What is the Clinton Legacy?
NAFTA and other anti-labor anti-eco trade cabals;
Plan Colombia; national health insurance discarded from the
Democratic platform; Reagan's space-based missile scam revived;
Reagan's welfare reform dream signed; the war on drugs escalated;
small nations bombed; the Kyoto protocols obstructed (Hague
conference, November 2000); prison populations doubled; etc.;
etc. Let's not forget the zeal of mainstream Democrats
currently in Congress to endorse the USA Patriot Act, surrender
constitutional war powers to Bush, pass the 2001 Bankruptcy Bill,
retreat on prescription assistance for seniors (the Grassley-Baucus
bill). Poor and working people indeed.
What's left for the Greens to spoil? The
real spoilers of 2000 were not Nader and the Greens, but the Florida
GOP and a biased US Supreme Court, armed with ballot access rules
targeted at African Americans that the Democrats have still
not attempted to dismantle, and accommodated by Dems in the
Senate who refused to back the Black Caucus's challenge to the
engineered Bush victory. Nader's spoilage is a useful myth
that Dems at the top don't quite believe: read DLC chief Al From's
"Building A New Progressive Majority: How Democrats Can Can
Learn From The Failed 2000 Campaign" <http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?cp=1&kaid=86&subid=84&contentid=2919>.
The Democratic mainstream's retreat from poor and
working people has given Republicans the license to move to even
greater extremes. The Dems will not reverse this
direction. The likely nominee for 2004 will be a Kerry or a
Gephardt, who will maintain Clinton's DLC agenda, certainly not a
Kucinich. The argument against Green participation is
essentially an argument to restrict the November 2004 ballot to two
pro-war pro-corporate candidates. The Green Party <http://www.gp.org>
is here to stay, because the US needs an opposition party.
Scott McLarty
Scott McLarty is a member of the Green Party
Media Committee. This letter was written in response to
comments made by Paul Berman in an article
posted at Salon.
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