Jill Stein, the Green-Rainbow party’s candidate for governor, held a press conference last week to announce that she’d gathered enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
Too bad the press barely paid attention.
Stein—who ran for the same seat back in 2002, and for secretary of the commonwealth in 2006—announced that she’d gathered about 12,000 signatures, well above the 10,000 needed to get on the ballot. The successful petition drive ensures that two other Green-Rainbow candidates for statewide office—Holyoke’s Rick Purcell, who’s running for lieutenant governor, and Whately’s Nat Fortune, candidate for auditor—will also be on the ballot.
“It is now officially a four-way race, and it’s no longer just among the members of the Beacon Hill boys’ club,” Stein announced in an Aug. 4 press conference at the Statehouse.
The candidate went on to outline some key differences between herself and the other three candidates, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, Republican Charlie Baker and Treasurer Tim Cahill, a former Democrat who’s running as an Independent. Stein is the sole candidate to oppose bringing Massachusetts casinos, which she calls “job-killing machines” that would bring serious social and economic ills, hurt small and local businesses, and preclude the creation of high-quality, sustainable jobs.
“In the end, gambling is just an inefficient and regressive scheme of taxation,” her campaign says. “And because it puts Beacon Hill politicians in charge of a cash-rich business, it adds another source of corrupting money to a political system that has thus far proven itself unable to resist temptation. If we are ever to clean up Beacon Hill, we need elected officials who are not taking checks from gambling interests.”
Stein’s platform also focuses on job creation through green development, such as renewable energy production; a living wage for all workers; real healthcare reform that serves the public, not the insurance industry; and a public education system that’s well funded and that doesn’t rely on a high-stakes, often punitive, system of testing. (For more, see www.jillstein.org.)
“The three Beacon Hill insiders are giving us variations on a theme drawn from a very narrow part of the political spectrum—a part of the spectrum that favors the insiders, the big money interests, and entrenched power,” Stein said. “The people of our Commonwealth have deep and sincere disagreements with many parts of this approach. They deserve to have a voice in the debate that can speak for them.”
Her campaign, she added, “will bring an important new voice into the race, because without our voice in the mix, only one point of view—the Beacon Hill point of view—is being covered.”
She’s not kidding. Press coverage of Stein’s campaign has been anemic at best; the Boston Globe allotted all of 84 words to coverage of her announcement last week—and that was provided by State House News Services, not a Globe staffer.
Indeed, voters who want to know what Stein and her party are all about will have to work extra hard to get that information. While the two-party system that dominates political discourse has creakily opened its gate long enough to let in the Democrat-until-a-minute-ago Cahill, it’s slammed it tight in Stein’s face. That includes her exclusion from candidates’ debates, such as the first debate of the season, held earlier this summer at a Boston radio station.
Another Boston station, WTKK, has a debate scheduled for Sept. 16; tellingly, a recent article in the Boston Herald described it as a match-up of “the three candidates for governor”—none of whom, in the Herald’s telling, has the last name Stein.
