Corn on the Cobb

When I got home last night, all the Greens had departed except for the Presidential Candidate himself. He was on my laptop in my study talking on his cell phone with his shirt off. Seems a nice enough sort, a kind of lispy soft-spoken Texan. He asked if I was an adjunct, and when I admitted I was, he said I was a member of the wage-slave class. I said, yeah, well, not really, because I also have a FT job and I'm only teaching because I'm a weirdo who decided he wanted to keep doing it a bit longer.

At least Cobb agrees with me that Nader's Quixotic behavior (see Alterman's "Liberal Media" column in the current The Nation, which is a bit shrill and hysterical and full of bombast, but does mention the fact that all Nader's major past supporters--Mike Moore, Susan Sarandon, Jim Hightower, Noam Fucking Chomsky--have signed a letter asking him to quit the race) is almost as ideologically narrow-minded as Bush's. Cobb only wants to build the Greens locally. If they don't stand a candidate for President, they lose their ballot access, so hard-fought the last cycle, so his nomination is only to prevent that--he wants folks to vote for Kerry. Therefore, he's not campaigning for president, but only making appearances in support of local Greens running for Congress or State House or school boards or whatever.

That said, the Open Debates PAC has had some success lately in getting the corporation which controls the debates to open up; they've had to release some of their papers, and will have more than one moderator at this year's debates, and are looking into the current rules for 3rd party participation, so Ralph's push is perhaps having some good impact for future elections. I still hope he wins his battles in time to announce in October that he wants all his supporters to vote Kerry--they will if he asks them to. Many of the die-hards will not vote for a Democrat if Nader isn't on the ballot, unless he specifically advises it. It's going to be a razor-thin margin again, and as much as I disagree with John F. Kerry, I'd rather eat a slice of white bread that's 60% sawdust than eat pure sawdust.