[Sosfbay-discuss] Fwd: A Look Back on 25 years of Maine Greens...

[Tian Harter]

   A Party of Their Own

http://www.downeast.com/node/5943


      * 2009 * Talk of Maine* Greater Portland

DEE TOM

      * By: Jeff Clark

Twenty-five years ago, when the Maine Green Party was founded as the
first Green political organization in the country, its often-chaotic
meetings earned it a reputation as “a prime example of creative
dysfunction,” as one exasperated participant said at the time. Ben
Chipman, of Portland, laughs out loud at the anecdote. In recent years
he has worked on or managed the campaigns of sixteen Green Party
candidates and won ten of them. Portland’s Green Independent Party
(as it’s now known) currently has three members on the city council,
two on the school committee, and two more on the Portland Water
District Board. The first Green elected to state-level office in the
United States was John Eder, who served two terms in the Maine
Legislature from a Portland district.

Portland has been a Democratic stronghold for decades, the party’s
grip on power so absolute that Republicans often don’t even bother to
run candidates in local elections — which officially are nonpartisan
but in practice are as political as any senate race. But these days
the Greens are widely acknowledged as the city’s new second party,
displacing the GOP in both votes and political offices and shaking the
complacency out of the Democratic power structure. In terms of
election results, the Forest City’s Greens are the most successful
branch of their party in the country. Retaining and building on that
success, though, will be a major challenge if the Greens want to be
more than just another footnote in Maine political history.

Portland’s Greens have found success appealing to a group of voters
that until recently were routinely ignored in political races — young
adults. Historically Maine Greens have their roots in the
environmental movement of the early 1980s, with a strong dose of
progressive politics adapted from the European Greens, the party’s
original home. The party’s core values of social justice, ecological
wisdom, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, and decentralization
resonate particularly well among Portland’s large under-thirty-five
population.

Greens have been an officially recognized political party in Maine
since gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter won 6.4 percent of the
vote in 1994, with a two-year hiatus after presidential candidate
Ralph Nader failed to break the required 5-percent benchmark in 1996.
Pat LaMarche won back official status in 1998 when she won 6.8 percent
of the vote running for governor as a Green Independent (a name chosen
on the spur of the moment due to legal ambiguities surrounding the
party’s official status and later formally adopted). Today Maine has
the highest percentage of registered Greens in the country, about 3.2
percent of Maine’s 994,155 registered voters.

Even in the gubernatorial races in Maine, though, the party’s
political organization can best be described as casual. Many old guard
Greens still view the rough and tumble of electoral politics with
distrust, making the success in Portland an even larger anomaly.
“Greens are fiercely independent and antiestablishment,” points out
Eder, “and running a political campaign is a very establishment act.
Some Greens find that distasteful.”

“Over time we’ve kind of screened out the people who oppose
electoral politics,” Chipman says of the Portland branch. The young
people who make up the Portland organization — gray hair is a
distinct rarity — have taken the Green slogan, “Think globally, act
locally,” to its logical conclusion in politics. “We’ve evolved
into an electoral force to be reckoned with in Portland,” Chipman
maintains.

Chipman, Eder, and Ben Meiklejohn get much of the credit for laying
the foundations for the party’s success. Chipman and Meiklejohn had
been active in the Green Party while students at the University of
Maine in Orono in the mid-1990s, where Meiklejohn was president of the
student government for two years. They both moved to Portland in the
late nineties and helped found the city’s Green Independent chapter,
which Eder cochaired in 1998. In 2001 Meiklejohn defeated an incumbent
Democrat to win an at-large seat on the Portland School Committee, the
culmination of three years of campaigning.

By 2005 Greens held four of the committee’s nine seats. Despite
occasionally frosty relations with the majority Democrats on the
board, Greens managed to pass several initiatives, including limits on
in-school military recruiting.

In 2002 Eder ran for a vacant seat in the Maine House representing a
district in the city’s West End. “One of the first pieces of advice
I got was to cut out all voters between eighteen and thirty-five years
old, as well as anyone who hadn’t voted in the last presidential
election,” Eder recalls. “I said no. Those young voters were my
crowd. What I found was that it’s easy for any group of voters to
become apathetic if they’re not invited to participate. Appealing to
younger voters and going door to door were the keys to my success in
Portland.”

Eder and other Greens admit that the demographics of the Portland
peninsula have played an important role in the party’s success.
“Portland has the largest percentage of eighteen to thirty-five-year-
olds in the state,” notes Tina Smith, the Greens new county chair.
“A majority of the people living on the peninsula are young, and
they’re more interested in dramatic change than either of the two
major parties.

“People our age have been called apathetic, and that’s not true,”
she insists. “It’s just that no one was talking about our issues,
the things that are important to us, like the creative economy and
neighborhood improvements.”

Eder, and Meiklejohn before him, found that the personal trumped the
ideological in Portland politics. “Portland has quite a few left-
leaning voters,” Eder points out, “although that wasn’t really an
issue going door to door. It was the face-to-face contact that
counted. A lot of people told me they had lived in the neighborhood
for thirty years and no one had come to see them before me. Voters
felt they had been taken for granted as a Democratic stronghold. Over
the years a complacency had set in with the Democrats that opened the
door for a more activist type of representation.”

I think everybody underestimated us,” says Kevin Donoghue, who
defeated an incumbent to win a seat on the Portland City Council in
2006. “It’s the new reality.” Donoghue registered as a Green the
day after the 2004 Democratic caucuses. “The caucus was such a
frustrating[experience] for a variety of reasons,” he recalls.
“Plus it was located at Deering High School off the Portland
peninsula on a Sunday when there was no public transportation
available. John Eder got me a ride.”

Donoghue quickly progressed from frustrated Democrat to Green activist
to political candidate, running on a platform of affordable housing,
better public transportation, and citizen involvement. “Every polity
needs at least two parties to have a public dialogue,” he reasons.
“It wasn’t until now that voters were given a meaningful choice in
an election rather than automatically voting for the anointed
Democrat.”

Not that the Democrats have welcomed the competition. Donoghue admits
that “it was tough getting respect” when he first joined the
council.

Nonetheless, the Greens were successful in passing policy changes to
increase housing availability on the crowded Portland peninsula, as
well as pushing for a public transit study to improve bus service and
create bike lanes on city streets. The Greens also played a key role
in choosing a development plan for the Maine State Pier last year.
(Legal issues have since stalled the project.)

Susan Hopkins, an attorney who became one of four Greens on the school
committee when she won an at-large election in 2005, chose not to seek
reelection last year after what she describes as a “brutal” three
years on the board. Hopkins came to the Greens as a long-time Democrat
who had worked on George Mitchell’s Senate campaign and served in the
Clinton White House.

“The Democrats do not like the Greens,” she says today. “They
were absolutely vicious. On the very first night, I was accused of
engaging in illegal meetings. It was downhill from there. I truly felt
driven off.”

Former school committee chair Democrat John Coyne — now a member of
the city council — was elected the same year as Hopkins, and he
recalls a “pretty fractious” first year. “There were a lot of 5-4
votes along party lines,” he says. Coyne says the Greens in general
on the panel showed a lack of political sophistication that hurt them.
“Their delivery and their approach needed some polishing before they
rolled out ideas,” he notes. “They wanted quick fixes, done now.
And in politics, nothing is now.”

Coyne speaks highly of Hopkins, calling her work with Portland’s
immigrant community a valuable contribution to the committee. “I
think her vision of what she wanted [on the committee] wasn’t
realized,” he offers. “The politics bogged her down.”

The Greens can have a future in Portland, Coyne adds, if they take the
time to establish themselves and make sure the people they support can
be accepted in the larger political culture. “In my last year on the
school committee, two of the Green members were arrested for various
things,” he points out. “I think the public saw that as not
mature.”

Veteran political observer and DownEast.com media columnist Al Diamon
says the Portland Greens still have to overcome a certain political
naiveté if they expect to have a future in the city. “They elected a
few people to public office, but once they got in there I think there
was a real shock that nothing happened,” he explains. “They
discovered that 90 percent of what they were dealing with was not
ideological; it’s practical — how many streets get paved this year,
which textbooks to buy.”

Portland Greens have also attracted criticism for their lack of action
in anticipating and dealing with the ongoing financial crisis that has
enveloped the city council and school committee. Meiklejohn lost his
school committee seat in a hotly contested four-way race in 2007 in
large part due to the perception that, as the board’s senior member,
he should have done more to head off the calamity.

Diamon says the budget crisis might prove to be a turning point for
the Greens, and not a good one. He predicts the party may get a shock
in the next election. “The Democrats got blindsided by the Greens,”
he observes. “Now they’re saying, ‘Enough is enough, this is our
turf.’ I think you’ll see a real Sunday punch in November.
There’ll be a grassroots campaign on Munjoy Hill [a Green power base]
like you’ve never seen before.”

A single city — or, for that matter, a handful of neighborhoods in a
city — do not a political party make, and Green activists are aware
of that. State Green chair Lynne Williams, of Bar Harbor, became the
first Maine gubernatorial candidate of 2010 in December when she
announced her plans to run.

“Building our base is the top focus for this year,” Tina Smith
says. Greens now count 2,354 members in Portland and more than 7,600
in Cumberland County, according to a tally by the Maine Secretary of
State in December. “We have to push ourselves out there so people
know who we are,” Smith says. “We’re a new option for people.”

She emphasizes that Maine’s Greens have largely moved past the
disgruntled Democrats who were the majority of early members.
“There’s a generational change going on,” she says. “People are
feeling they are Greens because of what we stand for, not because
they’re sick of the Democrats.”

Chipman, 33, says the generational shift has become far more obvious
in recent years. “I remember being one of the youngest people in the
room at the [state] Green conventions, and no one would listen to
me,” he explains. “Now there are a lot more people my age or
younger.” One result has been a simplified, more structured state
organization that is more focused on electoral success. “Last year
eighty towns in Maine had Green caucuses,” Chipman points out.

Eder turned forty in January and is as close as the Portland Greens
get to being the party’s elder statesman and mentor. He says the
Greens will have to work hard to avoid winding up in history’s
dustbin. “Everything we’ve done could disappear tomorrow,” he
observes. “It’s a matter of bringing more people into the process,
spreading it to other parts of the state. If the party can duplicate
[at the state level] what we’re doing here, it could mean a lot of
success.”
-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
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