For an hour on a Monday night, a few hundred people imagined a different America: one where no one went bankrupt because he got sick, where homeowners were bailed out instead of bankers, and where the military was used for defense, not offense.
Standing at a podium at Humboldt State University, a small, slim woman promised she’d deliver just that — if only Americans could break free from the fear that the only real choices for president are two lousy choices.
“There’s just plenty of devastation here that would be wrought by both parties,” said Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president. “To go into the voting booth and vote for either Wall-Street-backed candidate, that is the definition of throwing away your vote.”
Stein is the only presidential candidate likely to visit Humboldt in what’s left of the election season. She’s a Harvard-trained physician, but for the last 10 years or so she’s been losing for the Greens — for governor of Massachusetts, for secretary of state, for state representative.
Greens are used to losing, but they keep at it with that same wistfulness some people get when they sing the lyrics to “Imagine.”
On Monday night, Stein urged around 300 people (Green Party count: 328) to talk to their Democratic friends about the Greens the way they would to a friend caught in an abusive relationship. Stop saying President Barack Obama is well-intentioned and doing the best he can. Help your friends really look at the drone strikes, the trampling of civil rights, the pathetic performance on jobs and health care. Remind those Democrats, “part of being trapped is apologizing for their abuser.”
And then, Stein said, start believing that this time is different for the Greens. This time people are more focused than they have been in decades on the problems targeted by the Occupy movement. This time people have seen what other mass movements can do.
“If it took three weeks in Tahrir Square, imagine what we could do in seven weeks,” Stein said. “… Let’s go viral and give them the run of their life that they are not expecting.”
Imagine that: People sharing Stein speeches like a Gangnam Style video. Stein on Saturday Night Live. Stein at the presidential debates. Right.
Stein knows better. After her talk, she acknowledged that if even Ralph Nader, with his vast name recognition, couldn’t put the party over 3 percent of the vote nationwide, she probably isn’t going to win this.
“I’m not holding my breath that we’re going to get to the White House,” she told the Journal, “but I’m not ruling it out.”
Her campaign manager, Ben Manski, was even blunter earlier Monday, in a call from Green Party headquarters in Madison, Wis. In California, where an average of major polls now shows Obama leading Mitt Romney 56 percent to 36 percent, he said, “Jill Stein has as much chance of winning California as Mitt Romney does.”
And anxious voters worried that a huge Stein surge could still give the state to Romney should relax, he said, because so far Stein is attracting “old-style conservation Republicans” as well as Democrats.
Stein has around 2 percent of the vote in national polls, right around the same as Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, Manski said.
He expects she’ll do better in California, maybe even double that. Four percent. Wow. Then Manski got that Imagine tone again. Every extra vote Stein gets, he said, is a vote that sends a message that people aren’t willing to keep accepting the lesser of two evils.
“Nobody in California should vote for Obama or Romney unless they absolutely agree with their policies,” he said. “If they agree with drone strikes, extrajudicial assassinations and bailing out Wall Street they should vote for Barack Obama, and if they agree that 50 percent of us are leeches, they should vote for Romney.” If they want jobs, if they want to bring home U.S. troops, if they want to end corporate control of the political system, Manski said, then they should vote for Stein and her party’s “Green New Deal.”
Stein is on a four-day, 11-campus swing through colleges in California, starting Monday at College of the Redwoods and wrapping up on Thursday at Pierce College in Los Angeles.
Before that, she’d stopped in at one progressive event after another, joining Cornell West on his Poverty Tour, visiting with Chicago teachers as their strike wound down, and speaking at the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
A movie director could cast Stein as the first woman president: She’s elegantly thin, her silver hair cut in a luxuriant bob, her smile warm, her voice just deep enough to rob sexists of the word “shrill.” Casting might prefer a little more height, but other than that, she’s a shoo-in. Until you listen:
“We need to end this racist and dangerous war on drugs.”
“Nuclear abolition is the solution.”
“We can solve the foreclosure crisis right now.”
“Our First Amendment rights are absolutely being shredded.”
“We’re calling for health care as a human right” (OK. Obama said much the same in a debate and got elected anyway.)
Mostly, these are not shoo-in sentiments.
In Arcata, at HSU, they got Stein a standing ovation after a 50-minute talk punctuated by round after round of applause.
But in the voting booth? All across America? We’ll find out in November.
This article appears in To Redeem a Felon.
There looms one element of the electorate that feeds the “Imagine” hopes for us Jill Stein supporters. That element consists of the 90 million NON-VOTERS in our country.
Of course not all of them are Jill Stein voters, but then neither are they Obama or Romney voters. Assuming that they aren’t likely to start coming out for the two Wall St. candidates, then their very numbers demand attention.
They need a strong stimulus to change their non-voting ways, and the more they get to hear and know about Jill Stein the more I believe they’ll get motivated to register and vote this year.
Again, the key is reaching them. The internet is a big help, but it can’t do it all. That’s why continued, and hopefully increased coverage by news sources such as this one (northcoastjournal.com) is vital for the word to reach these 90 million non-voters.
But it isn’t just non-voters. While Stein, Johnson and Goode aren’t going to be on the debate stage (and what a faux “debate” that will be), but they will be with Amy Goodman commenting and discussing what’s happening at the “scripted event” showing on the idiot tube.
So interested people who we can assume are largely made of voters can get to hear from 3rd party candidates that night after all.
These forward-moving steps taken by the GP are coming at a fast pace, and so hope lies higher than it did for any previous presidential election.
People worried about “wasting their vote” if they vote for Stein or Gary Johnson need to remember that Presidents are NOT elected by popular vote. They’re elected through the Electoral College.
Obama should easily win California. Once he gets 51% of the vote, he wins all the state’s electoral votes. With that in mind, voting for Romney is wasting your vote since it won’t get him one electoral vote. The same could be said of voting for Obama since any votes he gets after the 51% are meaningless. He won’t get any additional electoral votes by voting for him.
Obama will easily win California. Those of you reading this could get everyone you know to vote for Jill Stein and Obama will still win the state and all its electoral votes. The same could be said for those who want to vote for Gary Johnson but are afraid of wasting your vote. No need to worry about that in California.
This is the perfect time to vote for your real choice.
There is an alternative to supporting the two party corporate system- vote third party, vote green party. We should no longer be giving our consent to the corrupted corporate parties.
Yes, each party has a different base, so their message is different to attract and rile up the base. But neither mainstream party actually represents even their own supporters.
It is not only that these elected officials/politicians fail to represent the interests of their own supporters, they fail to protect the interests of the United States, and fail to uphold basic human rights. Can you accept the constant wars; corporate corruption; lack of health care; and elimination of basic human rights? Not me, which is why I vote third party.
“I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don’t want, and get it.” – Eugene Debs
The biggest election story in a generation continues to be censored…over half the nation’s eligible voters never participate!
Why would media ever threaten its campaign gravy-train by (correctly) impugning the legitimacy of U.S. election’s?
Maybe it’s their fear of a domestic drone-attack to finally deliver democracy to America?
I like the Green Party. I find myself more closely-aligned with Green Party stances than the Democratic Party, although the Libertarian Party is a close second for me.
The Green Party’s problem is branding. Ralph Nader destroyed the Green Party brand 12-years ago for level headed progressive like myself. I was 16 during Nader’s quixotic run, and although I admired his fight and message, I did not admire his lack of self-awareness regarding there being real differences between Al Gore and George W Bush, and his lack of self-awareness/humility regarding having help shift the 2000 race towards Bush (which he certainly did). The Greens admirably abandoned Nader in 2004, but the brand-damage was done; and although I have forgiven the Greens for their bad luck in having Nader turn out to be an egotistical, racially insensitive demagogue, I have little faith in the Greens rising to prominence as a “Major” third party any time soon because of this branding issue. It’s a similar problem to the Reform party post-Pat Buchanan hijacking the nomination in 2000 — tough to recover from.
I personally see the Libertarian Party right now as more-likely to mobilize all of the “non-voters” one of the previous commenters mentioned, and to thus shake up the near-broken modern political process. I have more in common with the Greens, but I have more in common with the Libertarian Party than the Ds or Rs, and I believe their brand is clean. I wish Gary Johnson (LP candidate) and the Greens could form some kind of working coalition over their shared interests in fixing the broken political system, using our military responsibly & getting the government out of people’s bedrooms. The Libertarians and Greens have more in common than people would expect, and I think some kind of hybrid between the two parties could garner a lot of support from the disillusioned masses.
At the least, I would like to see Libertarians and Greens working together during this election season to get voters to take a real look outside of the political mainstream — because the political mainstream (D and R) stinks right now. More and more thoughtful, independent-minded people are realizing that every day.