Progressive attack on Aaron Dixon mounts

Citing to several reasons, including failure to register to vote, an unfinished divorce, several unpaid traffic tickets and a criminal record, the Northwest Progressive Institute asserts Aaron Dixon is unqualified for public office. One comment suggested that the Greens now have their own Will Baker.

The only legal qualification for office is an active voter registration. The rest of Aaron's history will certainly affect his level of voter support, but it does not make him unqualified. More important, Mr. Dixon's history really only matters if he wins, and nobody except Mr. Dixon himself has suggested he has even a ghost of a chance to win.

What the progressives are really worried about is that Dixon could peel off enough votes from the Maria Cantwell column to make Mike McGavick the winner. Thus, for all of the progressive's wailing and tearing of shirts about the Democratic Party's rightward drift the progressives still think a Democrat is better than a Republican.

If they knew their history they might think otherwise. Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive. Nelson Rockefeller, while not a true progressive, was still to the left of several sitting Democrats. I will leave it to someone else to determine where McGavick falls on the spectrum.

But the point is, and the progressives know this intuitively, that settling for the lesser of two evils is still evil.

The fact is, if third party sympathizers are going to let the "wasted vote" myth dictate their voting decisions, there really is no point for third parties to exist at all. They must come to recognize, and accept, that taking out a centrist candidate is a necessary hazard to moving political discourse in the direction favored by that third party.

Let's get real. We all know Dixon doesn't have a prayer to come out on top of this race. What the progressives have to decide is whether they are willing to sacrifice Maria Cantwell to the greater goal of becoming relevant.