Anita Rios : “As I was traveling around the state, a couple of things occurred to me. As Greens, we think about the environment. We know we have micro-climates, and have to treat different places differently.
“But we also have economic micro-climates. What’s going to work in Toledo or Youngstown is perhaps not going to work in Columbus. We have political micro-climates too.
“Bob and I spoke to different groups in different places. In a lot of the industrial inner-cities, we did very well, and got some good responses from people.
“But honestly, I also went into some of the very small rural places and I would get up in front of people and start talking about the issues that I talk about and, I swear, I would see the whole room go, ‘What is this woman talking about?’
“But that is not to say that the right types of Greens could not appeal to those populations, and gain some support. It’s important that in this next two years, we work on building grassroots candidates who connect to their communities, and have a sensitivity to their communities.
“I firmly believe that I don’t teach anybody anything. I connect with the things that people know. I connect with people’s wisdom. That’s the respect I owe the voters.
“There is a certain percentage of the population that I’m going to connect with. That’s probably the same population Bob is going to connect with. In these next two years, we’ve got to find those other candidates that are going to connect with the wisdom of these different places.
“Stick to our green values as we do that, but we can really build a movement. We got 99,000 votes. Certainly that wasn’t enough to win. But look at how much Kasich paid for his million votes.
“He paid at least a dollar a vote. With our $8,000, our 99,000 votes came inexpensively, by connecting with people who believe in the same things we do…I don’t think you can build a political party, starting at the top.
“You have to build it from the bottom. So, one of the things Bob and I talked about doing was keeping the campaign account open, to use it for seed money, throughout the state, for the next election.
“The other thing we have to be doing is building expertise. These campaigns are not easy to do. We need people who are experienced doing campaigns or at least willing to learn… My campaign manager had three other jobs he was juggling.
“So, needless to say, there were a lot of things that fell thru the cracks. There were a lot of ways we could have done better if we had the resources to hire a full-time campaign manager.”
Rios said she doesn’t believe in playing dirty politics.
“They (Republicans and Democrats) have their tactics, but I can’t do that. For me, it’s too hard to do politics that way. It’s got to be a labor of love or I can’t do it…I can’t be in a room with another human being and not see another human being, even if it’s John Kasich…What I am working on is a paradigm shift.
“To do this differently, and ethically and compassionately is absolutely necessary. I feel that’s what the voters want and that’s what the voters will connect with. We need to be that bresh of fresh air, that honesty, that cleansing force that changes the whole system…
” I look at my Latino community and I know there are a lot of ex-cons. I would like us to embrace some of those people who have been discarded from our communities and invite them back, to run for office.”
Bob Fitrakis joked, “but some of them smoked pot and did other nonviolent things.”
Rio said : “These have to be credible candidates who are going to show some leadership qualities. But that’s where we end up with this campaign. That next step is so important.”
Fitrakis said all of the Ohio initiatives that passed during the recent mid-term elections were closer to the progressive values of the Green Party than to those of conservatives.
“If you look at the surveys in the United States, even among people who identify as ideologically conservative, if you look at the programs they endorse, they are moderate to very progressive. We’re a liberal, progressive nation when it comes to specific programs But the other side has got a trillion dollars and we got a timid Democratic Party that keeps moving to the center.”
Rios said the antidote to all that money in politics is getting a lot more people involved.
“That’s not an easy process. If you look at this election cycle, we only got 40 percent of the people to actually come out and vote. That was registered voters, not the ones that don’t even bother with the process.
“But I think those are our natural constituencies. That’s a tough crowd to reach out to because they have despaired in terms of the political process representing or helping them.”
Rios said the Green Party will only be able to reach out to such disillusioned potential voters thru grassroots engagement.
Cliff Arnabeck said the Green Party and the Libertarian Party are the only ones trying to address election fraud. He asked Rios if she thought there was fraud in the most recent mid-term elections.
“What I saw out there on the campaign trail was that the Democrats seemed completely inert. They just weren’t doing stuff. It was inevitable that they were going to lose. What a bad campaign they ran.”
Fitrakis, who was an international election observer in El Salvador during its 1994 presidential election after its civil war, said a problem in the United States is that the voting system itself is set up for fraud.
“The US is the only democracy where private, for-profit, absolutely partisan companies secretly program the software. In any other country, that would mean presumption of fraud. If I walked into a voting place in El Salvador and they said, ‘Don’t worry; the right wing, fascist ARENA party has brought in their private contractors to set up the software and the electronic poll books,’ my report would have been ‘presumption of fraud’ and that would have been the entire report. You might think nobody does that. But that’s exactly what’s done here in the US, and people accept it.”
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