The Daily News puts it well this morning: The Working Families Party has opted for self-preservation over political purity, assuming the two can be separated, by accepting the terms Attorney General Cuomo insisted on before accepting the troubled "progressive" party's endorsement for the gubernatorial election. The WFP now not only endorses Cuomo but his "New Democrat" platform of austerity, rejecting their own principles of progressive taxation and stimulus spending by the government. The endorsement was deemed necessary if Working Families was to preserve its reserved line on the state ballot, which depends upon the party's gubernatorial nominee getting at least 50,000 votes this November.
An anonymous WFP "insider" didn't try to conceal the mortifying nature of the Cuomo endorsement. "You've got to eat a little shit right now" to keep the party alive, this source told the News, "It's better to take it in the teeth now and in a couple of years, hopefully, you're going to be a powerhouse again.
"If the party doesn't exist, you're never moving the progressive agenda."
Two implicit fallacies in one sentence: that Working Families is the only "progressive" party in New York State, and that the only way it can "mov[e] the progressive agenda" is by cross-endorsing a candidate for whom its support is contemptibly superfluous. It should be evident by now, however, that the nearest thing to a progressive party in the Empire State is the Green Party, which is running Howie Hawkins for governor. Endorsing Hawkins was most likely never considered by the WFP, which sees itself as a dependent yet somehow potentially decisive influence on the Democratic party. Working Families has never been an alternative to the American Bipolarchy and probably was never meant to be. Whoever registered with the party in order to declare independence from the two-party system has been scammed.
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It's worth noting here that the Working Families Party in Oregon is running their own candidate for US Senate, the first WFP Senate candidate who is not also the Democratic nominee, according to Ballot Access News.
http://www.ballot-access.org/2010/09/10/oregon-working-families-party-runs-own-member-for-u-s-senate/
More power to the Oregonians, then. No WFP can expect to have leverage over Democrats, if that's what they crave most, if the threat to run against them if necessary has no credibility. Nor would they have credibility if their worst case scenario is a Democratic candidate losing an election.
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