I worked for his campaign, I hoped, I checked back in! And he betrayed me and all the others who stood, teary-eyed and lump-throated, when he spoke at rallies and when he made his acceptance speech. We progressives/liberals really thought this was it; well, there were little hints…but we assiduously blinded ourselves to the discrepancies, Ameriquest and so on. I waved away friends who warned me.
But it all became evident very soon after the coronation when,
“Asked what he thought was the biggest misconception about him, Patrick said, “the liberal thing.”
— in fact, during the coronation — and then during his first year.
Now we have another chance, and miraculously, a real choice; a good person actually wants to participate in this mud-fest called politics, and for all the right reasons. We don’t have to blind ourselves this time.
But we do have to free ourselves, from the Deval we created in our own image, and from the self-defeating fear of the “Nader effect.” If we’re afraid of splitting the progressive vote and ending up with Baker, we should advocate for immediate passage of ranked-choice voting legislation, so we can fearlessly vote FOR someone we really want, rather than, yet again, voting AGAINST someone we don’t. Where has all this clever strategic voting gotten us? To this: incumbents can ignore us because their likelihood of winning keeps us thrall.
We lifted up Deval Patrick, who was a very unlikely victor back then, because he promised what we wanted. We can lift up someone else now, if we think she’ll give us the public service we’re looking for. That was BMG’s power. We’re not bound to a person, but to an ideal; that’s where we should put our allegiance.
Well said, Shirley. I think this sense of empowerment is central to how we will enact the kinds of changes we desperately need to enact, and it’s why I chose this handle long ago… Recently my comments on BMG have been a little bit aggressive, alienating, and angry (or at least they’re getting called out as such). But what I’m really trying for is a reassessment of what people are calling politically pragmatic or feasible or strategic.
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p>I want to stand WITH the BMG community — people who care deeply about the way things are going and have crucial ideas for how things can be turned around — and hit upon the best collective strategy for actually changing course. By collective, I don’t think there’s one central strategy, but many overlapping ones.
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p>Obviously BMG isn’t going to turn into the Green-Rainbow Party cheerleading squad (we’ve got GMG for that!). But strategic support for incredible — and truly independent — candidates like Jill Stein seems like something too good to pass up for our collective purposes. An easier pill to swallow might be visibly supporting Voter Choice and demanding that the Democratic Party enact it so as to remove the spoiler argument from the arsenal of lesser-evil political practitioners.
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p>What I like so much about the sentiment that “we can lift someone else now” is that we seem to consistently fail to recognize our own power to move mountains. We, The People did some ingenious things to get many hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to try to stop the Iraq War, to boost Howard Dean into frontrunner status in the Democratic primaries, to elect Deval Patrick and vote the Democratic Party back into control of Congress in 2006, and to get Barack Obama elected in 2008. Mostly it was a lot of hard work, but so much ingenuity and creativity and passion went into those feats. But we also gave up our power each time. We handed it to unaccountable NGOs and PACs like MoveOn, or to the standard bearers themselves as though we have no confidence in ourselves to solve problems, to weigh in on (let alone craft) policy.
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p>As though our only utility is to get people elected who we think will do the job for us… and then sulk when they don’t quite seem to be doing what we’d hoped.
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p>We need leaders who will engage us at every step of the way… not put our grassroots apparatus on hold and then start it back up when the going gets tough, or appoint the wolves to guard the henhouse, or put the lobbyists in charge of fundraising.
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p>I totally echo what Shirley says:
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let’s attack Patrick because we support Jill Stein.
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p>Wonderful.
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p>Again, this has come up before. A better idea is to instead talk about Jill Stein, what are her accomplishments, positions and how can she accomplish her goals. What you need to do is provide a reason to vote FOR someone. Every post I see here completely misses the point.
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p>What’s wrong with you guys anyway?
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p>It’s difficult to read your post when all you do is mud sling.
I’m not attacking Deval because I support Jill. I support Jill because Deval has turned out not to be…well, Deval.
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p>It’s not mud-slinging if it’s the truth. Can you counter what I’ve said, with facts?
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p>As I said, I worked for his campaign and I believed in him. I didn’t get caught up in the drapes-and-Cadillac stuff, but on serious things, he’s just not being what he promised to be. No one is sadder about that than I. I’d love to be able to support him now, I really would. It’s hard to accept such a great disappointment, and even harder to start up with a whole new candidate; supporting an incumbent is so much easier.
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p>Yes, we should talk more about what Jill can bring us; but first, someone has to be listening. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Or hear, or whatever. Declaring BMG’s allegiance before the candidates have a chance to present themselves means we cannot really talk about Jill.
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p>Anyway, her website tells her story, her positions, her past work; it’s not a hidden thing, all the info about her is out there for us if we want it.
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p>Hey! Maybe BMG could host a phone debate, as you’ve done in the past, among the prospective candidates, and ask them what they’d do and how they’d do it.
in your posts, that’s not getting it backwards.
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p>This really sums up the problems with the Green Party, and really most third parties. Supporters of these parties complain about the major parties (particularly the one closest to their own ideology), blame the media, and incessantly suggest that nobody is “giving them a chance.”
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p>Here’s my take on supporters of third parties: you have to earn people’s respect. Just because somebody is running for office with nice-sounding press releases doesn’t mean that they are entitled to that respect. You have to prove that you not only believe in good policy ideas, but that you can actually convince people to vote for you based on those ideas, and then implement the ideas when in office.
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p>Kvetching about Deval, the media, or BMG isn’t going to cut it. Give a good argument that Jill Stein is the best candidate in the race, not only because of the ideals in which she believes, but because she can actually win (and not just be a spoiler for progressive causes) — and because she would actually be the best Governor if elected. That’s the argument I want to hear.