Historic Green Election: Contested Primary in Rahm's Old Seat

On March 3rd, Chicago will once again be at the forefront of history: conducting a contested Green primary for an office other than the presidency. Rahmbo’s old seat is up for grabs, and 5 of the 25 filed candidates are running Green.
After having initially filed as a Democrat, I changed over to the party with which I am more ideologically resonant after realizing that the Democratic primary is a moot point: the winner there has already been decided. Don’t believe me? Listen to what the “lakefront liberal” Justin Oberman said upon dropping out last Friday:
"When we started, the field was wide open and the prospects for a successful campaign were promising. But in the past week, that landscape has changed substantially. It is now clear that most regular Democratic ward organizations across the district will be united behind one of my opponents; when viewed in the context of the short time until Election Day and the exceptionally low turnout expected in this special election, we have determined there isn't enough time to earn the votes we need to win."


Oberman knew that his paltry $160,000 wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he decided to stop wasting people’s money and send their donations back.
Gracious of him.
That narrows the Democratic field to 14, however the politically connected candidates will continue to drop like flies because the backroom deal is done. It’s only a matter of time until the rest of us find out if it’s Alderman Patrick O’Connor or State Rep. John Fritchey.
That will leave a handful of vanity lawyers who are presumably using the election to promote their respective law firms, a doctor who is doing the same for his medical office (Victor Forys), and Tom Geoghegan, a genuine progressive on social issues who is probably only half using the election to promote his books and legal practice.
When I attempted to contact Geoghegan about signing onto my pledges to oppose military aid to Israel and to refuse corporate donations in this election, he failed to respond. When I asked for elaboration on his Iraq stance (his website includes a mere two lines quoted from 2003), there was also no response.
He did, however, update his website to include a more elaborate position on Israel/Palestine, presumably in response to a slew of emails. He says:
“In the long run there will be no peace between Israel and Palestinians without some kind of two-state solution. The urgent question is how to get Hamas (or the leading part of Hamas) to renounce violence just as part of the IRA in Northern Ireland finally did – that is, how to pull at least the “political” people in Hamas into the peace process, and peel them off from those who will never give up their guns. I would press the Administration to rely on those who can tell us how to bring about this result.”

This progressive superstar manages to offend the left on two issues here. Firstly,
he trivializes the peace process in Northern Ireland and assumes that the current arrangement is acceptable to the IRA, while treating them as the indisputable bad boys on the block. Likewise, Hamas is perceived as the source of all problems in the Middle East, and predictably no mention is made of the need to combat Zionism as an ideology. Here’s my memo from the left to Tom Geoghegan: “If you’re on the left, you usually support those fighting for self-determination against an occupying power and not the other way around.”
At a candidate forum held by the Progressive Democrats of America, the group recently made infamous by throwing an endorsement at Jesse Jackson Jr in the Illinois senate seat selection fiasco, he condescendingly approached me after our respective speeches (mine available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIl39UVGHY&feature=channel_page), and said “I’m against the war, too, you know.” He was probably feeling slightly shamed to be shown up in oratory skill by a campaign novice of half his age, though this hardly excuses such a childish remark.
My conclusion is that he continues with the American tradition of progressivism: fairly reasonable on labor, environmental and health issues, while wholly apologetic to the tradition of American Exceptionalism. He goes so far as to applaud Obama’s imperialist presidency on his website, while stating that he finds it important for the United States to remain a superpower: “In the long run, if we’re going to survive as a superpower, as I hope we do, we’ll need a smidgeon of [international] law to check and balance us.” Just a smidgeon, eh?
This is as far left as the Democrats go: another do-good lawyer who found his niche fighting the man, though is unwilling to critique the over-arching superstructure of greed and Empire. He has, of course, attracted the support of the usual suspects within the progressive industrial complex: Thomas Frank and Katha Pollit publishing endorsements that sent thousands of users parachuting into his website to make contributions. It’s political big business of another sort, a nudge to the left of President Obama.
If you want a real election, the Greens offer progressives a genuine political race rooted in intelligent discourse and exchange of ideas. I will be opposing Alan Augustson, a respected Green activist who just ran for this same seat in November, amassing 4% of the vote against Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Republican challenger Tom Hanson. The Greens recruited me to the race because 4% is unacceptable in a district as progressive as this one. There is no reason that the working and immigrant majority of the district won’t support a candidacy built upon themes of non-violence and the defense of civil liberties. A contested primary will force all involved to actively campaign and recruit support at the doors, on the phones and at community functions.
I, for one, am a fan of campaigning in bowling alleys, and they are thankfully plenty in the 5th district. From Waveland Bowl on Western and Waveland to Habetler Bowl on Foster and Central, I will be finding support where Greens would normally not think to look.
The American left too often suffers from a snob complex, and I’ve admittedly been stricken with the ailment myself at times. We feel that, because we’ve read a book or two, we are unequivocally correct in our political convictions and so we deserve this air of superiority that we carry on. This is what we use as an excuse to put down the rest of our compatriots: the supposedly vile sorts that take pleasure in such crude activity as bowling.
I say, “If you don’t like it, get out of the Midwest!”
The puritan tendency vibrant within the American left must be vanquished, lest we continue to live under the rule of one mass murderer after another. If the left is going to ever rise from the pits of irrelevancy, it must stop looking down upon the would-be subjects of their purported movement. The culture of politically-correct must be dropped, if not outright combated. We must embrace liberty as our uniting principle, stop being fearful of entering into alliance with paleo-conservatives, who, after all, are the most organized amongst principled anti-war activists, and not be afraid to ask the “disgusting” majority to help.
Meanwhile, my generation, the new young professionals, must get organized. While I accept the challenge given to me by the Green party, to help organize young people, I want to make it clear that young people need to also accept working with their parents’ generation. Sure, the baby boomers’ record is atrocious: they have given us everything from a savage health care industry, declining unionism, increasing anti-intellectualism, an explosion in the practice of pop-spirituality, unsustainable levels of superficiality and loads of other undesirable traditions. However, some of them mean well, and others can provide the energy and resources we need to build winning coalitions. As such, the generation gap chatter ought be left with the coat check lady.
If we can accept that winning means embracing the greater Chicago community and becoming a genuine cultural member of this fantastic city, then we will help organize the Greens to victory in the April 7th general election, and that will be a momentous and historic victory for progressives and liberty loving people throughout the country.