In case the euphoria of last weekend's well-attended Nader rally at Key Arena has not worn off yet, here's a reality check.

Fifty thousand people demonstrated in Seattle last fall against the free trade policies of Jim McDermott. But not many of them, judging from the numbers, voted to stop him.

In Joe Szwaja, the Green Party is explicitly trying to challenge McDermott's free trade cheerleading at the expense of labor and the environment. Szwaja, alas, is not a millionaire; he's a schoolteacher. He didn't saturate the airwaves with campaign ads; nobody can remember his name, let alone pronounce it.

And, like Curt Firestone's Green-based city council run last year, he did only a bit better than ballot placeholders who didn't campaign at all; in this case, in last week's primary Szwaja pulled 14%--fewer people than filled Key Arena at $10 a head to hear Nader--and a phantom Libertarian Party candidate, Joel Grus, got 8%. Either progressives are a much smaller minority in Seattle than the WTO protests and Nader shindigs would indicate, or, more likely, they don't vote.

Either way, it's far easier to get third party votes if you're a billionaire wingnut than if you're a schoolteacher who can't afford TV. It's hard to tell which is the chicken or egg: do people not vote because government is only agame rich people play, or is government only a game rich people play because people don't vote? Or do people vote against their own interests because they haven't internalized the truth that politicians lie during campaigns, with no consequences? (Ask George Nethercutt.) Regardless, it means challenging the corporate hegemony of the Republicrats, even at the local level, is going to be very difficult. It's one thing for liberal city council candidates to sign a card and call themselves Green, even as they retain their lifelong Democratic affiliations; it's quite another to build a separate base of candidates, and officeholders, whose main loyalty is to the policies you advocate. The future of the Green Party isn't with a movement star like Nader running for the country's biggest prize; it's with ordinary, local, blue collar candidates like Szwaja challenging corrupt, bloated Republicrats like Jim McDermott.

To mount an effective challenge to corporate control of the state--that is, to get public policies changed for the better as a result of our work-- requires both a committed volunteer base and a message that, once heard, resonates with apolitical Americans. The Green Party, "five city council members" aside, isn't there yet. In one of the nation's most liberal--in its good and bad senses--cities, where awareness of Nader's inert 1996 campaign was high, it will be interesting to see whether he builds substantially on his vote total from four years ago. The Greens played to the left's strength at Key Arena; we know how to throw rallies. What we don't know how to do is elect people. Yet.