the
       goal and the information that created that goal
O  = ORGANIZE:  bring all of your resources, people and information together
D  = DIRECT: put your organized plan into operation
E  = EVALUATE: evaluate the results, the strategies, the situation

Then you go back and start all over again with IGPODE, based upon that
evaluation, and do it every time you have a project or plan to enact.

If Green Party follows this strategy and Scott Mclarty's advice, I think we 
will
truly "grow" our party into prominence.

Ronald Kinum
a.k.a. Libris Fidelis writing name
Johnson County / Iowa Green Parties

>From: hhart@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu
>To: iowa-dx@gp-us.org
>Subject: [Iowa-dx] Good article by Scott McLarty (national GP media 
>coordinator)
>Fwd: Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 2008 (Re: Independent 
>Politics:
>The Green Party Strategy Debate)
>Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:37:47 -0500
>
>In my opinion, the major challenge of 2008 for
>the Green Party has little to do with the
>presidential race.
>
>In order to prove ourselves a growing political
>party with a real future, we need to win
>elections.  If we don't rack up victories, then
>the public's perception of us will be that the GP
>has hit a ceiling, that we'll occasionally win a
>couple of City Council seats here & there, but
>Greens are too small & marginal to have any kind
>of traction or effect on the political direction
>of the US.  We'd be permanent members of the
>political space also inhabited by the Libertarian
>Party, the US Constitution Party, etc., and votes
>cast for Greens are mostly wasted.
>
>This unfortunate perception will be correct...
>unless we begin making real electoral gains.
>
>While the presidential race is important, our
>biggest (and most achievable) goal in 2008 should
>be to place candidates in important state and
>municipal offices.  We should aim to get 4 or 5
>Greens into state legislatures, at least a half a
>dozen more Greens onto the City Councils of major
>cities, and a dozen or more Greens on smaller
>City Councils & County Commissions.  And maybe a
>few new Green Mayors of small & medium sized
>cities.
>
>We can accomplish these goals, because we've
>already succeeded at different times in electing
>Greens to these offices.  But it will take some
>preparation: recruiting excellent candidates;
>raising money for them; helping them build
>campaigns; promoting them publicly.
>
>Our strongest national committee right now should
>be the Coordinated Campaign Committee.  Greens
>who are serious about seeing the GP advance in
>2008 should either be joining or offering their
>services to the CCC, or should be making
>arrangements to get some CCC help for their local
>& state parties & candidates.  We should be
>holding Green Campaign Schools throughout the US
>as 2008 approaches.
>
>There's no doubt that our participation in the
>presidential race is important: it gets us a lot
>of press & public attention; it helps state
>parties win ballot access; the Green nominee
>serves as a sort of figurehead for the GP's
>platform & principles.  But the presidential race
>is also the most irrelevant when it comes to
>gauging the GP's actual progress, since it's the
>race in which we're most vulnerable to factors
>over which we have no control.  Overwhelmingly,
>voters in 2004 who agreed with the GP on the Iraq
>War and other issues decided that their main goal
>was to defeat Bush -- even if this meant voting
>for a dreary pro-corporate pro-war Democrat like
>Kerry.  Very few voters made it their priority in
>2004 to support a growing antiwar third party.
>The result was that both Cobb & Nader got small
>fractions of one percent.
>
>The GP can run the best candidates & campaigns
>possible, but we can't mandate what voters'
>priorities are.  Despite all the heated internal
>debate over choices of candidate & campaign
>strategy, the major factor in the 2004
>presidential race was that we were irrelevant to
>over 99% of voters, and would have been
>irrelevant regardless of nominee (or endorsee) or
>campaign strategy.  In fact, we were already
>irrelevant early in 2004, even to many GP
>supporters: Brent McMillan noted in a recent
>posting titled "Overview of Green Party national
>planning for 2008" that "Before we even got to
>the convention approximately 70% of the national
>party's donor base either went ABB, Anybody But
>Bush, or didn't want us to run a candidate at all
>for other reasons.  We then proceeded to fight
>over the scraps."
>
>(Someone will probably write back and note that
>Ralph got over four times the number that Dave
>got.  Here's my response: (1) Of course -- Ralph
>is famous.  (2) A discussion about how we could
>have received a larger fraction of 1% in 2004 is
>not worth our time.)
>
>This dynamic repeated in 2006, when we ran some
>of our strongest candidates & most well-organized
>campaigns ever for seats in Congress -- people
>like Rae Vogeler, Aaron Dixon, Kevin Zeese, Howie
>Hawkins, Byron DeLear, Bill Paparian, etc. etc.
>They mostly pulled numbers in the 2-4 percent
>range, not through any fault of their own, but
>because voters who opposed the Iraq War & other
>Bush Administration horrors were determined to
>transfer control over Congress from Repubs to
>Dems.  As in 2004, to most voters the GP was
>irrelevant at the congressional level.  With
>Howie Hawkins' campaign for the US Senate in New
>York, there was no reason for any sincere antiwar
>voter to vote for warhawk Democrat Hillary
>Clinton, since her reelection was inevitable, but
>most voters who claimed to oppose the Iraq War
>still voted for her.
>
>On the other hand, in some important
>gubernatorial races, which were not affected by
>this sentiment, Greens did fairly well, with Rich
>Whitney (Illinois) & Pat LaMarche (Maine)
>receiving about 10%.  Pat might have drawn 20-25%
>or even more if a progressive Democrat hadn't
>also run as in independent, turning it into a
>four-way race with the progressive vote split.
>Rich's unprecedented numbers in Illinois, after a
>vicious Democratic effort to keep him off the
>ballot (Gov. Blagojevich spent $800,000 in
>taxpayers' money on legal strategems), were
>especially good news.
>
>The GP might get 5% in the 2008 presidential
>race, or we might get a tiny fraction of 1%
>again.  Either way, we should not allow ourselves
>to make our performance in the expensive and
>fickle spectacle of the presidential race the
>sole or chief determinant of GP progress, and let
>it eat up all our time & mental energy as in
>2004.  Placing all our eggs in the presidential
>basket is like someone deciding to pursue a
>career in the music industry, and then staking it
>all on winning American Idol.
>
>Furthermore, we should remember that a lot of
>voters may decide to vote Democrat in the
>presidential race, but will still be ready to
>vote Green in state & local races.  An absolutist
>ideal of Green politics would find this
>unacceptable: if a voter is 'Green' (supports the
>GP platform & positions, is registered Green),
>then naturally the voter will vote for every
>Green on the ballot, especially the presidential
>nominee.  But that's not how real electoral
>politics works.  Voters decide who to vote for
>based on a variety of reasons.  It's extremely
>naive to believe that a typical voter does some
>research to determine which candidate best
>represents his or her own positions on major
>issues and then casts a vote accordingly.  If
>this were the case, the GP would already be a
>major US party.
>
>In reality, voters (even registered Greens) often
>make decisions based on all sorts of criteria,
>some of them irrational or inconsistent.  The
>important thing for the GP is that all votes are
>valuable to us, even the ones we think are
>irrational & inconsistent.  If a voter decides to
>support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or even
>George W Bush or John McCain for president, we
>still want his or her votes for Green candidates
>running for state legislature, city council,
>school board, etc.  In other words, we need to
>hold our noses sometimes and respect voters'
>choices.  If we expect to grow, we'll have to
>welcome support from people who've made some very
>non-Green choices.
>
>Will we have a strategy in 2008 for winning back
>all those self-defeating antiwar types who voted
>for Kerry in 2004?  Will we have a strategy for
>persuading progressives who decide to vote
>Democrat in the presidential race to vote Green
>in state & local races?  Are we mature enough not
>to treat politics as a zero-sum game, and craft
>our campaign messages in a way that doesn't allow
>the national campaign to smother our chance to
>win a lot of down-ballot races?
>
>We should absolutely run an aggressive
>presidential campaign in 2008, competing in every
>state, and with every state GP pledged to support
>the national nominee.  (If we don't want our
>nominee to run aggressively in every state, or
>some state GPs decide they'd rather place a
>different name on their ballot line, we probably
>shouldn't bother to run a presidential campaign
>at all.)
>
>But Greens should be realistic about what we can
>and can't accomplish, and we should anticipate
>that external forces will affect how well our
>national nominees do on Election Day in ways that
>we can't foresee.  Here's one example: we might
>witness the first billion-dollar presidential
>campaign in 2008; will this work to the GP's
>advantage (evidence of how money has corrupted
>corporate-party politics), or will it simply
>crush us?
>
>It's the state & local victories, along with new
>registrations & more state GPs with ballot
>status, that will demonstrate the GP's permanence
>and steady growth.  If we place 4 or 5 Greens
>into statehouses, a bunch of new Greens onto city
>councils, etc., then it won't really matter if
>the Green presidential candidate gets 5% or 3% or
>1% or 0.05% in 2008.  It'll also set the GP in a
>stronger position for winning a seat or two in
>Congress during the next five years.  When we
>finally get a Green or two into Congress, it'll
>change the whole political landscape of the US,
>signaling the beginning of the end of the
>two-party system.
>
>Scott McLarty
>GPUS Media Coordinator
>
>_______________________________________________
>Iowa-dx mailing list
>Iowa-dx@lists.gp-us.org
>http://lists.gp-us.org/mailman/listinfo/iowa-dx

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