Now that Ralph Nader has slipped into the shadows from his former position as outspoken consumer advocate, we don't write as much about the Green Party. I was a little surprised when a press release from the New York State Green Party came across my desk late last week.

The release decried Obama's choice of a pro-war Secretary of State in Hillary Clinton. Here's an excerpt from the release:

"When Senator Obama launched his campaign, much of his appeal to voters in the primaries was his initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq during his time as an Illinois state senator," said Howie Hawkins, Green Party nominee for US Senator from New York in 2006. "During those primaries, Obama positioned himself as a peace candidate, despite his consistent votes in the Senate to fund the war, in contrast to antiwar legislators during Vietnam, many of whom voted to cut off funding for that earlier war. And now he has appointed to head the State Department a politician who has refused ever to admit that her support for the Iraq War was wrong."

They have some points, however I probably wouldn't have gone so far as too call Rahm Emanuel an "Iraq hawk," as the greens do a bit later in the release.

It was interesting to note that the release did not suggest an alternate candidate for Secretary of State, so I wrote to the listed contact and posed that question. The response was one that warmed my occasionally-cynical view of national politics by its purity, but one that offers no real solution to the Green's concerns over Clinton.

The response, from spokesperson Peter LaVenia was this:

"Probably no one that Obama would appoint: people like Noam Chomsky or Cynthia McKinney. Preferably we would like to see someone who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is in general supportive of peace efforts and real multilateral ties between countries and international institutions."