As the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush became almost even in the final two weeks of the campaign, I expected the Democrats to do what majority parties all over the world do when they realize they cannot prevail at the polls without appealing to a particular minority party. In Europe, for instance, liberal parties have often formed reluctant but effective coalitions with the Green Party for the past decade. On local levels, Greens and conservatives have sometimes joined forces when the liberals have tried to impose overdevelopment. In our own country's history, minority parties have pressured majority parties sufficiently to effect changes in policy.

This scenario for the Greens seemed so obvious that I included it in a story I wrote in 1996 as the closing chapter in "The Resurgence of the Real," a nonfiction book published by Addison-Wesley in March 1997.

In the story, set in 2024 in an American heartland city, a character explains what transpired in the presidential election of 2000: Al Gore, running against unspecified Republican and Green candidates, realized around the third week of October that he would probably lose without the support of a large number of Green voters. He finally made some concessions in various areas and won handily.

This fall, I watched with surprise as the actual Campaign 2000 began to match my story. When the Gore camp finally began worrying aloud about the Greens, I thought, "If you want to pick up some Green votes, Al, now's the time to publicly promise those voters you'll make concessions." Although Nader declined to meet with Gore, in late October, the Gore camp never revealed publicly whether they sought the meeting in order to ask him to withdraw from the election or to propose concessions. If the latter, Gore surely would have gone public with those proposed concessions in a direct appeal to Green voters.

If the Gore camp never considered concessions, was it because the Democratic Party is now so thoroughly pro-corporate that no movement whatsoever in the Green direction is possible?

I am not suggesting that the Green Party leadership (the national Coordinating Council) would have entered into negotiations with Gore, as Greens everywhere were working hard to win at least 5 percent of the vote. However, in the final week of the campaign in the closely contested states, many Green voters were becoming ambivalent, as the polls showed. Many were hoping for a way to help Gore without abandoning the Green platform, which was the product of years of grass-roots effort. Gore could have demonstrated that he had read the Green Party platform (www.gp.org) and had identified several issues on which he could publicly promise action, far more action than the Democratic Party was otherwise likely to take. In that way, he surely would have gained some badly needed votes.

When Gore finally began to address those crucial Green voters in the closely contested states, however, it was clear that he and his advisers had made a colossally self-defeating decision: Gore's response was to lecture, hector and threaten the Greens. In Minnesota, this strategy reportedly caused Nader's support to increase by 10 percent almost immediately. Yet Gore maintained and intensified the attack. The Gore campaign did not even bother to find out what the 16-year-old Green Party movement in the United States stands for, assuming instead that we are simply disaffected Democrats with some ecology tacked on. His failure to make concessions as he canvassed those crucial states in the eleventh hour reflects the Democratic Party's bankruptcy regarding issue-based politics.

During the final week of the campaign, the Democrats addressed Green voters as naughty children who needed to be whipped into shape. That metaphor is now commonly used by the anti-Nader liberal media: the pro-corporate people are the grown-ups, while grass-roots groups calling for sound alternatives are mere children. Yet, Nader noted, after the election the Green Party now has a national mandate of several million voters and supporters to be the watchdog party that pressures the corporate parties.

Although the Democrats do not admit it publicly, there is no denying that one of Gore's crucial errors in the late stages of the campaign was his decision not to treat the Greens as a legitimate political force in our democracy.

Charlene Spretnak is a co-founder of the Green Party movement in the United States and is co-author of "Green Politics: The Global Promise" (Dutton, 1984). She lives in Half Moon Bay.

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle

###