Marvin Gandall:
Should the US left support her candidacy or should it abstain and even repudiate her decision? Such a challenge, after all, would unfold within the bosom of the Democratic party, and if Ms. Sheehan were to win, she would be running as a Democrat and presumably reinforcing "illusions" in that party.
The left should abstain but it should not attack her.
We shouldn't be dogmatic, and we should recognize that whichever way she goes, it is not a do-or-die matter in present circumstances, which is the impression you sometimes get in our discussions. There is way too much intensity and heat around this issue on the international left, given its modest size and the still relatively stable political situation
We shouldn't be dogmatic? If it is dogmatic to make a principle out of opposing bourgeois parties, then I am all for being dogmatic. You have to remember that voting for the parties of the ruling classes is a fairly recent innovation, if you exclude Second International reformism. The Eugene V. Debs campaigns were fairly orthodox, as were the Bolshevik campaigns in Czarist Russia. In the mid 1930s, after a disastrous experience with ultraleftism, the CP's decided to begin to back bourgeois candidates. Except for the Trotskyists, this "tactic" was universal. The CP in Cuba, for example, backed Batista. And so on and so forth. In the 1960s, a new generation of radicals pulled back from this tactic, mostly out of disillusionment with LBJ. They provided the shock troops for the Peace and Freedom Party, which unfortunately fell prey to sectarian interventions. In the 1990s, as mostly Maoist radicals began to retreat from an ultraleftism that had much in common not surprisingly with the CP's "third period" of the 1920s, they got involved with the Jackson campaigns, which were a lot like the bid that Cindy Sheehan is considering. From there, they began to get comfortable with "lesser evil" politics, as ex-SDS leader Carl Davidson's ABB statements makes obvious. I myself advocate turning back the clock to Eugene V. Debs.
