Ain't Easy Being Green - Publisehd by San Diego CityBeat
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CITY WEEK
Feb. 25 2004 12:00 AM
AIN'T EASY BEING GREEN
BY DANA RAYMOND
Don't bother Kent Mesplay with notions like, "Ralph Nader helped elect George
W. Bush." He wants none of that.
Urging Green Party sympathizers to go Democrat so as not to give Republicans
a leg up "are words of consensus builders, of pragmatic, cautious Greens-words
of defeat," said Mesplay, who's hoping to beat the other Green Party
candidates for the presidential nomination when Californians go to the polls
March 2.
"To run with anything less than the drive to elect a Green president is to run with
half a heart," he said. "Let us be bold with our power."
A resident of Mira Mesa, Mesplay works full-time as an air-quality inspector with
the San Diego Air Pollution Control District. But he's spending his weekends
campaigning in an "all-out run" for the presidency, recognizing that doing so, in
theory at least, hurts the Democratic Party.
Mesplay, 41, was born in the U.S., but grew up in Papua New Guinea. He earned
a doctorate from Northwestern University in biomedical engineering and became
active with the Greens in 1995 as treasurer of the San Diego Green Party
Council and as co-chair of its communications committee, according to his
website, presidentkent.org.
2. Don't bother telling him he doesn't stand a chance of becoming the country's next
leader.
"I will absolutely run all the way through," he said. "The predominant attitude
among the Greens is that we can't win. But how the hell are you going to run a
campaign that even attracts voters and helps build the party if you say you can't
win?"
Mesplay's primary goal is to make it to the debates this fall where he believes
third-party candidates deserve a chance to be heard. First, however, Greens
must garner 5 percent of the vote-the Green Party has just about a third of a
million people registered nationwide. They're growing fast, however, and Mesplay
believes his party's platform scares Democrats who, he says, recognize that
Greens "stand for a lot of things that they no longer stand for." He's hoping to
tap into this shift in ideology and win some votes. "There are a lot of people who
don't vote because they're frustrated, they're apathetic, they're angry," he said,
"and I intend to tap into that and that would give me a landslide if I could even get
a third of these people."
The candidate acknowledges that he lacks political experience but counts it as
an advantage. "We're trying to change the system," he said. "We're not trying to
be a part of it." Democrats and Republicans are too closely allied with corporate
interests and tend not to advocate for the people, he added. For example,
Mesplay emphasizes the need to move toward national energy independence
based upon renewable energy. He believes the U.S. has the capabilities to do
this, but, he said, "we just don't have the political will.
"The motto of my employer, the county of San Diego, is: "˜The noblest motive is
for public good,' and our government doesn't work that way."
3. Mesplay calls himself a fiscal conservative and says he's been attracting former
Republicans and Libertarians with his stance in favor of chipping away at the
power of the federal government.
"I'm a long shot," he said. "I'm not delusional, I know it's next to impossible. But
things can change very quickly, especially if more people become frustrated with
George Bush in part because of his fiscal mismanagement. At the very least, it's
good for the Green Party to have presidential candidates because it helps
encourage Greens to run for other ticket positions on the ballot.
"We have to accept the risk that there may be a repeat of 2000," Mesplay said,
"and I'm willing to take it. Bush is a dangerous man. As Peter Camejo says,
"˜the only way to defeat Bush is to run against him.'"
In his bid for his party's nomination, Mesplay will be up against Camejo, the
Green Party's favorite son who ran a visible campaign in California's
gubernatorial recall election, boosting the Green Party's recognition as a viable
third party. In an interview with CityBeat about the 2004 presidential race,
Camejo took a page from Ralph Nader's 2000 election playbook: "This is not an
election. You're forced to choose between corporations-do you want the blue or
the red version? Kerry voted for the Patriot Act and voted for the war. What's the
difference between that and Bush?" he said.
Becoming a U.S. senator, Camejo said, means pledging to uphold the
Constitution, and Kerry, along with his fellow Democrats, has not fared well on
that score. In fact, Camejo argued, the Patriot Act and the vote to give Bush the
power to invade Iraq were both illegal.
Kerry has defended his Bush-friendly votes by saying the President broke
promises, but, Camejo said, "if Bush can fool you, you shouldn't be president."
4. He and Mesplay agree that running a Green candidate for president is the best
way to reach the public with the party's message. "The Green argument is so
much more appealing" than what you'll find in our predominantly two-party
system, Camejo said. "If we don't get out and talk, nobody else will."
The national Green Party is the fastest-growing minor party in the U.S. Since
being founded in 1996 as a way to promote the interests of the state Greens,
party membership has more than doubled. Currently, there are 204 Greens
holding elected office nationwide, with 67 in California and five in San Diego
County. The Green platform is broad, emphasizing grassroots democracy free of
corporate influence, ecological wisdom and social justice, including a so-called
Blue-Green pro-labor agenda, equal opportunity, non-violence and community-
based economics.
Despite their gains, the Greens are in a quandary. Many on the left say a vote for
a Green presidential candidate is, in effect, a vote for the Republican nominee.
Nader is still blamed in some quarters for Al Gore's loss to Bush in 2000. The
Green Party itself is encountering dissension among its ranks, including one of
Mesplay's opponents for the Green presidential nomination, David Cobb.
"The only thing worse than President Bush being re-elected would be if the
American people believed that the Green Party was responsible for him being re-
elected," said Cobb in a recent Green Party debate held at Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.
Cobb plans to monitor the swing states and pull out if it appears his presence will
spoil it for the Democrat. On his website, Cobb acknowledges that he can't win
the White House but predicts that the Greens, with their social-justice platform,
will prove formidable presidential contenders within the next few decades.
5. The existing electoral system caters to the two major parties, making it difficult for
third parties to get on the ballot and requiring at least five percent of the vote to
earn federal funding for that party in the next election. Changing the system is
near impossible because those in power have nothing to gain.
After the recent run-off in the San Francisco mayoral race, in which Green Party
candidate Matt Gonzales lost to the big-money campaign of Gavin Newsom,
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said, "I respect the Greens and the
enthusiasm that they bring to the political process.
"However," she said, "the fight in this country is between the Democrats and
the Republicans and in order for the Democrats to prevail, to be strong-having
the mayor of San Francisco be a Democrat is important to us."
The United States is the last democracy with such a backward election system,
Camejo charged. "The U.S. is the last bastion of a winner-take-all, un-democratic
election system," he said.
"After the gubernatorial election, we had endless e-mails from people apologizing
for not voting Green and we e-mailed them back and said to say 10 Hail
Marys," Camejo said, adding that he urges people to register Green and vote
Green because it's the only way for them to get the power to implement free
elections and affect change. The government these days treats voting like a
game, he said.
"The masters have given us a choice and now we should go and try to figure out
which is better. All you gotta do is run Hitler and we'll vote for Mussolini."
Mesplay said the way to avoid having Bush re-elected is by reaching out to
people who have not registered to vote and bring them into the Green Party.
6. "There's a huge pool out there to draw in that won't create the situation whereby
we would by chipping away at the Democratic Party," he said. "There are
Republican Greens, Libertarian Greens, those who aren't Green but vote Green.
But my goal is to help the party bring in the youth."
Camejo agrees with Mesplay's thinking. He said half of the population didn't vote
in the 2000 election, and picking on 90,000 in Florida-blaming them for spoiling
the election for Gore-doesn't make sense. "Democrats are the biggest
whiners," he said. "When Perot ran and Clinton won, the Republicans didn't
complain."
Nonetheless, some in the progressive press have pleaded with the Green Party
and Ralph Nader to stay out of the race. Publications such as The Nation and
Mother Jones-as well as MoveOn.org-who have historically supported
independent voices, have stressed that de-Bushing the White House takes
precedence over party-building this time around. "Context for an independent
presidential bid is completely altered from 2000, when there was a real base for a
protest candidate," says an open letter from The Nation's editors to Ralph
Nader, who announced Sunday on Meet the Press that he will indeed run for
president this year, but as an independent, not a Green.
Eli Pariser, creator of the online petition 9-11peace.org and the campaign
director of MoveOn.org, was quoted in Rolling Stone, saying, "Tactically
speaking, polemical messages aren't going to get you very far. They alienate
swing voters and that's how the left defeats itself.... I don't want to be a part of
the great leftist martyrdom story where we say, "˜We fought the good fight and
lost,'" he said. "I want to win."
