I don’t care where you live in the US, or how safe or vulnerable the state you live in is, Obama is the only viable candidate for the Presidency. Not just because he’s the only one who will stop Romney achieving the most powerful political position in the world, which is important, but because despite Obama’s faults, he actually is the best Presidential candidate on the ballot paper.
What about Jill Stein?
The Green’s Presidential candidate Jill Stein is considerably less flaky than 2008’s Green candidate, Cynthia McKinney, whose paranoid brand of 9/11 truthism and willingness to believe any old rubbish she was told was a disgrace.
However, Stein is still running the kind of random, strategy-less campaign that shows the US Greens are not yet a developed political party ready to organise bin collections and job creation.
The Greens certainly have a policy platform that is more progressive than Obama’s, but politics is not just about promises it’s also about delivery. People don’t simply vote on policy, and that’s right, credibility is crucial.
The campaign
Stein has been arrested three times so far in this campaign which has demonstrated neatly a law of diminishing returns for this kind of stunt.
Her first arrest (outside the Presidential debates that she wasn’t invited to) got some national coverage and allowed her to highlight the fact that there aren’t just two candidates for President – but the next two arrests have barely made a ripple in local papers let alone nationals and are a complete distraction from reaching out to voters on issues that matter to them serving to underline the lack of substance to the party’s organisation.
Stein has made no attempt to use her Presidential bid to target the strongest Green candidacies in the numerous non-Presidential elections across the US where the party might have made some advances. Every four years the US Greens run an extraordinarily top down Presidential campaign that lacks any integration with their local candidates. Some of these Greens could actually get elected if they were treated a bit more seriously by the party. However winning elections isn’t part of the Greens’ strategy despite the fact that even modest electoral success would add vital credibility to future Presidential bids.
Instead of running for President Stein could be using the election to build winning seats at county and even the congressional level. There’s no attempt to sow seeds for the future in what could have been the climate change election. The fact that this is not part of her agenda means that she wastes every vote that is cast for her.
Vice-President Honkala?
My mind was made up about the Greens this time round when Stein’s running partner, Cheri Honkala, chose the occasion of her selection to make a series of bizarre allegations about the Democrats’ campaign machine, stating in a number of interviews that they behave like gangsters and would illegally harass her using all the power the state provides. Indeed in one interview she claimed the Democrats might have her killed – she’s simply not a serious person.
She’s not the first US Green to mistake vague thoughts that occur to them while daydreaming as facts, of course, but politicians who mistake their dogma for knowledge are dangerous, and not in a good way.
Breaking the two party deadlock
Third party candidates can and do make a splash when they are meaningful, indeed they can even decide the results of Presidential elections just as Ross Perot did when he allowed Clinton to win his first term as POTUS by winning a staggering 19 million votes in 1992. More importantly, although the US is, in general, a two-party state independents can and do win in elections up to and including the senate.
A serious Green Party would be prioritising creating winnable seats with credible candidates at these lower levels and using the national profile a Presidential candidacy provides to claw their way onto the political stage. Sadly, despite a largely sound set of policies, much of the US Green strategy relies on moral high-groundism, candidate worship and stunts.
Stein and Honkala are undoubtedly well meaning individuals, but they aren’t suited for high office and I couldn’t in good conscience recommend voting for them. I’ve no objection to voting for candidates who don’t or can’t win. I do object to parties who don’t take your vote seriously and have no strategy to turn those votes into real change.