Greener pastures

Will the Massachusetts Green Party earn statewide status this November? Plus, more courtroom difficulties for a Weymouth activist, and Philadelphia police play hardball with demonstrators.

by Ben Geman

By any measure, it was a modest celebration. Last Friday night, in a bright room in MIT's student center, about 15 Boston-area Green Party activists chatted around a table adorned with pretzels, vanilla cookies, soda, and a bottle of wine.

PARTY BUILDER: "One challenge for us, and this will be an ongoing challenge, is to keep room for direct action and make space for electoral politics," says Massachusetts Green Party co-chair Stacey Cordeiro.

The low-key party was held to mark the state Greens' and the Ralph Nader campaign's success in submitting more than 20,000 voter signatures to get Nader on the state ballot this November. They needed only 10,000 certified signatures, but the extras will probably ward off challenges to making Nader an option for Massachusetts voters.

Shouldn't that giant step toward getting the legendary consumer advocate on the ballot warrant a more raucous bash? It's not that Greens don't know how to get down; it's just that collecting enough signatures was only one of the Green Party's goals. In fact, party activists are eyeing a bigger prize: the transformation of the Greens into important players in state elections. If Nader wins three percent of the state vote in November, then the Green Party will become an official political party in Massachusetts, along with the Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians. That would give them much easier access to the ballot in state races. And as the Nader run continues, Green activists here want to use his campaign to start building the infrastructure needed to run viable candidates in 2002. "This is about building the party," says 23-year-old David Strozzi, of MIT. "A lot of people are talking about how three is the magic number."

It's too early to tell how well Nader will fare in November, much less how successful the state activists will be in using his efforts to juice up their subsequent work. But there are promising signs. A mid-June McCormack Institute poll showed Nader with eight percent of the statewide vote. And the Green effort comes amid new vitality on the left -- a vitality that was apparent, for example, in last year's landmark Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO). "There's a lot of energy right now," says Stacey Cordeiro, a Nader-campaign staff member and co-chair of the state Green Party. "And we think at least some of it can elect good people."

Almost all the roughly 80 Greens in office nationwide have won seats on city councils and other local bodies. But soon, Massachusetts may join a handful of states especially well equipped to elect Greens in state races. In 1998, Massachusetts's voters easily approved a "clean elections" referendum that, among other things, sets up a substantial public-financing mechanism for state elections. The 2002 election cycle is scheduled to be the first held under the new law. Assuming it happens, it could bring changes to state politics that would help the Greens.

The law sets certain fundraising thresholds for candidates to meet; if they meet them, they qualify for public funds. The donations must be small, between $5 and $100. In the governor's race, for example, a candidate needs to gather 6000 such contributions; a state-senate candidate needs 450 contributions from his or her district to quality for public funds. "Four hundred and fifty for a state-senate seat," says Cordeiro. "I'm not too scared of that."

Still, it won't be easy. The state party has about 300 dues-paying members. And even though many, many more people will vote for Nader this November, the relatively small core of activists who make up the state's Green Party will have to work hard to build an infrastructure capable of sustaining electoral campaigns. If they achieve statewide party status in November, they'll have to do it again -- field a candidate for statewide office, such as governor or attorney general, and garner three percent of the vote -- to keep that status beyond 2002. Without a big name like Nader, that will be difficult.

Other challenges loom too. The Massachusetts Green Party attracts people well outside the boundaries of mainstream politics. The state party is affiliated with both the Association of State Green Parties -- on whose platform Nader is running -- and the more radical Green Party USA (see "It's Not Easy Being Green," News and Features, July 21). If anything, it tilts toward the latter. Many Greens are no doubt more comfortable planning demonstrations or engaging in other forms of community activism than they are piecing together an electoral campaign.

But Cordeiro says the activist bent of the party membership creates a welcome challenge: ensuring that electoral politics don't clash with other, non-electoral aspects of "movement building." "One challenge for us, and this will be an ongoing challenge," she says, "is to keep room for direct action and make space for electoral politics."

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Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com bgeman[a]phx.com.