Medea Benjamin.

Medea Benjamin ran as the Green Party candidate for Senator of California in 2000. But she urged voters in swing states to support Kerry. "I looked at the world and saw how important it was to send a message to the world that George Bush's policies do not represent us as a nation," she says. "And I thought that joining in the massive effort to defeat Bush was the only way we could send that message. I do believe it was the right thing to do. I just wish we'd done it more effectively."

Benjamin ranks as an accomplished organizer. She co-founded the anti-war group Code Pink. And before that, she co-founded Global Exchange, an organization committed to social and environmental justice. At Global Exchange, she monitors labor rights in sweatshops and launches high-profile campaigns against business giants like Nike and The Gap. In 1999, Benjamin's work helped to shed light on the horrendous working conditions endured by garment workers in the U.S. territory of Saipan, which led to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against more than a dozen U.S. retailers.

Benjamin was also involved in organizing the Battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organization. "We have to get back the energy and momentum we had in Seattle in November 1999 and put a lot more attention now on the issue of not only stopping the free trade agreements but building the alternative economy that we want to see," she says.

She somehow has managed to write several books, including The Peace CoTs and More: 175 Ways to Work, Study, and Travel in the Third World and Bridging the Global Gap: A Handbook to Linking Citizens of the First and Third Worlds.

In 2002, Benjamin received international attention for a trip she took to Afghanistan with victims of 9/11. "Taking people who lost loved ones on September 11 to meet with people who lost loved ones due to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan was an effort to show the world community that we are not callous, uncaring people," says Benjamin. "One of the only things that will make it more difficult for the U.S. to attack another country is if we show Americans that these people from 'evil' countries are not evil people--they're people just like us."

I spoke to her by phone on November 3, moments before John Kerry gave his concession speech. We also communicated by e-mail a few days later.

Q: How could Kerry have lost by three million votes when the left was so united behind him?

Medea Benjamin: Kerry lost because he never provided a clear message or an inspiring vision about the direction this country should take. And we have to admit that Bush's fearmongering and gay-bashing worked. Bush kept on message, while Kerry didn't. On Iraq, Kerry had a terribly mixed message. It was very confusing to people to understand where he stood on that issue.

Up until the debates, it was a pretty lackluster campaign. It was almost as if those of us from the anti-war movement grimaced every time Kerry would open his mouth and say something about Iraq. I never put on a Kerry sticker, button, bumper sticker. Not for a person who supported the war in Iraq. And I know a lot of people like that.

The Democrats have really lost touch with their base. In this campaign, the ones who were out there going door to door for Kerry were the 527 groups like America Coming Together and MoveOn. While these organizations galvanized thousands of activists,

I witnessed a lot of duplicated efforts and wasted money by bringing in a lot of volunteers from out of state. Whereas when you look at the Republicans, they were more organized, united under a "central command" in the party, and rooted in community through church networks. The Republicans emphasized local volunteers.

Q: What does this Kerry defeat mean for Greens and third party politics?

Benjamin: This whole Presidential campaign has been devastating for the Greens. At our party convention, most Greens decided that the most important thing in this election was to defeat Bush, so we rejected Ralph Nader in favor of David Cobb, a candidate who pledged to run a campaign that focused on supporting Greens running for local offices and building membership within the party.

Another faction of the Greens, however, went with Ralph Nader, and this caused tremendous division within the Green Party. We spent a lot of time fighting among ourselves instead of becoming more effective in the campaign to defeat Bush. This election has not been good for third party politics in general. We didn't come out of this campaign with a strong sense among progressives of the need to build a third party. Hopefully, with this divisive election behind us, we can heal the wounds and get back to the basics of building the party from the bottom up.

Q: What kind of impact did Ralph Nader have on this election?

Benjamin: In terms of numbers, Nader got less than 500,000 votes total compared to 2.7 million in 2000. He didn't have enough votes in any state that would have changed the outcome. Nader's campaign was misguided. It became more a fight about ballot access--the support of rightwing groups to get him on the ballot and the dirty tricks by Democrats to keep him off than about the issues themselves. His campaign took up a lot of time and energy among progressives. It divided our forces rather than united our forces. And I don't think it was good for Nader himself, since it severely tarnished his stellar career.

Q: Is it time to end the "Green Dream" for now, the idea of building a viable third party?

Benjamin: It's not time to end the Green dream at all. It's time to go back to the basics, which is getting people elected locally. That's where we can win; that's where we can implement changes. I saw it in my own community of San Francisco, getting people elected to the board of supervisors, the board of education, and where we almost had a Green mayor. We have to maybe scale down our sights but tighten up our organizing and work locally. Presidential elections are not where Greens can have an impact now.

Q: You wrote in an article posted on the Common Dreams website in October that voter turnout would be key--specifically among African Americans, single women, and young people. What happened?

Benjamin: The turnout wasn't as big as we had expected. And it was countered by the turnout on the pro-Bush side. While we were registering voters, they were registering voters. While we were trying to mobilize the youth vote, they were mobilizing the youth vote. We didn't expect that to be as much on a par as it seems that it was.

Q: What did the international election observers that Global Exchange brought to the United States discover?

Benjamin: One aspect of the U.S. electoral system that our observer delegation found deeply disturbing is the partisan oversight and administration of elections. The secretaries of state hold office as either Democrats or Republicans, as do most county clerks. This is a major departure from the global norm. Partisan electoral management has led to accusations of bias, especially in Florida and Ohio.

Several other facets of U.S. elections caught the observers' attention. They were disappointed that touch screen voting machines--which nearly one in three voters used this year--do not provide a paper trail. They were confused as to why the public financing of the Presidential race--in which each candidate receives up to $70 million--is not duplicated for House and Senate races. And they were distressed by the laws in eight states that permanently disenfranchise felons, laws that create subcategories of citizenship.

The bottom line is that the observers believe that we here in the U.S. have a lot of work to do to reform our electoral systems and give all Americans the confidence that elections will be fair.

Q: Global Exchange formed Occupation Watch International Center in Baghdad. When were you last in Baghdad? What did you see?

Benjamin: I visited Baghdad four times in the last year and a half. I saw a continuous deterioration in the conditions for the Iraqi people, which is quite astounding when you think that they went through thirty years of a repressive dictatorship, including thirteen years of inhumane sanctions. The Iraqi people had all the reason in the world to believe that once they were occupied by the richest country in the world, at least their living standards would improve. But instead, what I witnessed was a precipitous decline.

First, the invasion knocked out most of the basic infrastructure for electricity, the water supply, and the communications system. Second, contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel were given the contracts for rebuilding instead of Iraqi companies--leading to tremendous bitterness among Iraqis. Then, the security situation deteriorated from the moment that the U.S. administrators dismissed the entire Iraqi army and police force, leaving a void that was replaced by looting, by mafia-type gangs, and by a free-for-all. Usually in a free-for-all, it's those with the biggest guns and the most guns who speak the loudest, and that's what happened.

Q: You are one of the founders of Code Pink. Tell me what being involved with Code Pink means to you.

Benjamin: Starting a new group like Code Pink and being surrounded by fantastic and passionate women in the last two years has been one of the most rewarding things that I have done. It has kept me sane during this period and will keep me sane as we go into this post-election phase. It has been astounding to see how this idea of Code Pink--an idea that came out of a meeting where we were joking about the yellow, orange, and red alerts of the Bush Administration and someone said we needed a code pink--really turned into a movement that now has more than 100 groups around the country, as well as international ones that spring up every month. Code Pink takes the anger and angst people feel about the present state of the world and combines it with joy, creativity, and humor.

Q: Where's the hope?

Benjamin: There's a lot of hope, just on the electoral front alone, where millions more people got involved with politics.

There is hope in the economic alternative that we are building in the fair trade movement. We should take heart that we have managed to slow down some of the worst trade agreements and that we are building alternatives that will last way beyond one Administration or another.

There is a lot of hope in the women's movement, which mobilized more than one million people in Washington, D.C., this April to support women's rights. Code Pink, the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority--a lot of us have been energized in the last year or two and have helped to energize a lot of young women. And that is not going away.

I see hope in the new activists that have been created. I see hope in the new networks that have been formed, and in the new technologies we've developed to communicate with each other.

And whenever I feel really down, I look for hope in the international community. In Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, there are movements that actually brought progressive movements to power. That is pretty awesome. And elsewhere in Latin America, you have strong grassroots movements, from Mexico to Chile, that are extremely active and energizing.

Q: You were arrested at the Democratic National Convention and at the Republican National Convention this year. Why do you keep getting arrested?

Benjamin: I keep getting arrested because they keep arresting me. I felt that the issue of the war had to be brought up at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in any way we could. That's why my efforts to get onto the floors of those conventions with banners and with words speaking against the war were absolutely critical. I didn't agree with people who said, "Give the Democrats their space, and we'll push Kerry after the election." I always thought it was critical to push Kerry during the campaign.

Getting arrested is never a goal, it's a consequence--sometimes a necessary consequence. We shouldn't be afraid of speaking out and putting ourselves at risk, even if it means getting arrested. With four more years of the Bush Administration, many more of us are going to get arrested. We are going to have to be very visible and very loud, speaking up against the assaults on our civil liberties, our environment, our right to choice, and for our passionate desire to relate to the rest of the world not through bombs and bullets and Bradley fighting vehicles, but through compassion and love and kindness.

Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive.