[Sosfbay-discuss] GP-US Political Director's address to Reading

[JamBoi]

Here's some heavy duty analysis of the GP-US from our
staff:

Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:16:28 -0400
From: "Brent McMillan" <brent at gp.org>
Subject: [usgp-dx] PD Address to NC 7-12-07


Dear NC Delegate:

Following is the text of the address that I had hoped
to deliver to the National Committee on Friday, July
12.

Unfortunately schedule changes did not allow me to
deliver the entire address.

In Service:

Brent McMillan, Political Director
Green Party of the United States
202-319-7191
brent at gp.org

Political Director Address to National Committee
Friday, July 12 GPUS Annual National Meeting, Reading
PA by Brent McMillan

One of the lessons to be learned from Cuba in the
crisis that they faced in surviving the special period
after the collapse of the Soviet Union is that if you
want to have Political Autonomy you have to have
Economic and Energy Autonomy.

Two major focus issues for 2008 that I see are Energy
and economy.

The first is Energy Policy. We need to connect Wars of
Imperialism, Global Warming and Peak Oil back to US
Energy Policy. This IMHO should be the number one
focus of our federal level candidates. We have an
opportunity to have a dialogue with Greens in Europe
throughout this cycle. Earlier this year I met with
delegations from both the Austrian and the German
Green Parties. We are part of an international
community and we need to take advantage of that, but
with open eyes. We are facing an immense, world-wide
corporate green washing campaign. They are very
concerned and need a strong green voice in the US. In
the Strategic Plan Plenary on Saturday, Julia
Willebrand, Co-Chair of our International Committee
will be addressing this.

The Second is economic and in particular economic
justice. We need to focus on building a Black/Brown
Coalition. We need to be increasing our efforts in
reaching out to and becoming relevant to
disenfranchised communities. One key to this is to
focus on the re-construction of New Orleans. We need
to be more supportive of the work of Malik Rahim, the
Common Ground Collective and others. Communities where
there are also strong opportunities include but are
not limited to: Detroit, Oakland, Washington DC and
Baltimore to name some. Detroit is arguably the first
post-Industrial City in America. What they can tell us
is that the future is Green. Many Americans are being
dropped from basic services, People who thought they
would never be dropped from basic services. This is
where our opportunity lies.

In addition to this two pronged approached, when we
are accused of being spoilers there is an opportunity
to talk about election reform. We need to be prepared
to advocate the reforms that we are asking for.

We will once again be under a lot of pressure to not
run a presidential candidate. It will come from
several directions and for different reasons.

We have several candidates that have expressed
interest in seeking the Green Party's nomination in
2008. We are way ahead of where we were at this time
in 2003. You'll have an opportunity to meet these
folks this evening.

In many ways 2004 was our first really competitive
convention.

As we would probably all agree 2004 was problematic.
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. In my opinion we didn't do our work
going into the convention and we left the convention
with unfinished business.

I think that we are going to get another chance at
reaching the American public in 2008. There is an
immense political vacuum out there that we are
operating in. I see a level of opportunity that we
haven't had since 2000. Greens are feeling a level of
acceptance in the General Public that we haven't felt
in seven years.

For those of you that were involved in 2000 it's hard
to forget the excitement that the super rallies
created. We went from being a little fringe party to
where we were now on the national political map.

(I was the State Facilitator for the Green Party of
Washington State in 2000, in essence the chair, and I
remember that after the Seattle Super rally the
Seattle Times ran an editorial declaring the Green
Party the
second party in Seattle and that the Republicans were
now the third party.)

So what would it look like if the Green Party was to
get serious about 2008? I would like to make the
following suggestions.

1) We need to make more time for the process of
approving the platform and for the presidential
nominating process in 2008 than what we did in 2004.
Therefore we need to scale back competing programs.
For example the CCC had an ambitious campaign school
going during the convention with several tracks. This
needs to be scaled back at the 2008 convention.

2) Money:
A. Fundraise at the convention: Little known to anyone
is that in 2004 we did not allow our presidential
nominee to fundraise at the convention. The national
party was in dire financial straits at the time, so
what else is new, and it was seen as competition. This
was not made public. We asked our potential candidates
to compete for the nomination, in essence to spend
every last dollar they had to get the nomination and
then sent this person away broke. Who ever our nominee
is in 2008 they should be allowed to fundraise at the
convention regardless of the financial state of the
national party.

B) Reseed the campaign: Also, I think that they should
walk away with a chunk of cash to reseed their
campaign. What if 100 people donated $100 to a fund so
that whoever walked away from the convention, walked
away with $10,000 to reseed their campaign? I know
that this is not a lot of money in the overall scheme
of things, but it would be progress over what we have
done in the past. I think that this money should not
go through the national committee but should be raised
independently. We are competing with so many other
programs for the general fund that this wouldn't stand
a chance unless it was an independent effort.

We could use some help with this. This needs to be an
effort outside of the National Committee. Perhaps
there needs to be a 527 set up for this purpose.

3) Impeccability in the rules process: In my opinion
representatives of the candidates had too much
influence in the rules process in 2004.

We have to have a process that people trust. Not just
in fact but also in perception.

The problem we have is that there are not enough
active greens on the national level to have people
work on the rules that aren't working on some
campaign. Do we keep the two separate or do we work to
keep a balance of representation of various interests.



Look at the former Delegate Apportionment Committee
(DAC) as an example of the latter model.

This can be described as the Civil Service Model vs
the
Political/Trans-Partisan Model. Trans-Partisan is a
word that I would like to see in the Green Party
lexicon. It's not non-partisan, which denies political
identity, it's not bi-partisan, which limits the
debate to two sides, it's trans-partisan which
recognizes that it's more complicated than that. Yes,
we have a political identity, but we are also willing
to transcend our ideology in order to find a
successful solution.

4) We need to have better informed Delegates. Many
states did not have a plan in place for what to do
after the first round of voting in Milwaukee. I have
suggested a judge and jury model as a solution. The
judge informs the jury of what the legal questions to
be answered are but doesn't dictate to them how they
are going to do it. State Committees need to have a
plan in place before they come to the convention.

States will have a template to work from.  There are
drafts being worked on now for how to address this. We
need help, though. We need people willing to work on
this. We also need to have in written form  an answer
to the question, "how does the nomination process
work?"

5) How do we do a better job of communicating with
potential candidates? What's the initial point of
contact with a potential candidate? Who is the initial
point of contact with a potential candidate? This is a
problem at both the national and state level that
needs to be addressed. The PCSC recently sent out a
survey to all of the state committees in regards to
this. A little over 80% have responded so far.

Who does the potential candidate talk to about the
ballot access process for your state? Who can they
contact to help them with fundraisers or hosting an
event? Each state party needs to have clearly defined
initial points of contact.

6) Security: If we become serious enough in 2008 to
become a threat we will need to address the issue of
security. Those of us involved in 2000 in key
leadership positions can personally attest to this
need. In Seattle, both myself and Joe Szwaya who was
running for Congress at the time had our homes broken
into and political materials and monies stolen. I had
a window broken out and received threatening phone
calls late at night. Twice I had to get postal
inspectors involved to stop the dead lettering and
returning of campaign contributions by Postal Workers.
These are federal level offences but no one was held
accountable.

7) In 2004 Democrats raised $10,000,000 to keep third
party candidates off the ballot. Nader faced mush of
this in 2004. In 2006 we began to see this directed at
us. We need a ballot access legal defense fund. I am
advocating that at least $10,000 be earmarked for
engaging in up to three lawsuits in 2008. I'm a former
director of COFOE (The Coalition for Free and Open
Elections) which is regularly engaged in three to five
lawsuits at any given time. We win about half of them.
This money would be for filing fees and printing
costs. We need to identify attorneys willing to work
pro bono on this issue.

8) In 2006 we created the Green Senatorial Campaign
Committee (GSCC). It became the first Congressional
Committee to be recognized by the FEC since it was
formed in 1975. We held off forming the Green House
Campaign Committee so that we could incorporate the
lessons learned from the GSCC in its formation and
ultimately FEC approval. Former GPUS Political
Director, Dean Myerson and I were present at the FEC
hearing for the approval of the GSCC. It passed easily
with a 6-0 vote.

9) Have the 2008 convention as early as possible, and
settle on the convention site sooner rather than
later. The earlier we know this the more likely we
will have a well organized and well attended event.

10) Challenge 2008. In 2004, soon after I arrived at
the national office in February, I began seeing in our
press releases and other locations references to our
running 1,000 candidates in 2004. I began asking
around for where was the plan to do that. Nobody could
answer the question, so I went to working on killing
any reference to this. So what if we ran 1,000
candidates in 2008, what would that look like? I did
an exercise in an excel spread sheet where I looked at
the last four years and each state parties record for
the actual number of candidates run. I then developed
a formula for this. I didn't let any state off the
hook, so if they hadn't run a candidate before the
goal became that they would run a candidate. For
example California fields about 16% of our candidates
therefore 160 candidates.

If anyone would like a copy of the schedule please
email me at brent at gp.org and I will send it to you.

Our ticket was way too top heavy in 2006. We had way
too many candidates running for congress and state
wide-races relative to the number of candidates
running for state legislature on down. Although we had
less candidates running for congress in 2006 than in
2004 we got more votes. When I talk about recruiting
more candidates, I mean from State Legislature on
down. We have plenty of top ticket races to lead our
tickets. The quality of our campaigns and candidates
improved in 2006, this is partly due to the number of
campaign schools that we ran in 2005. Unfortunately,
so far, in 2007 there has not been that level of
commitment going into 2008. There is time to correct
that, but we need to act now. We need to restore the
Coordinated Campaign Committee.

Thank you to the National Committee for support of the
SE Regional Campaign School and funding of the Fall
Cycle.

Closing: Martin Luther King, Jr. said that, "Power is
the ability to achieve a purpose." We need to walk
into our power. We need to emerge out of our
fragmented impotence and get serious about being
agents of change in the
world.

We have some tough questions before us in this
convention that we need to have answers to in order to
be effective in 2008.

http://www.gp.org/

http://www.greenscc.org/

___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

"To the brave belong all things"
Celt's invading Etrusca reply to nervous Romans around 400BC

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)


       
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