Last year, she offered Massachusetts voters a progressive choice for governor. Now Jill Stein, a physician and leader in the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party, is jumping into the 2012 presidential race, running to the left of Barack Obama.
Stein announced her candidacy for the Green Party of the United States’ nomination last week, calling for an end to corporate control of the government and a serious commitment to environmental protections.
Her platform includes a “Green New Deal,” in which the government plays a direct role in creating new jobs in sustainable, environmentally sound fields; a moratorium on home foreclosures; free higher education and forgiveness of student loans; universal health care based on the Medicare model; and serious efforts to reduce carbon emissions and head off climate change.
So far, Stein faces one other candidate for the Green’s nomination, Kent Mesplay, a long-time activist with the party in California who works as an air quality inspector for the County of San Diego.
As the Green-Rainbow’s 2010 gubernatorial candidate, Stein won just 1.4 percent of the vote in a tight race between Democratic incumbent Deval Patrick and Republican Charlie Baker, with former state treasurer Tim Cahill playing the wild card role as an Independent.
That poor showing aside, Stein made waves during the campaign, questioning, for instance, the details of the Cape Wind project and noting that Patrick had accepted campaign donations from National Wind, the utility that stood to profit from the project. In keeping with Green Party practice, Stein vowed to refuse contributions from corporate donors and lobbyists.
Stein’s positions in that race—she called for single-payer health care and sensible drug policy reform, and argued that the alleged economic benefits of legalizing casinos were false and would be outweighed by the economic and social costs —should have endeared her to progressive voters. But in the end, it appears, many were swayed by the Democratic argument that she was a “spoiler” candidate who would take votes away from Patrick and put Baker in office.
(Patrick, of course, won that election; among the top priorities of his new term: legalizing casinos in the state.)
No doubt, Stein will be tagged with the same spoiler label in the presidential race. Certainly she’s pulling no punches in her evaluation of either major party.
In her campaign announcement, she spoke about the public loss of faith in the political system and faulted both the Republicans and Democrats for bailing out Wall Street while regular people live in economic insecurity; for squandering resources on “wars for oil”; for “rolling back civil liberties and racial justice, plundering the environment, and driving us towards the calamity of climate change.”
But, Stein said, while “we stand here today at a time of great crisis in our nation,” there’s also an exciting energy, represented by the Occupy Wall Street movement. (Stein has spoken at Occupy Boston.)
“[T]he American people are standing up in a way we haven’t seen in generations, and they are providing the leadership that isn’t coming from the political elite,” Stein said. “The people have to take charge because the political parties that are serving the top 1 percent are not going to solve the problems that the rest of us face.”
