Third Parties Are Critical for an Informed Public
In general, I value open discussion and the consideration of multiple perspectives when searching for solutions to particular issues. I feel that weighing what everyone has to say is a crucial process in formulating a stance on something, and whenever I neglect to do this I end up wishing that I had been more thorough. This is why it is very important to not limit our sources for information to only a few channels–if we do we tend to absorb the bias inherent in them. Naturally, it can be assumed that just about everything is biased, making it our duty to analyze multiple perspectives if we intend to have as logical and objective an opinion as possible.[CONTINUED]Because the formatting is not working here, please see original post found at :: http://citizentleilax.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/third-parties-are-critica...
(5 votes)
12 Comments
Jason L. Gohlke
If the formatting isn't working for you, try clicking on "Input format" right under the content box. That will reveal three options. "Full HTML" is a bit of a misnomer -- what it really means is "WYSIWYG html editor". If you want to paste things in with full html code, use "PHP code" instead.
tgg
Seriously. Having a website about green government and not actually including Green Party candidates on the site is mind-boggling and a tad ridiculous.
JenesseMiller
For my part, what I find ridiculous that this Web site is fully open to anyone to add their opinions, and yet none of the people upset about the lack of Green Party candidates and information have seen fit to say anything about what the Green Party has to offer environmental voters. Now THAT is mind-boggling.
We encourage all of the supporters of all of the dozens of candidates for governor to tell us why they would be the "greenest" governor for California. You have the ability to do that on this site.
Of course, it's much easier to complain about what's wrong than actually do anything about it...
So don't take the easy way out. Tell your fellow environmentalists what you want the candidates to do for the environment! If you need inspiration, look at the issues area on our Web site. There are plenty of challenges for our next governor -- clean air, water, renewable energy, protecting endangered species, toxins, climate change and more. The environmental community eagerly await your thoughts on these and other issues.
_tleilax_
Jenesse, I wasn't going to press further since you said you didn't have time, but since you are still responding... PLEASE find the time to respond to the challenges on the Calitics article. I really want to hear your position, and I think it is very important to establish that you and the CLCV are not in fact intrinsically biased and look at Democrats with a much more lenient attitude than they deserve, while refusing to look at Greens at all. At the very least, please reply to the challenge that the CLCV has in fact never authentically endorsed a Green *while* they were a Green--that will take even less time than you've spent here. And if it turns out the CLCV actually hasn't ever endorsed a Green, please admit it. Your honesty will be appreciated. Because as I said, if you leave these factually-based challenges unanswered it appears as though you are indeed biased in general, and even purposefully dishonest when you go around saying that you have endorsed Greens in the past, as you did again here on my post. I'd really like to have it cleared up because I'd like to give you and the CLCV the benefit of the doubt that you're smarter and more trustworthy than that. But currently, that is unfortunately impossible to ascertain.
If you just straight up don't like the Greens, despite their obviously advanced environmental platform (which you, as an environmentalist, should already be well aware of and have easy access to), that's fine. Just do yourself and everyone else a favor and be real about it, and don't try to pretend otherwise. That's the issue here, and it's with you and the CLCV, not the average person concerned about the environment. If that's not the case, I would be completely satisfied if the CLCV could be honest and publicly state their position as being that the Green Party has great positions on environmental policy, but you can't currently support them due to lack of party organization and extensive popular support. Do that instead of pretending they don't exist or they aren't as good as Democrats. Because if you're concerned about the environment, you really can't legitimately deny that the Green Party is THE environmental party in California, and America in general.
DavidinLA
I don’t want to duplicate Jenesse Miller’s excellent response to TLEILAX’s posting, except to say that I whole heartedly agree with her. It is rather telling that TLEILAX spent his entire post lamenting the lack of attention to the Green Party candidate without saying one word about where the Green Party candidate stood on a host of critical environmental issues. Further, TLEILAX seemed perplexed that the Democratic and Republican parties are trying “to keep third party philosophies away from the American public”. It is the role of political parties, even the Green Party, to advance their own agenda and it is decidedly not their role to advance the interests of their adversaries. It seems to me that a party wishing to be taken serious by the voters and organizations like CLCV has the minimum responsibility to advance its agenda aggressively in the market place of ideas. It needs to effectively communicate what the party and its candidates stand for and to pursue the opportunities available to it to reach out to the voters and organizations in a proactive way. Complaining that no one is seeking us out is a flawed strategy. This approach may go a long way to explain why the Green Party has shrunk 25% from .88% of California’s registered voters in November 2000 to 0.66% of the electorate as of February 2010. Whatever the Green Party and its candidates may stand for on the issues, it is clearly not presenting a compelling message to the voters choosing party affiliation. Nor can the Green Party argue that it has a base of voters or activists large enough to be considered a viable party in a statewide election. A party that cannot organize effectively to increase, or even maintain, its membership is unlikely to have the organizational skills to run an effective campaign.
_tleilax_
Hello, thanks for reading my post. Please see my response to Jenesse. I'd like to point out that I'm not confused about why Repubs & Dems promote their own viewpoint and not others (obviously), I'm just talking about solving problems and becoming educated about issues in general, and why third parties are necessary in that process for the benefit of American politics and the public. I realize that everyone has their own agenda, and that unfortunately this agenda is not always to effectively solve a problem. Since my post is essentially theoretical, I assume that when one group suppresses the perspective of another group, they have something to lose should the other group's message be publicized. If everybody was interested in simply becoming smarter about things, they would welcome the inclusion of all sorts of perspectives and philosophies, so that sifting through and finding the best combination would be easier, regardless of what party affiliation they ultimately have. Tragically, people are often far more interested in labels than simply working together to improve society and the human condition.
DavidinLA
The first lesson of politics is that if you don't win elections, you cannot govern. This lesson seems to be lost on third parties. They cry out to be taken seriously, to engage in the debate, but have utterly failed to build the organization and skills necessary to win. Absent the above, why should anyone take them seriously?
_tleilax_
The logic of any given argument should be weighed for its own merits, regardless of how popular the person(s) saying it are at the time. This is a lesson that frequently seems to be lost on those who consistently support philosophically inferior politicians.
JenesseMiller
I thank you for raising the issue of third parties with the GreenGov2010 community. As the communications director for CLCV, I'd like to try to respond to some of the many points you've brought up in your post.
First, let's talk about the "omission" as you see it of the Green Party candidate/s from the "Build a Greener Governor" campaign Web site. CLCV is nonpartisan, but that doesn't mean we exist in a world apart from reality. For practical reasons, candidates for state office must meet a certain level of viability before CLCV includes in them in our endorsement process (meaning they can successfully organize at the grassroots, set up campaign offices on the ground, hire staff, raise money -- everything it takes to successfully campaign for office). When candidates meet CLCV's viability criteria, we include them in our endorsement process and have endorsed Green Party candidates in the past. Similarly, CLCV staff does not have the time, staff or resources to create a well-researched individual profile for each of the dozens of candidates currently running for governor.
That is why we created this campaign site and made it completely open to everyone who wants to join the conversation -- so that voters will get a better sense of all the candidates and what they stand for, and be able to articulate what they want the candidates to stand for.
Anyone, no matter his or her party affiliation, with access to an Internet connection, has the opportunity to sign up to contribute content, opinion, and access and add information to this Web site in order to convince all the candidates for governor to represent the strong environmental values of Californians. This site, and the conversation it represents, is open to the public so they can help CLCV pressure all of the candidates to adopt a "greener" (more environmental) platform and ultimately identify the best environmental candidate. That is the whole point of creating it.
Unfortunately, from reading your post, the average person would have absolutely no clue what the environmental issues you or your fellow Green Party members are interested in. It strikes me as a missed opportunity to communicate with the readers of this site, who are primarily voters who rank the environment very high on their list of issues they'd like to see addressed by our next governor. I hope you will return to the site and provide more information about the environmental platform of the Green Party candidates.
In addition, the fact that you are only the second Green Party member to sign up and contribute your voice to this conversation, despite the fact that more than a dozen Green Party members complained via email that CLCV had not profiled their candidates on our Web site; despite the fact that I personally responded to each and every individual who wrote to us explaining our staff/resource limitations and providing clear instructions on how to sign up and add your opinions to the site; despite the fact that Green Party members promised to share that information with large email lists of Green Party members, is instructive. Perhaps the Green Party (like many "third" parties) is figuring out how to convince its members to be more engaged in the political process. Convincing Green Party (or any party for that matter) members to be more engaged with their party is not the mission of CLCV -- our mission is to identify and elect environmental champions to state office, and to hold legislators accountable for their promises to their constituents to protect the environment.
I don't know the extent to which you speak for the party, but it may be time to look within rather than blaming other organizations such as CLCV for the lack of greater voter engagement with the Green Party. I read a news story today (http://www.mercurynews.com/politics-government/ci_14631028) that described in detail the Green Party's challenges in recruiting and engaging members. The percent of registered Green Party members within the California voter population is less than one percent of all Californian voters. Obviously that makes organizing, fundraising, cultivating potential candidates and all the rest very difficult for the Green Party. Like many Californians, I am sympathetic to those challenges. It is difficult for democracy to work well when, for example, it's so expensive to run for state office.
But given those challenges, why not then take advantage of relatively easy-to-use and democratic tools that exist, like this very Web site, to engage people who care about the environment? The energy involved in your long and angry post could perhaps have been spent explaining to readers on this site what the Green Partycould do for the environment that other parties have not achieved in terms of environmental protection.
CLCV is working to involve our members and Californians frregardless of party affiliation to get them involved so they'll contribute their ideas, questions for candidates, and other original content to this site. We will all be better off and more informed for it.
_tleilax_
I certainly appreciate the fact that you allow anyone to post here, anything less would be highly questionable. That indeed was my reason for signing up and posting here, to determine your openness to that. [paragraph]My piece was written about the benefit of including third parties in general--a political philosophy piece, the point of which was not to talk about any specific platforms or candidates. It's a philosophy that stands apart from any specific race or situation, as most theory does. However, I used that philosophy to direct my actions into a letter to your organization about something specific, so I can see how you would confuse my purposes. I'd like to add that I wasn't angry at all, simply expressing my views on the topic. Reread it again, and you may realize this (and on that note, I cut most of it and directed people to my blog, since the formatting hasn't worked for me here for some reason and, probably like this response, it looks far too jumbled to read effectively). Perhaps you thought my letter was angry, but in fact even that was primarily just expressing disappointment. [paragraph]It's interesting that you note you responded to each and every person, yet I did not receive any reply. Is that because my letter was directed to Chabot's email address and not yours? In any case, I am glad you have responded here. I would really like to see you finish responding to posts I discovered at http://calitics.com/diary/11155/clcv-by-wes ... wherein your claim to have endorsed Green Party member(s) in the past was effectively challenged, and then left unrebutted, along with some other very compelling arguments against positions you supported there. This actually makes it seem like you have no response and have been defeated, so I encourage you to return, because I want to hear your position. [paragraph]I also find it very interesting you say you don't have time or staff to create a profile for each candidate, yet you somehow find the time to argue on forums whenever someone writes something against the CLCV. I actually appreciate that you do that, since I think it's good to see your position clarified; it's just an interesting juxtaposition when you mention not having time.
DavidinLA
In the 1990's, on behalf of CLCV, I personally researched and conducted interviews of Green Party candidates for some Assembly races in Southern California. While I have no memory of the names of the candidates, it is clear in my memory that the candidates were only interviewed after suspending our viability requirements (having resources adequate to reach enough voters to run a legitimate campaign). None of these candidates had a clear understanding of the role of the legislature and little or no understanding of the environmental issues they would be dealing with in the legislature. Nor did they have the slightest idea of what it takes to put together a political campaign or how to run one. CLCV did not endorse them.The last time I participated in an interview with a Green Party candidate was during the recall election in 2003. The Green Party candidate, Peter Comejo, was a nice enough gentleman, a committed leftist, but demonstrated no particular knowledge of the environmental issues facing California, the duties of the Governor or any knowledge of the Governor's environmental responsibilities. In short, he was not the best environmental candidate in the race and CLCV did not endorse him. I have no idea of what the Green Party stands for, or what Green Party candidates stand for, because the party and the candidates have consistently failed to put together the resources to run a functioning campaign, that is, communicate with me as a voter. As an environmentalist, I should be your prime audience. Despite having Green Party candidates on my Assembly ballot, I have never talked to a canvasser, received a phone call, or opened a piece of mail from one of your candidates. Although vastly better informed than most voters, no Green candidate in my district ever offered me much information about themselves. Hence none ever got my vote.Your party, any party, this goes for candidates as well, has the affirmative obligation to tell voters what your ideas are and what your agenda will be if elected. This means organizing enough volunteers knock the doors, make the calls, get out the mail (assuming you've raised the money to pay for it), identify persuadable voters and, you know, actually campaign. The time you spend complaining that no one is paying attention does nothing to get your ideas before the voters. It is not CLCV's responsibility to campaign for your party or your candidates, it is yours. We have neither the resources nor the inclination to advance a party or candidate we know nothing about. We certainly don't have the resources run the campaign for your party.Your voluminous correspondence with us has advanced nothing beyond the thesis of your party's victimhood. You blame us, you blame the media, you blame other parties. Perhaps you should reflect on how you spend your time and energy. You could have been calling voters, you could have been organizing volunteers, you could have been registering new Green Party members, you could have been raising money. Instead you do this. I would remind you that the Green Party has lost a quarter of its tiny membership in the last 10 years. The Green Party has just .66% of the registered voters in California. That is just over 100,000 voters out of almost 17,000,000.So I ask you, do you want to spend time complaining of your victimhood or do you want to build your party and advance its ideas in the political process? You don't need to answer me you need to answer yourself.I have had enough of this conversation. Feel free to use the GreenGov2010 website to tell us what your party stands for and what your gubernatorial candidates stand for. Let us know what you want to hear from other candidates if you like. Asking again about why we ignore your party will get no further response. CLCV will be devoting its time and resources to researching candidates and issues as well as educating voters and the media as to which candidate we think is best able to deal with the many environmental challenges facing California. Everything else is a distraction.
JenesseMiller
Frankly, I had to abandon the conversation on Calitics that you refer to because it had already taken up far more time than I could afford to spend. I've spent several hours over the past few weeks responding in public forums when CLCV is being unfairly (in my view) attacked, but these have mostly been situations where it's clear that I'm having a one-on-one conversation with individuals who have a very specific axe to grind with CLCV, rather than participating in a conversation with a large number of environmental voters who are actually going to engage in a meaningful way with the governor's race and other important elections this year.
As far as your question about how I use my time: Part of my job is to clear up misinformation about CLCV -- and the Calitics conversation you refer to was misleading readers about a number of topics. The truth is that we at CLCV have a very, very long to-do list at the moment -- the environment is under very serious attack in California right now (see www.ecovote.org for more information) and we don't have the luxury of getting involved in prolonged debates that on the surface are in a public forum but are really with one or two people who have a very narrow and specific agenda and have already made up their mind about the work we are doing.
Either you will use the tools here to broaden the base of the Green Party by explaining what it has to offer voters who care about the environment (if you're interested in doing that) or you won't. That is not my decision, it is yours. While I appreciate that you are asking important questions about the political process in California and indeed our country, I'm sure there are more appropriate Web sites and forums to discuss the challenges of the two-party system for third parties. This particular campaign site is focused on getting input from environmental voters on what the positions of the candidates should be, pressuring the candidates to adopt more pro-environmental positions, and ultimately electing an environmental leader as governor of California. I must turn my attention back to that very important task, and will likely not be able to continue to respond to each of your posts, but encourage you to continue to contribute content to this site. Thank you.