A pre-emptive defense of the Democratic party, in light of Ralph Nader’s latest run for president:

If Al Gore were president, the Kyoto Protocol would likely be in force right now. Gore negotiated it on behalf of the US, and Russia was moving towards signing it (and thus activating it and making it legally binding) UNTIL the Bush folks leaned on them to not sign it.

As it stands, though, the world has still not implemented any meaningful action against climate change. Meanwhile, ice shelves are melting, coral reefs are dying, seas are rising, and the hope of stopping massive shift in the earth’s climate within this century is rapidly receding into the distance.

Similarly, many other Clinton-era environmental initiatives that the Bush administration has attacked — protecting roadless areas in national forests, reducing pollution from old coal power plants (I live within five miles of two of ’em), protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, etc. — would not be under attack if Gore were president.

I used to work in affordable housing finance, another field in which the administration has great discretion in setting targets and priorities. (Also, most affordable housing money in the US comes from the feds, not from state or local government.) The repeated cuts to various crucial programs — HOPE VI public housing redevelopment and Section 8 come to mind immediately — have seriously impacted the ability of cities like mine to help the least fortunate. Indeed, the Bush administration has broken twenty years of bipartisan agreement and slashed funding for Section 8 vouchers, leaving tens or hundreds of thousands of families and seniors without any way to pay the rent.

In all of these instances, the policies I’ve mentioned are led and implemented by the administration with little input from Congress (besides budgetary review), so Republicans controlling Congress would have little impact on how a Democratic president would have done things. Further, Bush has already announced plans for policies that merely await approval from a Republican Congress — e.g., his proposals to block-grant Medicaid and Section 8 and to change TANF, thereby allowing states to cut into already the already weak social safety net, or further tax code tweaking that will *permanently exempt* the hereditary aristocracy (e.g., trust fund babes like Jenna and Babs Jr.) from ANY income tax on their unearned inheritances and investments (thereby shifting the entire tax burden to us working stiffs), or the hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending, from LIHEAP to food stamps to public housing to veterans’ benefits, that are right now being axed out of the budget to pay for rescinding taxes on millionaires:

Courtesy Center on Budget & Policy Priorities

There ARE major differences between the two parties. ALL of these measures have been actively opposed and voted against by the Democratic minority (most of it, at least). These differences may not be as immediately obvious as many would like, but they are there, and they DO affect the world we live in. That’s why it’s so important to elect Anyone But Bush in 2004, and to not get distracted by sideshows like Ralph Nader. The notion that “the left could use a cold shower” is ridiculously self-absorbed in light of the very real pain that Bush and his cronies have already inflicted on America.

The Greens sometimes find ways to work within the political system for genuine change, often at the local level. Most of the Greens’ political work in the US, though, has been useless grandstanding, and it seems that every day the Greens find ways to become ever more useless through infighting. In order to gain political traction, the Greens must find ways to energize, not antagonize, their allies, with thoughtful, idealistic candidates and positions.