From the Margins, Stein Seeks to Change Policy Discourse

In early August, a crowd of protesters began gathering outside the downtown Philadelphia offices of the Federal National Mortgage Association. There were about 50 protesters outside the offices by 1 p.m. lobbying peacefully for the embattled mortgage lender to drop two foreclosure cases, according to local media reports.

By 1:30, a smaller group of protesters had tried to enter the building illegally and started a sit-in in the lobby of an adjacent bank. By 2:30, officials met with two of the protesters facing foreclosure with little success, and, by the end of the day, two of the Green Party’s top organizers, 2012 presidential nominee Jill E. Stein ’72-’73 and her running mate Cheri Honkala, were in jail.

Stein and Honkala were among five arrested and charged Aug. 1 with unlawful entry and conspiracy for a sit-in. As Republican nominee Mitt Romney mulled over his looming vice-presidential pick and President Barack Obama campaigned in Ohio, the Green Party presidential candidate spent the night in jail. The game is rigged against third parties, she meant her actions to say, and it is time somebody did something about it.

“Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense,” Stein said, by way of explaining her protest. “It’s time for this game to end. It’s time for the laws to be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators. It’s time for a new deal for America, and a Green New Deal is what we will deliver on taking office.”

A Lexington, Mass. physician, Stein is not running to win, but to prove a set of progressive points. Her party has come a long way since Ralph Nader first pushed it onto the national stage more than a decade ago, but Stein knows that in an era of big media and bigger political parties, a poorly-funded third-party candidate with a career in medicine cannot win.

So she attends events like the one in Philadelphia. In mid-September she spoke at Occupy Wall Street’s one-year anniversary. Late in the month she called on supporters to “storm” the Commission on Presidential Debates. She tries, as the Greens always have, to provide an alternative to the two-party system, while forcing its hand.

“It’s not necessarily having someone elected to office, it’s having the third party that drives an agenda forward,” Stein said in an interview with The Crimson. “Sometimes you can win the day without winning office.”

The overwhelming question surrounding the campaign, political experts say: Can Stein push her peripheral third party to the forefront of the political debate with just five weeks until November 6?

From the Grass Up

The Green Party has always faced an uphill battle to find widespread support. Barred from debates and forgotten by mainstream media, 2012 will be no exception. But, in the wake of the Occupy movement and the threat of government shutdown, the political climate might be right for a party that tries to loosen, if only slightly, the hold of the two-party system that dominates the national political landscape—or so Stein hopes.

“We’re in a unique moment now in American history. It’s a moment where I think people realize it is up to us to bring the breaking point to the tipping point,” Stein said.

Stein is unwavering in her policy proposals, which are radical in comparison to either mainstream party. The keystone of her platform is a “Green New Deal” that she says would create 25 million jobs while laying the foundation for a more sustainable economy and environment. Specifically, the plan calls for $700 billion in local investment offset by defense cuts and further health care reform, as well as tax increases for the country’s highest earners.

Without big donors, Stein’s campaign could be described as human-scale. Though it has far-reaching ambitions, the camp is largely grassroots, relying on Twitter and alternative media to get the word out.

Ideologically, the Stein campaign is not unlike its Green Party predecessors, and her own political story echoes that of her party.

First organized in the 1980s, the Green Party was originally a collection of local parties united to advance of environmentalism, non-violence, social justice. With Nader, a Law School graduate, at its helm, the party became better established in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Like most Greens, Stein’s first involvement with the party was local. As Nader was reaching the zenith of his political career, Stein quietly began hers in 1998 in Lexington, as a citizen advocate for recycling and pollution reduction.

Stein is a Harvard-trained physician—she graduated from Harvard College in 1973 and then Harvard Medical School in 1979—and she says her early involvement in politics was an outcropping of her work as a physician.

“I’m now practicing political medicine, because it’s the mother of all illnesses, and we have to fix this one to fix all the other things that ail us,” Stein said.

Early on, that meant raising awareness about toxic waste and industrial pollution, helping with local projects, and joining the group Physicians for Social Responsibility.

In 2002, she made the leap up from local politics and decided to run for governor of Massachusetts on the Green-Rainbow ticket. Her most memorable opponent: a successful businessman and failed senatorial candidate Mitt Romney.

Stein saw the campaign as a chance to capitalize on Nader’s success nationally and unsettle the two-party balance of party in Massachusetts. Though she ultimately earned just 3.49 percent of the vote—Romney won the election with 49 percent—Stein used the campaign to document the exclusion the two-party system, petitioning for inclusion in debates and election finance reform.

But more importantly, the election put Stein on the national stage. When Nader decided not to run in 2012, Stein was the heir apparent, having had several years of national media attention on programs such as NBC’s “Today.”

Stein says her political career was as unexpected as the movements that inspire it. Her political engagement began in the height of student discontent at Harvard in the late 1960s. As an undergraduate she witnessed Vietnam protests, civil rights rallies, and the storming of University Hall. Though her interests were not always political—“I did not see myself as a political person at all when I was at Harvard,” Stein said—the experience provided the framework that would later shape her political career.

“I think that is what independent politics are all about—the social movements are usually expressions of discontent,” Stein said. “In the ‘60s and the ‘70s it was about Civil Rights and the antiwar movement, and it triggered a lot of creative political thinking at the time.”

Now, Stein says, it is time to capture that discontent once more.

Fighting For Exposure

Third parties have an important but patchworked history in American politics. According to Harvard government professors, that history is largely one of exclusion by better-established parties.

The Greens, like the Know-Nothings or the Greenbacks, built their successes on a limited range of issues at a historically specific moment. They hoped to push the Democrats farther left, and force the party to reevaluate its platform.

“Traditionally, the rationale for this is education. It’s a way to get ideas out there,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Alex Keyssar ’69 said. “There are a lot of parties that have had significant regional strength or success confined to a state....And in so doing they pushed the major parties.”

The Green Party has had a good deal of local and even statewide success, but the jump to national politics is hard, Harvard history and literature lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy ’93 said. Stein is currently only on the ballot in 37 states. She plans a write-in campaign in others. And though she has qualified for federal matching funds, Stein has little financial support. The Democrats, by contrast, have enough of both to ignore a relatively quiet movement like the Green Party.

The question, professors say, is whether people are listening. If the Green Party could replicate the support it drew in the early 2000s and incorporate the highly energized but politically ambiguous Occupy movement, professors say it could make a difference.

“It’s no secret that a lot of people think the system isn’t working,” Keyssar said.

Still, a Gallup poll released Sept. 13 reporter only one percent of Americans planned to vote for a third-party candidate.

“There’s been a sea change [since 2000]. You have a much clearer and starker set of options and that’s one reason the Green Party isn’t going to get much traction this time around,” said McCarthy, who said he has voted for the Green Party in the past.

“There’s nobody, even Jill Stein, who thinks Jill Stein is going to be president of the United States. Given that reality, everyone who votes for Jill Stein has to realize that is a futile electoral act. It may be a noble one, but it’s futile.”

—Staff writer Nicholas p. Fandos can be reached at nicholasfandos@college.harvard.edu.