Unlucky at Any Speed: Nader is Toast...and Who Is David Cobb?
(latest in my electoral struggle)

Nader/Camejo's failure to gain Green Party endorsement at the GP convention this weekend has sapped a great deal of my remaining enthusiasm for that ticket. Nader's choice of Peter Camejo, a former Marxist and one of the most visible leftist activists in politics today (after a respectable performance campaigning against Governor Kindergarten Cop in California) came too little too late, and instead, the faithful, intelligent, party-liner David Cobb will be the Greens' candidate for President. Cobb will likely name Pat LaMarche as his running mate. The biggest loser here may be Camejo, who could have been the Greens' presidential candidate, but now will have to trapse around ten or so states as the VP candidate of the Reform Party!

The GP convention was partially a referendum on whether and how to support John Kerry, partly a final message from the Greens to Nader, and partly an acknowledgment that the heart of the current Green Party is in its plethora of new members who, like David Cobb, only recently abandoned the two-party system. If it is not radical enough, then Nader's candidacy (at least the way he has played it) is even less so.

Reaction has been mixed. Joaquin Bustelo, writing for "Frontlines: The newspaper of the Left" calls Cobb a "shamefaced Kerry supporter" and writes with disdain that Cobb has:

no claimed connection to social or protest movements. He says he discovered the evils of the two-party system in 1996 [...] Over the past few months Cobb ran a stealth campaign in which he held virtually no public meetings or rallies -- not that he could draw any sort of crowd had he tried.
Instead, he focused on lining up green apparatchiks and delegates by pissing in their ear about how Nader was taking money from racists, on the one hand, and would refuse to share his list of contributors with the greens, on the other. [...]
Even taking this into account, however, the success of Cobb's campaign for the nomination must be chalked up largely to Nader. After having put the party on the political map and won for it ballot lines all over the country, in 2004 Nader has consistently refused to accept responsibility for the party's course nor even tried to influence it in a positive direction.

I am having a hard time understanding how Bustelo can be so hard on such an obvious GP success story (although I have deleted some of Bustelo's less relevant and more personal attacks; the full text is here, and you may notice that Bustelo seems more concerned about Cobb's hairline than his platform, which is never mentioned).

On the other side, this AP story shows a lot of reason behind the pro-Cobb sentiment:

...Cobb has touted himself as a homegrown Green who would work to build the party from the ground up, while Nader has maintained he is not a member of the party and does not plan to join.
Cobb went out of his way to praise Nader in accepting the nomination, but said later the vote was a sign the Green Party "has gotten out from under the shadow of a man who has probably cast a larger shadow than any other living American."

One LBO-talk member assured that listserve: "I gave David Cobb a crash course on Marx, Joan Robinson and Nick Kaldor and the intertranslatability of economic terminology a la Quine. I was with him in CA on 9/11. He *knows* the problem is capitalism." Of course, there are ways that potential Cobb voters can and should verify this. And one can certainly "know the problem is capitalism" and still be mistaken about whether one should support the Democrats.

The key here is that Cobb epitomizes, and actually delivered on, the ideals that Nader promised. We've all heard the stories that

...circulate about Nader's aloofness, his refusal to share his mailing lists with the Greens, his ignoring suggestions from staff. For a man who has dedicated his life to the nitty-gritty of consumer safety, Nader has stirred up a lot of strong passions.
"Nader is an icon in the movement but he does not share my vision of grass-roots democracy," says Anita Rios, who co-chairs the party's diversity committee. "He doesn't understand about working with people, grabbing people by the hand one by one," she says, getting agitated. "We don't need some rich white guy with a Harvard education leading us."

Cobb, like Nader, is a lawyer, and isn't presumed to be doing too badly for himself. The chief difference between Nader and Cobb seems to be more interpersonal than ideological, at least so far as the GP rank-and-file are concerned. Since I have always been reluctant to condemn Nader for being a "cold person" (something far too many touchy feely liberals will prioritize), this difference doesn't automatically win me over to Cobb. But in some ways, his unassuming honesty is refreshing.

Although he "knows the problem is capitalism," Cobb believes Bush is at least a problem, if not the problem: "My primary goal," he says, "is to grow and build the Green Party, but my secondary goal is to have George Bush out of the White House." Cobb justifies his two-fold strategy (increase Green exposure, get rid of George Bush) in a relatively simple way: "John Kerry," he says, "is a corporatist militarist, but George Bush is a genuine threat to the planet."

It's been difficult for me to admit what many others seem to have seen better than me. Nader has made mistakes that will cost him whatever he was trying to get--from all of us. Still, I wish more of Nader's critics would actually read his positions, if only to see how much they differ from-- and how good they look in comparison to-- what Nader manages to get out in 30-second soundbites. Hearing him speak is kind of the best of both worlds; with more time, he can reach deeper into the causes of things, and his platform is, realistically, the best solution among all the allegedly unattainable ones. But I fear that this time around (likely his last time around), he comes off as a kind of buffoon, a crazy spoiler, possibly even a liability for his own causes--many of which I enthusiastically share.