It’s not easy being Green

The
Green Party’s presence in New York politics has been established by an unlikely
pair of founding fathers: nationally known and respected consumer advocate
Ralph Nader and Al Lewis, the comic television actor who gained fame as the
geriatric vampire Grampa Munster.

            Now the party’s future in the Empire
State rests squarely on the broad shoulders of a former steelworker and union
organizer from the Bronx: this year’s Green Party gubernatorial candidate,
Stanley Aronowitz. If the Green Party is to maintain its status as an
officially recognized political party in New York — a designation that’s key
to any third party’s ability to survive and thrive here — Aronowitz and his
lieutenant gubernatorial candidate, Jennifer Daniels, must receive at least
50,000 votes in this November’s elections.

            Despite the Greens’ unprecedented
level of success both nationally and in New York State, that’s anything but
guaranteed. And if Aronowitz fails to attract at least 50,000 voters, the
party’s efforts to become a relevant part of New York’s political landscape
will take a major hit.

            Nader’s two relatively high-profile
presidential campaigns put the Green Party on the political map. In 1996, the
Green Party presidential ticket got nearly 76,000 votes in New York — 3,200
from voters in Monroe County. In 2000, the Nader-topped ticket received over
244,000 votes statewide — 11,520 of which came from Monroe County voters.

            But it was Lewis’s 1998
gubernatorial run that gave the Greens a real foothold in the state. Lewis and
his aptly named running mate, Alice Green, managed to attract 52,533 voters
that year (2,568 in Monroe County), enough to secure a Green Party line on this
year’s ballot and give the party the official recognition that makes
party-building activities easier to conduct.

            Unlike Nader and Lewis, Aronowitz is
hardly a household name. A sociology professor at the City University of New
York, Aronowitz has written 15 books on such subjects as the corporatization of
higher education and the history of the labor movement. Perhaps not
surprisingly, he’s yet to top the bestseller list.

            There are several other factors that
make Aronowitz’s candidacy an uphill struggle. Chief among them are money and a
lack of media attention. But the party’s political inexperience, nearly
all-volunteer staff, and internal divisions also gum up the Green political
machine.

            Does Aronowitz expect to win the
election? “No, of course not,” he says. “I think that’s part of the bullshit.”
The bullshit, in this case, being Aronowitz’s contention that the three most
prominent candidates — Governor George Pataki, Comptroller Carl McCall, and
Rochester-area billionaire Tom Golisano — aren’t really debating matters of
genuine importance.

            “The issues that are urgent for the
people of this state are never really debated,” Aronowitz says. “I think part
of the reason for that is that [the candidates] have converged, and what they
do is attack each other in a rather, I think, juvenile way — about
misstatements or statements they might have made, or missteps or character.
Because in the last analysis, they don’t have anything different. There are
small differences, but they’re not, genuinely, differences that can excite
voters.”

            The Green Party’s platform certainly
includes issues that generate excited debate, if not outrage and indignation.
It includes a call to close the state’s nuclear power plants, ban genetically
engineered food, abolish the death penalty, decriminalize marijuana and other
drugs, make the minimum wage at least $10 per hour, institute universal health
care, and change the way the electoral system itself works by publicly
financing campaigns and other measures.

            “What the Green Party is doing, and
continues to do, is to raise issues,” Aronowitz says, “to meet people, to get
them aware, to get them registered to vote, to get them to actually vote for a
genuine alternative.”

            Getting the media — and, by
extension, the public — to pay attention to the Greens’ issues is Aronowitz’s
primary motivation, but he’s also running because “we need 50,000 votes,” he
says. Without that total, the Greens lose their ballot line for 2006 and a good
deal of the political momentum the party has generated so far.

As the Greens
see it,
their lack of money and media exposure go hand-in-hand, in part due to some
underhanded and unethical journalistic practices.

            The party as a whole, which is also
running candidates for attorney general and comptroller at the state level,
“will probably spend maybe $30,000 in this election,” says state party chair
Mark Dunlea. Dunlea hopes Aronowitz will be able to raise as much as $100,000
through his own efforts, but he says the two major party candidates and
Golisano “are spending that a day in television ads.”

            On October 3, about a month before
the election, Dunlea said the party probably had about $5,000 in its bank
account. By contrast, Pataki’s campaign finance filings indicate he had $12.2
million in his war chest in early October, and had already spent $27.4 million
on the election. McCall’s campaign, which has spent $11 million, reported
having $1.1 million in the bank. Golisano’s self-financed campaign had blown
through nearly $40 million by early October. The billionaire has said he’s
prepared to commit as much as $75 million of his own money to this year’s run.

            In the absence of paid advertising,
the Greens must rely on media coverage to get their message to the voters. But
“in order to get media coverage, you have to be provocative,” Dunlea says. In
the Greens’ experience, that’s meant provoking laughter, anger, or the prurient
interests of the electorate.

            Dunlea recounts a conversation he
had with Lewis about the 1998 campaign. Alice Green, Lewis’ running mate,
“‘stands up there at a press conference and she’ll give statistic after
statistic after statistic and fact after fact in response to a question, and
the reporters will write nothing,'” Dunlea recalls Lewis remarking.

            “‘Then they ask me, “What should we
do about toxic waste?” And I’ll go into my old man lunatic routine and start
cacklin’ and scream that what we should do is get a big spoon and make all the
CEOs eat their toxic waste. You know the next day we’ll get three paragraphs
about “Al Lewis wants to feed toxic waste to the CEOs.” The people we need to
reach, that’s the only way they’ll hear us, and they’ll understand what I meant
by feeding toxic waste to CEOs.'”

            Perhaps.

            As a Green candidate, Dunlea says,
“You’re put in this dilemma: Do I act off-the-wall in order for the media to
pay attention to me? But then the only thing the general public hears is when
I’m acting off-the-wall. Then they’ll say, ‘Why should I vote for this guy? He
seems so off-the-wall.’ That’s a big, big problem for Green Party and
third-party candidates.”

            The biggest splash Aronowitz has
made in the mainstream media thus far came after he admitted that he — like
McCall’s running mate, businessman Dennis Mehiel — has fathered children out
of wedlock. The admission made up two or three minutes of an hour-long press
conference that covered a wide range of issues, but Aronowitz’s revelation
about his sex life was the only aspect of the event that got significant play
in the media.

            “Stan’s 58 minutes talking about tax
policy and the environment and universal health care, all of that got ignored.
Because now the media had their sort-of sexy hook for the day,” Dunlea says.

            Aronowitz, Dunlea, and others in the
party also say the mainstream media ignores them in part because the Greens
don’t buy ads.

            When the editors and news directors
of mainstream media outlets are deciding which candidates to cover, the amount
of advertising the candidates buy “isn’t the only criteria, but it’s definitely
a criteria,” Dunlea says. “There are campaigns I’ve been involved in where
we’ve had money to spend on advertising, and it’s pretty clear usually that if
you buy some ads, you also expect to get some free media coverage out of it as
well — sort of a quid pro quo.”

            The media coverage Golisano has
gotten is a case in point, the Greens say. “There’s not a reporter in the world
who could argue with me in a straight face that they’re covering Tom Golisano
because of the brilliancy of his political ideas,” says Dunlea. “The only
criteria is that he has billions of dollars and is willing to spend $50 to $100
million” on his campaign.

            Local Greens are particularly angry
with the lack of coverage Aronowitz and the other statewide Green candidates
have gotten in the Democrat and Chronicle.
James Bailey, the Green Party’s campaign coordinator in Monroe County, says
press releases on Green Party campaign events and positions are routinely
ignored by Rochester’s daily paper.

            D&C political
reporter Joseph Spector did not return a call seeking comment. Editor Karen
Magnuson deferred comment to Tom Flynn, the paper’s vice president of
communications.

            Flynn says the D&C sent Aronowitz and the Greens’ other statewide candidates
requests for biographical information and their stands on various issues
several weeks ago, but has not received a response. He says two calls Spector
made to Aronowitz’s office were also not returned.

            What’s really gotten Bailey and
Rochester Greens riled up is the D&C‘s
stance on gubernatorial debates. “There also has been some silly-season talk
about including all eight gubernatorial candidates — among them the Marijuana
Reform Party and Socialist Workers Party standard-bearers — in the debates,”
reads a September 20 D&C editorial. “That would make things very unwieldy. Independence Party candidate
Tom Golisano deserves a spot, along with McCall and the governor. That’s it.”

            “I am appalled by your narrow
definition of ‘democracy’ and your concern that too much democracy is
unwieldy,” wrote Richard Freeman of Rochester, in an unpublished letter to the
editor posted on the Green Party of Monroe County’s website. “[D]emocracy is
unwieldy and the more you try to make it ‘wieldy’ the more fascistic is gets…
And what makes Golisano worthy and not, say, Stanley Aronowitz of the Green
Party? Because Golisano can buy his way to media attention? Is this democracy?”

            “You might ask, ‘Why Golisano?'”
says Bailey, “until you look into the Sunday paper and you see those full-page
ads.”

            Flynn says the Greens’ contention
that the paper trades coverage for ad revenue is “ridiculous.”

            Regarding the fact Aronowitz has
made that charge, Flynn says, “this from a candidate who can’t even respond to
inquiries by a newspaper for information. You can only have a dialogue if two
people are talking.”

            As for the D&C‘sSeptember 20
editorial, it’s only an opinion, Flynn says. “Editorials and news coverage are
quite separate and distinct,” he says. “Take it for what it’s worth.”

            Asked about his experience with the D&C, Aronowitz says, “I’ve had the
experience of not being covered by them much.”

            “The Buffalo News and the Democrat
and Chronicle have done scribbles, but not real stories,” he says. “I’ve
been profiled by The New York Times,
I’ve gotten into the Post Standard in
Syracuse, and so on. But the Rochester papers and the Buffalo papers — the
dailies with the big media presence — they have shut us out. They have taken
the position — I’m not saying that this is what they say — that we will not
advertise, we don’t have the clout to win; ergo, there’s no need to cover us.”

            A search of the D&C‘s online news archive illustrates the Greens’ point. As of
October 6, a search for articles containing the name “Golisano” brought up 17
articles going back to September 24, 11 of which were directly related to his
campaign. A search for “Aronowitz” did not bring up a single story for the same
time period. (It should be noted that the D&C‘s
online archives do not necessarily include every reference to a candidate that
appears in the print version of the paper.)

The D&C‘s online archive isn’t the
only place you’ll be hard-pressed to find Green candidates. Ballots for seats
representing Rochester in the state legislature will be practically Green-free
this November.

            In part, that reflects a conscious
decision on the party’s part to concentrate on Aronowitz’s gubernatorial run.
But it’s also indicative of the Greens’ lack of experienced, local candidates,
and their hesitation to challenge Democrats whose political agendas are similar
to their own.

            Green candidate Bonnie Cannan’s name
will appear on ballots for the 56th State Senate District seat representing
part of Rochester, Greece, Brighton, and Parma. But, essentially, she’s not in
the running.

            According to Bailey, Cannan
volunteered to challenge Assemblyman Joe Robach when Robach, a former Democrat,
switched parties to run in the newly redrawn State Senate district as a
Republican. But since the lawyer and progressive activist Harry Bronson entered
the race for the Democrats, Cannan has decided not to actively pursue the seat,
Bailey says.

            Cannan, who ran unsuccessfully for
city council last year, did not return a call seeking comment.

            Green Party member Thera Clark tried
to mount a campaign challenging incumbent Democrat Susan John for the 131st
Assembly District, but was undone by her own lack of political experience and a
legal challenge by county Democrats that disqualified her from the race.

            Clark, a first-time candidate,
needed the petition signatures of 18 registered Greens to get on the ballot.
Conventional political wisdom suggests that candidates gather as many as twice
the number of signatures required in order to withstand challenges to the
signatures’ validity by opponents or boards of election. Clark only got 20
signatures.

            Compounding that problem, Clark
says, Monroe County Board of Elections officials were confused as to what race
she was trying to enter. The Board eventually certified her signatures, but the
Monroe County Democratic Committee challenged the Board’s decision in court and
won.

            “I really was surprised at the
extent [the Democratic Committee] took it,” Clark says. “I was running for
office to draw attention to an issue, not so much against Susan John.” The
issue at stake is the state’s failure to fund the processing of rape kits,
which contain DNA and other evidence collected after a sexual assault. That
information can be processed into a national database to help identify and
apprehend offenders. But lacking funds to do so, police often fail to do that.

            John has been active on the issue,
but Clark believes the assemblywoman hasn’t done enough. (She says she’s
willing to work with John on the issue, and will continue her own efforts on
its behalf.)

            Why would the Democrats spend time
and money to disqualify a single-issue, long-shot challenger like Clark? “The
party was just concerned about making sure everybody followed the same set of
rules,” John says.

            Local Greens have more of a presence
in this year’s Congressional races, where they’re fielding candidates in two of
the four races for seats representing parts of Monroe County. Attorney and
Green activist Paul Fallon is challenging incumbent Republican Tom Reynolds for
the 26th district seat, and Rachel Treichler is challenging Republican Amo
Houghton for the District 29 seat.

            Like Aronowitz, Treichler is
realistic about her chances for victory. “I am running to raise the issues,”
she says, among them the potential to develop wind power in the district, which
encompasses much of the southern half of Monroe County and several rural
counties in the southern tier.

            “We can talk about winning at
different levels,” Treichler, a first-time candidate, says. “With the Greens,
at this stage, winning would be to significantly build awareness of Greens in
the district and enroll voters toward the goal of winning a future election.”

            “There’s a great potential for the
Green Party to become a significant force in Rochester politics,” she says.

“Locally, the
party has moved out of its infancy,” says Rochester activist and Green
Party member Jon Greenbaum. “You might say it’s in its teenage years.”

            You might also observe that, like
teenagers, the Greens can be headstrong, contentious, and cliquey in
self-defeating ways. Granted, Republicans and Democrats often exhibit the same
adolescent tendencies, but the Green Party has some unique characteristics that
exacerbate the problem.

            “One of the challenges within the
Greens is that, basically, the Greens become the catch-all for all progressive
groups, and so there are people within the Greens who have different political
[views],” Dunlea says. “There are the anarchists, the Marxists, there are the
sort-of Green capitalists, there are the progressive populists [Dunlea
considers himself one of those], there are ecologists, there are women’s
[issues] activists. It sometimes can be difficult fitting all those different
political strategies together.”

            “We get people who are very good at
asserting their rights,” Greenbaum says. “A statewide Green assembly is always
a rowdy exercise in democracy.”

            Dunlea speaks of tensions within the
party between “Realos” and “Fundies.” The Realos, he says, are the
pragmatically minded Greens who’ll often tone down their rhetoric or amend
their ideas to make them more palatable to the electorate. The Fundies, on the
other hand, are more dismissive of the electoral process as a means to create
change. They believe their job is “to bring in ideas which initially are
dismissed as being too radical, and then, over time, convince people of their
merit and basically force the major parties to adopt them,” Dunlea says.

            In recent years, this philosophical
split has played out nationally as the split between the Fundie-minded Green
Party USA and the Green Party of the United States, which is the Greens’
national political party. Though Dunlea says many of the differences between
the two organizations have been resolved, another source of inter-party tension
is ready to take its place.

            This tension comes from a seemingly
unlikely source: Ralph Nader. Specifically, many Greens, especially Fundies,
are upset that Nader distances his citizen-activist groups from the Green
Party’s efforts.

            For example, in a widely circulated
October 3 e-mail, Mitchel Cohen — a member of both the New York State Green
Party and Green Party USA — criticized the organizers of Nader’s Democracy
Rising group for inviting Democrats such as unsuccessful New York City mayoral
candidate Mark Green to an October 4 rally on Wall Street. Cohen also
criticized the organizers for failing to mention Aronowitz’s appearance at the
rally.

            As one of the co-founders of the New
York Public Interest Research Group and the first chairperson of the national
PIRG, Dunlea says he’s considered “part of the Nader family.” He acknowledges
there are tensions between Nader and the Greens these days.

            Although he considers Nader “a
genius,” Dunlea says “he’s not an organizer [and] he’s not good on political
strategy” — shortcomings he says Nader himself would readily admit. Democracy
Rising couldn’t promote Aronowitz’s appearance, says Dunlea, who also helped
organize the event, because it’s funded by sources that can’t directly support
partisan activities.

            “Ralph just can’t take his 30 or 40
different citizens’ groups and turn them into fronts for the Green Party,”
Dunlea says.

            Of course, whether the Green Party
activists who worked to get Nader on the 2000 presidential ballot in 35 states
can appreciate that fact is another matter.

Will the
Greens ever become a force to be reckoned with in New York politics?

            Aronowitz is heartened by what he’s
seen so far. “Four years ago, we had 15 locals in New York State,” he says.
“Now we have 60.” With the exception of the D&C
and some media outlets in New York City, Aronowitz says he’s also getting
more serious attention from the press than Lewis did. And he’s found a
particularly receptive audience among the state’s college students and other
young, disaffected voters.

            Aronowitz also believes the growing
possibility of war with Iraq will increase the Greens’ stature. If, as he
suspects, Congress gives President George W. Bush sweeping powers to initiate
such a war, “we’re going to be the one party standing out there and saying,
‘These guys [Congressional Democrats and Republicans] are selling you out.’ That
may help us, both in the general election and in getting much more public
visibility.”

            But the one factor Aronowitz thinks
will really propel the Greens to prominence is a turn of events no one can take
heart in: the gradual destruction of the planet’s ecosystem.

            “We are in the middle of an
environmental catastrophe,” he says. “Global warming used to be thought of as a
cumulative process. Global warming is not a cumulative process. It’s about the
destabilization of our ecosystem. The destabilization of our ecosystem means
that at any time, just like a war like Iraq, the ecosystem can produce
tremendous disruptions in our everyday life.”

            Aronowitz notes that Greens in
Central Europe gained political capital in Germany and elsewhere after the
region experienced destructive floods. “If we have those kinds of catastrophes,
the Greens’ response, and the fact that the Greens have a position and have
been warning all along, will have some effect on [the party’s] standing in
votes, as well as in the public eye. The problem is, lacking such a
catastrophe, it’s long, slow work.”

            In other words, people who say
there’ll be a Green governor in New York when hell freezes over just may be
exactly right.

This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2002.