Greens Hope Local Wins Presage Bigger, Better Things

In his longshot bid for the White House, Green Party presidential contender Ralph Nader crisscrossed the country railing against the pervasiveness of corporations in American life and politics, and about the corrupting influence of cash on an electoral system gone bad.

He won less than 3% of the vote.

In this northern California enclave of environmental free spirits, Green Party member Craig Litwin set his political sights on the City Council. In Nader’s shadow, he crisscrossed this former farm town talking about traffic, affordable housing, the need for fiscal responsibility. And a skateboard park.

Litwin, 24, won his race hands down, pulling four times as many Sebastopol votes as Nader and helping the Greens win a City Council majority--only the second such victory nationwide in the Greens’ short history.

Herein lies both the paradox and the lesson of the election just past. For all the Greens’ global views on pollution and politics, the key to their future could well rest in the words of an old Boston Democratic machine pol, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill: “All politics is local.”

The proof is in the numbers. According to a Green Party tally, at least 32 Greens won local races in November, out of at least 266 Green candidates in 28 states. Those victories pushed the total number of Green officeholders nationwide to at least 75. And this week Green candidate Matt Gonzalez, a former Democrat, became the first Green to win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Party’s Been in Similar Position

Although far from making the party a national political force--Libertarians have about 170 local officeholders, including a Vermont state representative--these victories could presage the future as Greens try to convert themselves into a major third-party movement.

They’ve been at this juncture before. In 1996, the Greens won a majority on the Arcata City Council, a coastal town nearly 200 miles north of Sebastopol, but let it slip away two years later. And last year Audie Bock won a seat representing Oakland in the California Assembly running as a Green. She left the party a few months later, though, to become an independent, then lost a reelection bid last month to a Democrat.

How high the Greens can rise nationally remains uncertain, particularly in a political system that historically either marginalizes or co-opts third-party platforms. Success can co-opt too. In Europe, where the Greens have played roles in multi-party parliamentary governments, their access to power transformed them more than the system they challenged.

“As the European Greens have gotten more political influence, they’ve become less radical in their views but more pragmatic in carrying out their ideology,” said Russell Dalton, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine.

Nader hopes the Greens will be able to strike a balance.

“If the candidates are relatively idealistic, they often get burned out,” Nader said. “If they’ve got a pragmatic aspect to them, they thrive. So we want that blend of being able to keep a high horizon and high expectation level, and still get things done.”

Because of this, some believe the American Greens are uniquely positioned to challenge the Republican and Democratic parties.

“The Green Party is, in my view, the one [third] political party out there that could be viable in the long term and could raise its profile nationally,” said Cal Jillson, chairman of the political science department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“The most important thing for any third party to grow is to work between election cycles, and that’s the one thing the Greens do well, better than the Libertarians and the Reform Party,” Jillson said. “They have to stay busy and solve problems [locally] and then be available in the next election cycle to move people from city councils to state legislatures and ultimately beyond.”

Michael Feinstein represents the beginning of that process. The mayor of Santa Monica, Feinstein recently led a seminar advising other Greens on how to win local elections. “On the municipal level, where basic quality-of-life issues transcend anybody’s political labels, we’re making a real identity for ourselves.”

Litwin, a community organizer and gardener, is helping forge that identity. He came in fourth in a six-way race for three Sebastopol council seats in 1998. A few weeks later, he began organizing a volunteer group to build vegetable gardens for local residents in return for a share of the harvest and seeds to sow future gardens for other residents.

Litwin estimates the group has dug about 100 gardens around Sebastopol, both on private and communal lots. The high-visibility project helped fuel interest in his recent campaign, and Litwin sees that as an example of how the Greens can merge the practical with the wished-for.

“There are a lot of different ideas out there,” Litwin said, reciting a list that ranged from incentives to encourage bike riding to building solar-energy homes.

“We need to work for practical solutions . . . we need to figure out how to live more sustainably.”

Yet to maintain political growth, the Greens also must maintain their relevance.

The Reform Party’s cohesion dissipated along with the federal deficit, the point around which Texas billionaire Ross Perot first rallied large groups of disaffected voters in 1992. And where the Libertarians push a core ideological outlook--a sharply reduced government and a corresponding slash in taxes--they haven’t latched on to the kinds of issues that motivate large blocs of voters.

But the Greens, by linking environmental concerns to everything from corporate globalization to the flow of traffic through downtown Sebastopol, believe they have positioned themselves to tap into the kinds of bread-and-butter issues that win elections.

Like many small towns on the fringe of the Bay Area, Sebastopol has been grappling with the transition from past to future. Small cattle farms and apple orchards outside the city are slowly giving way to new vineyards and get-away houses for wealthy San Franciscans, driving property values skyward and pricing out many of those born and raised here.

The problem was exacerbated four years ago when a local initiative limiting the city’s boundaries--and the amount of available space for new development--passed with more than 70% of the vote.

With growth effectively stymied but the surrounding economy booming, the measure created a closed market and housing prices jumped even further. The current median price for an existing Sebastopol house--many of them small, aging wood-frame buildings--is about $354,000, compared with $290,000 for Sonoma County as a whole.

Larry Robinson, a Green who won his council seat two years ago and who organized the growth-boundary referendum, acknowledged that Sebastopol could become “a gated community, with the gate being economic.”

Yet, so far, the only solution the Greens have come up with is packing houses more densely within the city limits--something Robinson acknowledged would be a tough sell politically.

“It’s not popular, but it’s less unpopular than sprawl,” he said.

The area around Sebastopol, on the inland slope of a small coastal range in western Sonoma County, is more conducive than most for the Greens’ message. For generations the local economy was dominated by farming. But in the 1960s, adherents of the back-to-nature movement began filtering in.

Now the political tenor is progressive. And activist.

When Columbia/HCA decided last year to close Sebastopol’s Palm Drive Hospital and trauma center, a coalition of residents bought it out with a mix of $4.5 million in donations and personal investments. They then arranged for a public vote on creating the first health district in California in some 20 years--it passed with 91% of the vote--and sold the facility to the new public agency at cost.

Robinson hopes to harness such activism and move the city forward. When the new council met for the first time Dec. 5, it considered, along with routine items, a resolution calling for a state moratorium on capital punishment. The resolution was postponed until January. Also mixed in was the election of the new mayor, traditionally a symbolic handing over of the meeting gavel to the sitting vice mayor.

In a hardball political maneuver that would have made James Carville proud, the Greens pushed Robinson through as mayor, sending a clear signal that the council--and the city--was theirs.