Jack Hirschman: May I ask something along the way? Peter, I was in Europe at the time. You ran on the Green Party ticket for Governor. What was the final tally on the vote?

Peter Camejo: Don't forget that I ran twice. In the regular election, and then the recall election. In the regular election, we got 5.3% of the vote. In Northern California we got, in what we call the Green Belt - which goes from Santa Cruz to the border with Canada, and from San Francisco to the border with Nevada - we got 10% of the vote. Now in a winner-take-all race, with the spoiler issue, that's enormous. In the inner Bay Area - that is, San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley - we got more votes than the Republicans.

MG: So Peter finished second in those areas.

PC: The other big surprise of that race was that the Latino community voted two to one over European-Americans for the Green Party for the first time. Our vote was 8%. And our whole vote was skewed to young people. Of the first time voters who were Latinos, 12% voted Green statewide. A poll was taken in Marin high schools, and 22% said they considered themselves Greens. In the districts around the University of California, I got 40% of the vote. It showed a very sharp rise from previous elections. Gray Davis was a perfect candidate. You had Bill Simon and Gray Davis. The opening line I had in most of my talks was, "I want to thank Gray Davis and Bill Simon for everything they have done to help the Green Party." I said that here at the big antiwar rally [Oct. 25,2003], and everybody started laughing. Let me just say that, in the recall race, I think we got a lot further than we did in the first one. The coverage we got was immense, which gave us credibility. After all, the average person doesn't think the way any of us in this room think. So, all of a sudden, if you're on TV, their head says: "This is legitimate, this is real, this is important." So the fact that the Green Party is in the middle of the debate with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Lt. Gov. is sitting next to you, this is like you're for real. The sympathy we gained from those debates - there were six of them - two were televised nationally - and the big debate had the largest audience for political debate in the history of the United States, larger than any Presidential debate. So anyway, in that race a peculiar thing happened: our vote declined. I personally thought our vote would go up. There was something really interesting I learned from that. If the polls show that a Democrat is going to win, people are more willing to vote Green than if the polls show that a Republican is going to win. Especially if they think it's close. The Democratic Party did a terrible thing in the last three days of the campaign. They deliberately put out that the polls were tied, because of the attacks on Arnold about the women's issue. I was on KPFK (Los Angeles) the night before the election, and as I got to the radio station, I'm listening, Antonio Veragosa is getting off the radio station, and the last point he's making is that the polls are absolutely tied between Bustamante and Arnold, and every vote counts, etc. And the next day Bustamante loses by 17%. This is just something they made up. Obviously these were faked figures. Now I don't believe that Antonio himself made it up, these were figures that were being circulated as a desperate last effort. They still had illusions that maybe Davis could survive. But this killed our vote. And where you see it clearest is that in places where we're strongest - Humboldt County, Mendicino, San Francisco - my vote got cut in half. So you could see people who would normally vote Green, voted for Bustamante; threw their votes away, really, because it would have been real good for the Greens if their vote had been big, and there was no way to stop Arnold. He got 49% of the vote and McClintock, the conservative Republican, got 13%, so they got 62% of the vote, and only 35% are registered Republicans. Arnold won with more non-Republican than Republican votes. Our vote dropped, but here's an interesting thing that no one expected: the African-American vote for us rose. It was the only group that rose. Of the registered African-American voters, 6% voted Green; with 5% Latinos, and we got a little under 3% over-all of the vote. I had made an issue of the three-strikes law.

JH: That doesn't surprise me. If it was so close in a gubernatorial race, then probably a lot of people who voted Green in the regular election went to the Democrats. Certainly it was out of desperation and fear of Schwarzenegger...

PC: ...and out of a fear of Bush. There's a real fear now among progressives and liberals and that fear has a conservative effect.

JH: To link what happened with you in the gubernatorial race with what happened here with Matt in the San Francisco mayoral election: it seems to me the important lesson is that Matt ran with 3% of the electorate as Green in the city and got 47% of the vote. That means that something else was taking place, that no doubt was also taking place at the gubernatorial level. In a smaller area, however, this phenomenon is highlighted, i.e., there is really a whole movement that's going on against that two-party system, and in Matt's instance what emerges in the minds of people - and I've talked quite a lot with people after the election about this - is that with his own particular personality, Matt tapped into a kind of participatory democracy that has not existed for a long time, and that no longer exists in the minds of many people. People want that participation. They want a manifestation of real democracy. Your comment about the war in Iraq being an influence on the election, Peter, before we turned on the tape, is something I agree with completely. The war has had an incredible effect, especially on young people, in turning voters away from the two-party system and into a new direction. If the Greens only represented 3% of the registered voters, then clearly the 47% were voting for something else. Perhaps what these people were voting for doesn't even have a name outside of "real democracy."

Scott J.Thompson: It's something totally non-commercial, with people who are involved in creating their own entertainment, who aren't turning on the TV to be told what to think. A lot of the people who joined Matt's campaign are people who don't need a lot of the "stuff" that's vended by the Democrats and Republicans.

Csaba Polony: Certainly, Scott, there was a strong base among such people in Matt's campaign, but that's not just what Matt tapped into. That's not 47% of San Francisco. To me, what's significant about Matt's campaign is that it brought to light the alienation people feel toward politics, period. People responded to Matt's completely unconventional style. I don't mean that in the "hipster" sense at all, but rather on the human level. You [Matt] communicate your ideas like a normal person without the bullshit that people have become used to with politicians. It's what people have a real hunger for.

MG: To really appreciate the successes in Peter's campaign, you have to understand that he doubled what Medea Benjamin had accomplished in her Senate race in 2000. She ran a strong campaign against Diane Feinstein, who did not really have a challenge from Tom Campbell. There was no concern that, "Oh my God, a vote for Medea Benjamin will give this election to a Republican." And Tom Campbell is not your typical Republican, anyway. To have come in two-and-a-half years later, as Peter did, and double the vote is really quite an accomplishment. I also think that the context in which I jumped into the race was in part formed by Peter's race for Governor. People respond well to him. The ones that feel guilty that they'll cause the election to go a particular way, and don't vote for Peter, feel differently when they're looking at a more local election. They look at a candidate like me, and in some ways I'm picking up some of the voters that wanted to vote for Peter but didn't because they were scared.

When I got into the race, I did something that everybody said I shouldn't have done. I ran a basically unapologetic, progressive campaign. I said that our ideas were better. Let's go out and defend them instead of always watering them down. That really sets us apart as Greens from what the Democrats want to do. They always want to outflank the Republicans by being more conservative than the Republicans, and not allow the Republicans to ride a particular wave of sentiment: the war, the Patriot Act, etc., Real strength and opposition would be to take a stand against the Patriot Act - take some heat for ninety days, it won't take long for people to ask, "What the hell happened? This is a lousy law." How could there be only one Senator who voted against it? And that was Russ Feingold. That means that Barbara Boxer, Paul Wellstone, all the darlings of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, voted for it. That's what was attractive about my campaign. So often people don't want to get involved in politics because politicians disappoint them so much. People go out and work for politicians, and then the politicians get into office and do all the wrong things, they compromise on too many essentials, they worry about their own careers; but to have a candidate come forward and say, "Look, I'm going to govern by a set of values. Let's articulate them: Working-class values, diversity, immigrant rights, civil rights. Let's go out there and take those concepts and try to govern for the public benefit. And young people responded to it. Young people say, "Hey, this is different. Politics can be done differently. I'm willing to get involved with this guy. I won't do that for just anybody, but I'm willing to give it a go with this guy." And that's what happened. That was the spark I was sensing among younger people who'd never been involved with electoral politics.

SJT: Not just among young people, Matt. I remember talking to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters [of City Lights Books] in your office at one of the art openings, and they said they'd never seen anything like this in their whole lives. Somebody they not only knew and liked, but who actually represented all the things they'd been waiting for a candidate to be. Ferlinghetti is in his eighties. He had never seen anything like it.

JH: Nor had I, actually. And I'm only in my seventies.

PC: In our lives, this has never happened.

JH: The last time that I recall a really democratic election in this country was in 1948, with the Henry Wallace campaign. That was the last democratic election. And it wasn't a grassroots election. It was more an election along a certain ideological line. When Terry Hallinan's father was the vice-presidential candidate and Henry Wallace had broken with the New Deal to form the Progressive Party. Before that, someone reminded me, there was a progressive movement, back in 1934 for the Governor's race in California, when Upton Sinclair ran for Governor. That was a grassroots election.

MG: The End Poverty in California Movement.

JH: When I came back to San Francisco from Europe at the beginning of December, I saw people getting up out of their beds in the morning, going out onto the streets with your posters, and standing there for hours flagging down people to vote for you. We know what you feel about the arts, so you had the Poets for Matt and the Artists for Matt, but I mean, that is unusual. That is truly unusual. When you got into the election, you tapped into something that has been talked about for many, many years. There is an intuition on the part of people that those dogs who really run this country would like to arrive at absolute zero, in terms of popular democratic participation, in terms of their pocket. They don't give a damn about the people in this country, they are actually working in a world where the rule of speculative capital has really got them by the short hairs, and that's where they are. And all the other stuff is a bunch of bullshit lies. Many young people are especially affected by this war that hangs over everybody's head and festers in everybody's guts, whether we want to admit it or not. In both the mayoral and gubernatorial elections, people are saying that they're sick of this goddamned system as it is, because it is not real democracy, and we want real democracy.

CP: And as you said, it is all based on lies. This war is a lie. Everything in it is based on falsehoods. A conscious misrepresentation. Even the people who support it must know at some level that something is weird here.

SJT: Remember how many people were out on the streets in this city during February and March. Matt got the vote of a lot of those people.

MG: Let me say a couple things about the election which are important to keep in mind. A quarter of a million people voted and we got 119,000 votes. That may very well be the most votes that a losing candidate in a city-wide election has ever gotten in San Francisco. Generally, if you get that many votes, you'll be elected to something. This is unprecedented. Interestingly, it's pretty much an accepted fact that I won the vote among Democrats. I lost this election because Republicans favored the fellow who's now being portrayed as the up-and-coming leading light of the Democratic Party. He was elected by Republicans, because he was favored by Republicans 75% to 25%, or 80% to 20%. Republicans account for 15% of the electorate. If you break that down, probably about 35,000 of the votes cast were Republican. That was more than sufficient to cover the margin of victory, which in this case was 13,000 to 14,000 votes. When you consider that there were already other progressive candidates running when I entered the race, and I did not have the support of the Bay Guardian, the premiere progressive paper in this town - I only had the support of the Bay View, the progressive African-American paper, the socialist paper Frontlines, the online journal, and the San Francisco Sentinel, that was really it, besides the support of Chris Daly, one of my colleagues on the Board of Supervisors - the fact that I got into the run-off is astounding. I got into the run-off with 19%, and my opponent had 42%. So many labor unions, in particular, did not think it was possible that I could go from 19% to 51%. You know what they did? They couldn't support Newsom because he is anathema to so much of what they believe , but they figured, "Let's stay out of this race. And that way, we can carry an olive branch to the Newsom forces: i.e., Don't hurt us once you're elected Mayor." They did that because they didn't think I could win. After they'd made those commitments, and the polls started to suggest that this was a dead-heat going into the final week, those folks [i.e. unions] regretted what they had done, because they had passed up an opportunity to use established networks for absentee balloting and precinct work. They had given that up for their own self-preservation, with a couple of exceptions. Mike Casey from Local #2. Those guys were troopers. They said, "To hell with the outcome, we want to get behind the guy we believe in." And you know what, I think the election could have turned out differently if the forces among the progressive community had not bought into the idea that I couldn't get the 51% of the vote.

SJT: You and Walter Johnson [Secretary of the S.F. Longshoreman's Union] were on the same stage together at numerous anti-war rallies. I find it scandalous that you did not have the backing of the Longshoremen.

MG: Imagine this: I was the chief sponsor of a measure to raise the minimum wage to $8.50/hour. This is probably one of the most important labor laws that has been passed in the United States in the last decade or so. This is a real living wage, minimum wage, effort, and it applies to everyone. Despite having done that in a tough economy, when everyone said it couldn't be done, and we succeeded in doing it, imagine what it is to have the majority of labor going with my opponent or staying out of the race. I mean, it's really incredible.

JH: It goes to show, for example, that in San Francisco, the Democratic Party is like the PRI in Mexico. It is so entrenched, that people's pockets have been related to it, including the union movement, for many years. You [Matt] are quite right. I found myself very disheartened when the vote came in for Newsom, and I knew that the unions had not gone for you. I said, "Here was an example of a real possibility for a real adventure in democracy, in a way that would have revivified the whole union movement." A day or two after the election, one was left with a sense of "same-oldness" again. As President of the Board of Supervisors, you have a progressive bloc that will see to it that, whether he likes it or not, Newsom is going to have to move in the direction of this participatory democracy and, if he doesn't, then it's really down the drain with him, and rapidly too.

What do you foresee in terms of the future? We're interested in what you think.

MG: You're going to see a couple of things. You're going to see an administration that tries to continue with a business tax that favors corporations at the expense of the people. So a couple of years ago we settled a lawsuit that essentially gave back to the corporations $30 million a year - and some of us voted against it - and we're not going to recoup any of that money - , and that's going to be one of the biggest battles we fight. There's already a battle over a phony "work-force housing" measure, which is supposed to bring affordable housing to people, but the cost of the housing is higher than what the working-class makes, and the give-aways to developers are incredible. The city is waiving conditional-use fees that help fund apartments; the city has to pay up-front environmental impact money to developers, who then will reimburse the city after the project is finished; the city is giving height and density bonuses that it shouldn't give, given the lack of affordability. I mean there are a lot of specific issues we have to fight over. I think we're going to see a budget process where Newsom tries to hang on to what has been a staple of Democratic Party politics, which has been the kind of Tammany Hall patronage. He's going to do everything he can in a hard-budget time to do what? To do what we know - to cut public health, cut social programs, hurt the bottom, rather than to take it from the top, or reorganize government, or let go of managers who are getting paid inappropriate amounts of money, the "special assistants." That's where the battle is going to be.

For my part, I want to fight aggressively over things like expanding the right to vote to non-citizens in municipal elections, I want to come forward with some measures that help seniors, the disabled, youth; to waive fares for public transportation for those people, so that we gradually get to a place where we can have free public transportation, rather than this business of collecting a fare, which generally decreases ridership. We're going to see the progressives bring forward a measure that will have a profound impact on local elections, where we try to stagger the next mayor's term, so that it's not a four-year term. So when Newsom is up for re-election, we're going to make it a five-year term, so that at the end of it, the election will be held with the Presidential election. We are caught in this absurdity right now: the higher the turnout, the greater the likelihood that I would have been elected. If this election would have been held in November, 2004, with the Presidential election, there would have been a greater chance for electing a progressive candidate. So let's consolidate these elections. Let's stop having the mayor's race in a low-turnout election, which favors the conservatives. I think this will be a huge change. It will profoundly change electoral politics in this town. It will takes us a decade to get there, because we don't want to pass a law that gives Newsom an extra year in office.

In the post-election discussion, one thing I found interesting is that there's a tendency to talk about my candidacy within the context of progressive coalition-building, in the sense that this wasn't so much a third party or Green Party effort as it was a coalition of a bunch of progressives that got together. I resist that interpretation because many people who believe that don't want to accept the fact that a candidate like me, who articulated the issues in the way I did, cannot exist within the Democratic Party. When you join the Green Party, a third party, you're basically saying "to hell with safety." You're going to cast your lot with the folks who don't have power, and you're going to go out and articulate what's wrong with the system. I went out there and I did that. I can't exist within the Democratic Party. While I think it's great that all those progressive Democrats who found my message attractive voted for me, I don't think that they're really copping to the fact that the very reason they did find my message attractive should tell them to get out of the party they're in. They really ought to become independents or join the Green Party, and they should accept the fact that their own party is trying to crush anything that really challenges the tired old mechanism of patronage.

SJT: I'd like to add something here. Though I wasn't out there on a daily basis doing grunt work during the campaign, I used my radio program on KPOO throughout the campaign to bring Matt's message to the listeners in the African-American community. Clearly, neither this nor the endorsement from the Bay View newspaper was enough, given the results of the election. At this point, it appears - despite whatever unexpected gains in African-American votes the Greens experienced during the gubernatorial election - that African-Americans are still deeply connected to the Democratic Party, and that they are disinclined to join what they consider to be a mostly white-dominated Green Party. Cynthia McKinney, on the other hand, has publicly shown sympathy for Peter's candidacy, and at an antiwar rally on Oct. 25^th she even suggested that he run for President. Given the fact that her own Democratic Party undermined her in her last election, it seems to me that she could bring many African-Americans into the Green Party if she were to become a Green. Has any attempt been made to court her support?

MG: Let me just say this. First of all, I often find it amusing that people who argue how white the Green Party is have not themselves been to a Democratic Party meeting lately. If you walk into the room, it's all Caucasian. This fiction that it's a rainbow coalition is all bullshit. The reason African-Americans and Latinos are in the Democratic Party in such large numbers is because there is this conventional wisdom that all of the advancements in civil rights efforts in the Twentieth Century were the result of the Democratic Party standing and fighting. There isn't a sufficient acknowledgement that these successes were driven by social movements, not by the Party itself. The Democratic Party got involved later, and essentially took the credit...

CP: ...when it became opportune to do so. As far as Black support for Newsom, you have to remember that only 26% of the eligible Black voters voted in the election for Mayor. There is this huge group that just doesn't care because they're so alienated from the system.

JH: In the final analysis, one could say that what Willie Brown wanted actually took place. The two people he wanted on his way out of office won the election. Even though we know that Matt won that election in terms of all that came forth that was "supra" party. There was something that was expressed that said, "It's not the party. I'm disturbed by the way this country is being governed. I want it to be governed in another kind of way."

Only six years ago, the first real working-class party was formed in the United States, the Labor Party. It has been formed largely by breakaway union people, and their whole program is now driven toward getting health care for everybody. Now many of those people, who are in the city, voted for you, Matt. I know that you, Peter and Scott are Greens, and you obviously see things in those terms, but what emerged from your election was something that did not seem to be a party. It was really a people's movement.

MG: But Jack, I really want to get to this. I think that there are many people who cast votes for me who say, "Aw, I don't like the Green Party. The Greens turn me off in this way and that way." But you know what? I am such a Green candidate. Now I don't wear it on my sleeve, I don't say it to you every time I open my mouth. Nor do I think that I played it low-key. I have enough of the trappings of legitimacy. The same way that, when Peter talks about the economy and what we need to do in our budget to make things work, we know what he's been doing. Here's a guy who's been involved in socially responsible investing for decades. He knows what he's talking about. He talks circles around the other candidates. I'm an attorney. I was educated at fancy schools, I'm the President of the Board of Supervisors. Nobody can say, "Hey, you're not legitimate." And so I don't seem like the Green candidate. And so people say, "Well, it wasn't really the Green thing, it was this other thing." But it's like what I said before, I exist because I'm in a party outside of those dominant parties. And I'm a threat to their legitimacy because I'm willing to articulate what's wrong with the way they've been governing, and they're not accustomed, particularly in this town - which is such a Democratic town - to have somebody who has a position of power, who can reach the people through the means of technology, whether it be the weekly airings of the Board of Supervisors, the committee meetings, the routine interviews, whatever. The media is at my disposal to a certain extent. That's not supposed to exist.

PC: Let me pose a question to all of you. This campaign is very peculiar. We're all trying to figure out how this could have happened, this 47% of the vote. I want to ask you to think through this question: Why did Bill Clinton agree to devote three days of his life to go to a place where there's a run-off, where the guy he's supporting had 42% of the vote before the run-off, had all the money, everything safe - and have Al Gore come out, Nancy Pelosi come out, Diane Feinstein come out, have Jesse Jackson send a tape-recording? A whole series of different things happened here. Certain things combined. How do we analyze this? The war certainly has something to do with it, but there was a rebellion in the ranks of the Democratic Party. They rebelled against their leadership, and they were led by the locally elected Democrats. Nobody in any article pointed out that the elected Democrats in San Francisco, the majority, endorsed Matt.

MG: The ones on the Board of Supervisors.

PC: Well, the Board was 6 to 3, you had the majority. Here's the point: Those supervisors would not bend to having the top leaders of their party come to town and tell them that they were dead wrong. It didn't even phase them. It wasn't like they were terrified and scared and didn't know what to do. How can that happen? What happened was that Matt developed a certain charisma and vision that is very difficult to get. Very rare in the United States. He had the authority of being the President of the Board of Supervisors and he was a Green Party member. It wasn't as if a rank and file Green Party member had appeared and run. Such a person wouldn't have gotten anywhere. He had the authority of really being legitimate. Who gave him that authority? The Democrats on the Board of Supervisors.

MG: This is a good point, Peter, because the idea that once I became Board President and people saw me govern, when they're told that I'm a "racist," or that I've got these "crazy ideas" that are going to cause San Francisco to fall into the Bay - none of that resonated because I had been in office exercising power and none of these people had anything to complain about six months ago.

CP: Your style really has a lot to do with it.

PC: I want to finish my point. One last thing. I want to tell you a story. And this is not because I'm an ego-maniac. The people who worked on Matt's campaign were totally attracted to him because he's a Green. I want to tell you something. I went to this meeting at the University of San Francisco, and there's 500 people in the room. Chris Daly gets up to speak, Aaron Peskin gets up to speak, and Jake McGoldrick gets up to speak. They all get up and say good things and everybody applauds, OK? Nothing special, nothing particular, but everybody's very supportive. They're the supervisors. Before Matt gets to speak, they introduce me. I got three minutes to speak. So I get up and I say nothing. It didn't really matter what I said. I said a few things, right? I got a standing ovation, OK? I get a standing ovation. And now something else happens. Every one of these elected supervisors gets out of their chair and runs up to hug me. This is what I think is happening: What the people in that audience felt was, "this is great, what's happening." they know that the Greens cannot be bought, that they're totally incorruptible. No one would join the Green Party and run as a Green who had ambition for self-gain. That's what they understand. So when they hear me get up and say: "This is a battle for democracy, this is for real, Matt is the person we want," and so on, then they get up. Why is that different from when Chris Daly or Aaron say it? They all said the exact same thing.

JH: It could be that you're absolutely correct about that, Peter. Yet, look at the paradox. Both of you, look here. Suppose you had played the Green hand openly.

PC: Oh, it would have backfired.

JH: It would have totally backfired.  

MG: Peter was in front of a young audience. This is a young audience that sees the future is in the Green Party, and they're paying homage to a guy who had the courage to fucking put it out there.

JH: But look, you guys represent a dimension of what I'll call "progressive politics." I happen to know Chris Daly from way back. I know where Chris Daly comes from. I know that when Chris Daly comes up and embraces you, he embraces you because he's inside the Democratic Party, but his feelings and sympathies, and actions too, are outside that. And it's the same with Aaron and the rest of those who embraced you there. In other words, you and the Green Party are tapping into the disgust with this two-party system.

PC: Many of them would like to be Greens and they're frustrated.

JH: What Csaba said before, there was something else going on in the mayor's campaign. When I said that the style of democracy - and Matt's a "cool cat." What's your favorite expression?

MG: "It's all good."

JH: "It's all good." And you're cool about it. If you don't think that in this generation that is seen as something very positive, you'd be really mistaken. A lot of these cats got out and they moved with you because they sensed, "the guy is talking integrity, the guy is telling the truth." And that thing, where you get the sense that, "this guy is not a politician, he's talking level, he's like a real brother, I can identify with that." Like what I said earlier, it's this "style of democracy" that you have.

MG: Let me say this, Jack. My strength in politics is that I don't care if I hold office. Whether or not I get elected to something is not going to change what I think. So you know what? If I'm practicing law instead of politics, I'm going to make a lot of money. I'm going to be successful at it. I'm going to be happy doing it, because I enjoy it. Politics has been fucking hard. It's been really hard. And Peter can tell you this. To cast your lot, to be part of the movement that's trying to get on the beachhead. That's what we've accomplished. I'm not going to be the Mayor of San Francisco. All those twenty year olds working on my campaign: one of them will be Mayor of San Francisco, they're going to the State Assembly, they're going to go to Congress. I actually believe that. And I don't feel badly about it. But I really think that what we're part of is an effort to make this a multi-party system. If we accomplish that - and that's what instant run-off voting is about - and targeting issues like low wages, that's the only way the Green Party shows other folks and gives them the courage to leave the party they're in. People say, "Hey, these guys are working on things that matter to me." I think that that is where we're heading. That's what it's about.

PC: You know what scares the Democrats? They're scared that the whole thing is done without money. In their eyes, in their world, that's impossible. So it's like something they can't understand. That's why Clinton and Al Gore come out here. They were told on the phone, "There's something very scary happening in San Francisco." You know what a lot of them think? They think the Republicans are financing us. They wonder. You know Republicans do sometimes come up and offer money, but the Greens always refuse it. The Democrats wonder, "how is this happening?" They don't get it. To them it's a very scary thing. Willie Brown actually thinks Matt Gonzalez is a total idiot and a jerk. I mean, he thinks something like that. I don't mean "idiot" as in "dumb," but like "in another world," because it doesn't fit their world. They're so removed.

JH: Willie Brown has been a hustler politician and a con-man, really something of a confidence man, all the way through. He became a very powerful figure in California politics.

PC: In South America, Willie Brown could give lectures on how to be corrupt and stay within the law, and he'd have enormous audiences.

MG: Can I tell you what was happening before I walked home today? I was at my office and refused to attend the unfurling of a bust of Willie Brown. And I had the audacity to tell a reporter that I thought it was crass that the Mayor would unfurl a bust of himself at City Hall. I'm still shocked. I cannot believe this. That's what I live with down at City Hall. When I say it's hard working there, it's because I have to put up with absurdities like that. Can you imagine, the Board of Supervisors doesn't vote on it, there's no public discussion about it? This is a guy in office. And it turns out that the authority to put a bust at City Hall belongs to a fellow that Willie Brown hired. The guy who runs the building. And when he was asked, "who has the authority do this?" he says, "The Mayor." So the Mayor unfurled a bust to himself. I'm going to try to have it sent to the State Assembly. He spent more time there than he did in San Francisco.

SJT: And then he has the gall to call Matt a racist. Then he summons all the prominent Black leaders to vote for Newsom, and they all got behind him.

MG: Yeah, that's right. Like I spend a decade as a public defender going to court for African-Americans and Latinos, primarily, charged with crimes, who didn't have money to hire an attorney, and now I'm the racist. And the candidate from Pacific Heights, who's never been to Bay View/Hunter's Point is the guy they should vote for. One thing I do want to say. I was on the Larry Bensky show [KPFA's Sunday Salon] this last weekend. I'd never met Larry and I was very impressed with him. The issue of the national election came up. And I said to him, "Look, I think that the Greens need to field a presidential candidate, and I intend to vote for that candidate, even though I don't want George Bush in office until I hear the Democrats articulate a commitment to support electoral reform that will essentially add as its cornerstone the idea of majority elections. What happened in Florida shouldn't happen. That's a plurality victory. You know what, we should have a run-off a month later. Where you don't want to spend money on another election, do rank-voting or instant run-off voting in that one election: get a majority winner.

JH: I would just like to follow up something that you implied before. You said that you could be a lawyer and make a bunch of bucks, but you were basically concerned about changing the way things are. It seemed that you were touching upon what I perceive as the importance of this recent campaign. Though I understand completely what you and Peter are saying; that is, that it could very well be that the people who voted for you were really voting for the Green Party.

PC: I know what you're saying. You're absolutely right. I'm not disagreeing with you. The fact that he's a Green made it easier to vote for him, but they weren't voting for the Green Party. They were voting for something much broader.

JH: And that, it seems to me, is so important. Csaba and I have talked about this many times. This election was the first grassroots election campaign in a major American city in this country where a candidate polled so many votes, and was an expression of so much sentiment running counter to the two-party system. Now that, it seems to me, is a very important thing. Because it's really the beginning and not the ending of something.

MG: That's OK, we all play a role and try to make this thing unfurl itself. You know, I got a call from a woman named Anne Heathers. She is in her eighties now. She lived many years with an artist named Esteban Frances He was a surrealist artist on the island of Majorca back in the '30s or '40s. She called up and she said, "You know, I really want to congratulate you on giving people hope. There are people who've been casting votes for the Green Party and other third parties over the years, and you start to believe that it cannot be done. And while you fell short, the closeness of the election showed that it can be done." And it's going to reinforce the sense that it's simply a matter of people voting their conscience, and stepping up to do the right thing. And, I think, to that extent the campaign reverberates. It goes places beyond San Francisco. People say, "Hmm, maybe this can be done. This is a party that can emerge."

PC: Let me give you some numbers that will tell you a story. In the last seven years, two million new voters came into California. Two million more people could register and become voters who weren't voters seven years ago. The Democratic Party has declined in its registration in that period by one million voters. Even though two million more came in who could register. The Republicans have declined by 300,000 in that period. This is a gradual continuum. What rose? Where did they go? "Decline to state," - that's where they went.

MG: This is important because, if you join the Green Party, you can't vote in Democratic primaries. When you decline to state, you still can vote in them. Many Greens decline to declare their Green Party affiliation.

PC: I believe that Greens in San Francisco are 10%. We refer to 3% because there are 15,000 people who are willing to not even vote in the Democratic primary. Now that's the hardcore Green. But most people who vote Green decline to state because they want to vote in the primary. They want to vote for Kucinich or somebody else, like in the Governor's race, and then they vote Green. My vote here in the second round was 7.5%. That's about what the Greens are. Seven to 10% of the population of San Francisco. If you ask many people, they say, "Yeah, I sort of like the Greens." The thing is, all these party labels are very soft in America. What is the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party has no platform. Take Kucinich and Joe Lieberman, tell me they're the same party.

MG: Talk a little about the history of the Democratic party, Peter. We were talking about it a little earlier.

PC: I have a particular view about this. In fact, one of the goals of my life is to write a history of the Democratic Party. Let me just say one thing about the Democratic Party that nobody ever says. This is the longest existing political party in the world. Yet, nobody has ever written a history of it, and this is the most successful political party ever. The majority of the people of the United States are registered in it. And it has almost always had the majority of the people registered in it. It is the party of capitalism. It is the party that holds this system together. The Republicans couldn't exist without it because it's what makes the Republicans possible. The reason is that the Democratic Party is very flexible. They don't care who belongs to it. They like it when rank and file Democrats are super-radical and progressive. It contains dissent. But they don't let them rise. As you go up, man, you have to accept the rules, or they do to you what they did to Cynthia McKinney. Cynthia McKinney crossed a line. She got out and she said point blank what you and I and all of us in this room think. And they said, "that's out." See, even Barbara Lee, who voted by herself for the Constitution of the United States, immediately shut up. People don't notice this. She didn't go on a single talk show. She kept her mouth shut. She called the Greens and did some fundraisers to get money out of the Greens and, of course, she's a wonderful person, a good person. I'm not deriding her, that's not the point, but she knows how to play by the rules, where and what she can do, and she actually became very scared that they might write her off, even though her base is safe. See, Cynthia McKinney is a very gutsy person. She will say what she believes, but Dennis Kucinich plays by the rules. He will not come out here to support Matt Gonzalez. Now think about it from his point of view. This was the greatest opportunity for him in this primary to win some votes in California. If he had come out here and stood by Matt, and had said to Gore and Clinton, "this man represents the real interests of the Democratic Party," he would have picked up a 100,000 votes in San Francisco. He would have been very popular for doing that. But Dennis declined, saying, "that's crossing the line, I can't do that."

MG: Well, Peter, let me just say that I like Dennis a lot. I came out and endorsed him just a couple days after the election, because I really do think he's very solid on the issues, and he's really holding the line, and we've got to get behind him.

JH: Let's face it, the Democrats and Republicans represent the capitalist party. They are the capitalist party in this country.

PC: It's a thing that functions without a conspiracy. You understand? There's an interrelationship, where they can keep control. You've got to have two parties. You can't present one party. People will say, "what's my choice?" So you've got to have two. And they've written the law so that it can only be two. And the key to it is not the Republicans. The key is the other one. The one that gets all the poor and all the dissenters to stay inside the system, or alienates them so they don't vote, or won't participate, so they're powerless. You can have the whole country believe that it chooses the government, when it is really the money that picks it. And money has total control: Twenty-two thousand lobbyists, they run the country. The lobbyists run Sacramento. They decide. Those guys up there know nothing. State legislators? They're just raising money to get elected again and being good with the politicians who control the money.

MG: I gave Peter the Upton Sinclair book as a gift. Sinclair ran as a candidate for Governor in 1934. Before you guys got here, Peter remarked that he was reading it, and he noticed how similar things are now to that time. I was wondering if you could say something about this.

PC: Let me tell you something I did twenty years ago. I went over to the University of California and I read all the issues of the Abolitionist papers to try to learn how this third party issue played out. I read all the copies of The North Star. That's why I formed The North Star magazine. What a great name! I want that name for a paper someday because it's out of America's soul, it's our symbol, we should talk in Americanese. The Left was a disaster in the sixties. We talked like we were just imported. Total idiots. Upton Sinclair saw some of this stuff. He ran as a socialist over and over again, and he realized he wasn't running to promise some abstract future to people. But to talk to them about their real lives and get rid of the rhetoric. Now, he might have said that for wrong reasons, in the sense that he was bending to the pressures of the Democratic Party, because what he did was go into the Democratic Party and try to campaign. But the thing caught fire. And the description he gives of a movement without money, all volunteers, I mean, it's just like today. Full of conflict and problems.

You know, one thing I loved about Frederick Douglass: he wrote this long article where he said that "Everybody complains that the Abolitionists are totally split, divided, everyone yells at each other, they all criticize each other, people join, they quit, they complain and so forth." And he said, "That's the way it is." When you build a movement, that's what it's like. Do you know when it's not like that? When you have power and money. You hire staff, you fire people and it's not like that. Everybody makes fun of the Greens: You can't get four Greens together without having five positions, etc. But that's the way a movement is. It always is. It has taken me fifty years to learn this. Now I sort of understand that. It doesn't upset me. When I ran, Greens set up a website to attack me. Then the media came to me and said, "What do you think of that?" I said, "That's wonderful, please print where that website is." We've got to be the type of movement that welcomes debate.

MG: I hear you're running for President.

[Ed. Note, July 2004: Peter Camajo is now running as Vice Presidential canidate with Ralph Nader for President on an Independent ticket]

PC: Right. My father calls and says to my wife: "He's running for President, I heard it on CNN!" My wife's parents from Venezuela are listening, and she turns to them and says, "He doesn't even tell me! He's running for President!" And I said to them, "But I didn't know either!" So then a reporter calls me from The Sacramento Bee and says, "Mr. Camejo, I want to talk to you about your campaign for President." And I said, "I want to talk to you about it, you're the only reporter who's called me. CNN and The Chronicle have all announced that I'm running for President when I'm not running. So you can break the story that I'm not running." He put it in a column and buried it.

But if you're running, it doesn't mean you're going to spoil the election. In my opinion, if a strong Green campaign runs, like Nader, and does it right, it hurts Bush. I think it's a big mistake to think otherwise. We need someone out there who's blasting Bush's premises, not just how he does it. What the Democrats do is argue about how to do it. Hillary says we need more troops in Iraq. Somebody else says that we've got to bring in the U.N. Another says, "Bring in NATO." Someone's got to say, "This is illegal, fundamentally wrong and dangerous to the American people; I think what Bush is doing is promoting terrorism, not fighting it."

JH: People all over are saying this. It's on the computers. It's a very difficult time now in that way, because there's a kind of sinking in. This thing that's going on with this government in Iraq and the rest of the world - they're the expression of this Empire that's all over the world. They built these forces to dominate the entire world.

CP: There's a nice quote from an article on Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas I recently came across: "The 'War on Terrorism' is the final battle waged by the world's dominant Power in order to eradicate, destroy all remnants of oppositions to neo-liberal world domination. The ërogue states' and ëterrorists' are to be eliminated, through seduction by the media industry, drugged through pharmaceuticals, bribery, deceit or, if nothing else works, destroyed by military force."

PC: You know what Cheney put on the Christmas card he sent out to everyone? He put in a quote from Benjamin Franklin. The quote is something like, "If a sparrow falls to the ground, God is involved. How can an Empire be built without His approval?" That's what he put on his Christmas card. The only other thing on the card is something like: "Merry Christmas," - Cheney." That's what he sends out to people. Build an empire, God is with us.

MG: That's good, let's go have some dinner, there's a good Mediterranean place on Haight Street.