Baltimore — Roseanne is not coming.

This news begins to spread through the Green Party convention in a mixture of tones, accompanied by a range of analyses:

It is sad that Roseanne is not coming. It is bad that Roseanne is not coming. (Roseanne’s not coming? Are you sure?) It is admirable: Should Roseanne really fly all the way from her macadamia nut farm in Hawaii to deliver a 10-minute concession speech acknowledging that she will not, in fact, become the Green Party’s next nominee for president of the United States? Talk about a carbon footprint.

There is a small cohort that will confess, either in an apologetic whisper or in a cranky diatribe, that it’s a blessing Roseanne canceled her planned appearance. Roseanne Barr, who placed second behind Massachusetts physician Jill Stein in the Green Party’s presidential nomination process, is exactly what the party members do not need here. Not when they are trying to be taken seriously, not when they are hoping to make a real impact on the national agenda, not when the mainstream media would just as soon pretend, post-Ralph Nader, that they’re a bunch of woo-woos.

(Oh, look! There is a Washington Post reporter here! Oh, no! The Washington Post reporter writes not for the politics section but the Style section, that notoriously cheeky annex of The Post that is, itself, slightly woo-woo.)

The Republicans will decamp to Tampa at the end of August; the Democrats will pour into Charlotte during the first week of September.

But here at a Baltimore Holiday Inn, the Green Party — the proud lefties who know they’re right — has gotten a jump-start. Approximately 290 delegates from 34 states have arrived to spend the weekend hashing out the major issues of America (which include, yes, the legalization of hash) and nominating their choice to take on President Obama and presumptive GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

At the presidential nomination vote on Saturday, people keep articulating that, with hopeful, optimistic defiance:

“Jill Stein will become the next president of the United States of America!”

And then they chuckle, self-aware, as if unsure about getting too caught up in the dream.

A party on a mission

“I’m going all the way back to Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” John Rensenbrink says. The abolitionists and the suffragettes, “it took them a long time. But half the battle is just showing up.” This is how he views the mission of the Greens.

Rensenbrink is a co-founder of the Green Party of the United States. He is 84, a white-haired retired political science professor. On Friday, he leads a seminar called “A Proposed Open Letter to the American People.”

Rensenbrink and Karen Young of the Green Party of New York have drafted a multipage missive — about corporate greed; about global warming; about the Occupy movement, which the Green Party has tenderly embraced. In this seminar, they seek editorial feedback from fellow party members.

As this is a very popular seminar, it also contains a fairly accurate cross section of the attendees of this convention: There are more older people than younger people. There are more white people than non-white people. There are more batik prints and grizzly beards than typical in mainstream America, but fewer than one would see in Takoma Park.