March 23, 2006

Director's Corner

by TIM HARRIS

In 2000, after Nader reneged on his pledge to not campaign heavily in key states and went for broke in Florida, I would have happily strangled the man. His 2004 slide into irrelevance felt right and just. But times change. As Hillary Clinton emerges as the Democratic front-runner, a choice that will galvanize the opposition while offering little new to the rest of us, I’m no longer so sure third-party politics in America is a no-win dead end. That honor, more and more, seems to belong to the Democrats.
They’ve had their chance a few times, have blown it, and are well on the verge of still not grasping the obvious: swing voters are not where it’s at. You have to bring the people back who have decided voting doesn’t matter, the people whom Democrats have written off since the ’70s.
Here in Seattle, respected community activist Aaron Dixon has emerged to challenge a key Democratic seat as a Green. His opponent, Senator Maria Cantwell, has yet to firmly oppose an unpopular war that, three years down the road, has taken the lives of more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers and, it is estimated, the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. To get a sense of what the $249 billion spent in Iraq could do, check out costofwar.com.
So here’s a newsflash from the Dept. of the Obvious: If Democrats can’t offer real moral leadership, people will find it elsewhere.