Michael Albert: Election Plan (Green strategic voting, Shadow Cabinet)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=4041

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Here is a proposal. The Greens are the clear-cut vehicle for a leftist electoral campaign in the U.S. They have grown in membership and state chapters steadily and are now a relatively formidable entity able to muster considerable visibility and communicative pressure in nearly every state.

Suppose the Greens nominate Michael Moore for President? Or maybe Barbara Ehrenreich, or Ron Daniels, or Ralph Nader, say. How about running their candidate aggressively in all states where the final ballot is simply a foregone conclusion? Moore running in Texas and in Massachusetts seeking as many votes as possible in those and in similarly uncontested states is not going to impact the broader election because were Bush to lose Texas or were whatever Democrat is running to lose Massachusetts, the whole election would be a gigantic stampede uninfluenced by our project. And there are many other such states.

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But how? Nader -- maybe it is Nader who runs – or Moore, or Ehrenreich, or whoever it is, doesn’t run alone. The Green presidential candidate runs with a whole slate of others, one person designated as his administration’s chief of staff, another person designated his vice president, a third person designated his secretary of state, a fourth as Press Secretary, and so on and so forth, through the whole Cabinet and West Wing. Nader, or whoever the presidential candidate may be, runs with a pledge that if there is sufficient support for him and for the Green platform he will establish a shadow government beginning the day after the election.

This new shadow government will operate alongside the White House and real Cabinet. It will put forth Green program, analysis, and demands regarding every major undertaking the real government pursues and many others we think it ought to have pursued. It will hold teach-ins, tribunals, rallies, and demos, every month for the entire term of the real government.

It will shadow and pressure Washington, providing a vehicle for the immense range of progressive projects and voices throughout the country to manifest their desires and to organize support and visibility for them and thereby pressure the government. It will take seriously what we want for every side of life, and compare and contrast it with the agendas and actions of the forces of money and power, and it will show why our way is infinitely preferable, and fight for its implementation. And imagine running in 2008, on a foundation of four years of explicitly formulated and explored dissident program.

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It would constantly feel the pressure to follow and react to what is being done in Washington.

If you want examples of a Green or Green-like platform with its own initiative, you can look to various countries around the world today. They get more and less-biased media coverage than a domestic academic excercise by outsiders ever would (although that is already almost nil).