The Pathetic Failure of Green Party Candidate Jill Stein

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By David Weigel

For the first time since 1992—seriously, it had been that long!—Ralph Nader opted out of the presidential campaign. The anti-Obama left-wing vote would be sought by Jill Stein, a sometime Green Party candidate in Massachusetts, who got some free press attention for 1) having previously run against Mitt Romney and 2) getting arrested when protesting her noninclusion in debates. Democrats didn't worry about her too much, but she polled as high as 2 percent in some surveys, and it wasn't hard to find the occasional Salon or TruthOut jeremiad demanding that the left punish Obama for his drone warfare ways.

How'd Stein do? Terribly! There's a hefty vote left to count in the West and in provisional ballots in states where Republicans played Parcheesi with polling places, but right now, Stein's won fewer than 400,000 votes nationwide. That's barely more than one-third as much as Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who left the GOP in a huff and ran an anti-war, pro-drug legalization Libertarian campaign. Roseanne Barr (yes, her), who ran a failed primary campaign against Stein (I should probably stop with the eyebrow-raise parentheticals) is pulling fewer than 50,000 votes. In Massachusetts, Stein ran fourth, with fewer than 20,000 votes, even though every Democrat in the state realized he could cast a spoiler vote if he wanted to. She's running behind Nader's smallest vote total in 2004 (463,655), when he left the Greens and their also-ran got 119,859 votes.

Why'd she fail? Pretty obvious. Media coverage of the race suggested that it would be close. Stein, like Nader, collapsed when protest voters got skittish about throwing the election away from Obama. You can see this best in Florida, where Stein currently has 8,757 votes. In 2008, Nader got 28,128 votes in Florida. (He ran on the Ecology Party ticket.)

So, add this to the pile of Much-Hyped Stuff That Didn't Matter. Perhaps there was an anti-Obama vote on the left. It largely didn't show up or shifted to Obama. You could blame Stein for running on an idiotic "Green New Deal" (as if the president had failed to fund enough green energy) when activists left energy to focus on Bradley Manning and drones. Or you could shrug, because in the Post-Nader era, left-wing third-party energy is limited to dilettante white leftists with no real interest in or ability to organize beyond their affinity group.

The Pathetic Failure of Green Party Candidate Jill Stein

 

[StatUS]

If she gets 5% then she's a success to me

I'm almost certain Johnson will.

 

[theworldismine13]

#hardforhill

 

[JahFocus CS]

 

[Pull Up the Roots]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox...s_not_the_savior_the_left_is_looking_for.html
People accuse Hillary of lying, flip-flopping and pandering, but Jill has those same qualities plus some really bad positions.


Jill Stein’s Ideas Are Terrible. She Is Not the Savior the Left Is Looking For.

Dan Savage on Jill Stein: Just No.

Anybody seriously voting for her because of her positions and not just to cast a protest vote


A vote for Jill Stein is a vote in favor of starvation.

 

[StatUS]

Well if Slate and Dan Savage hate Jill she must be the worst.

 

[Pull Up the Roots]

Jill Stein is for a moratorium on GMOs. Do you understand how disastrous that would be on our food supply? And how that would drive up prices on natural food?

 

[88m3]

Jill Stein’s Ideas Are Terrible. She Is Not the Savior the Left Is Looking For.
By Jordan Weissmann

Please don't.

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Now that Hillary Clinton has officially won the Democratic presidential nomination, chances are we're going to hear a lot more about Jill Stein. The Green Party candidate, currently polling in the low single digits nationally, has been gunning for the support of disaffected Bernie Sanders fans, urging them to “keep the revolution going” by getting behind her own long-shot White House bid. Tuesday, she was on hand at the Democratic convention to meet aggrieved Sanders delegates, some of whom formed a small crowd around her to chant, “Bernie or Jill.” Thanks to progressive grassroots rage, she may well peel off a few percentage points of the vote come the fall, when she's expected to be on the ballot in about 47 states.

JORDAN WEISSMANN
Jordan Weissmann is Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent.

Which is a pity. Because even by the standards of protest candidates, Stein—whose press team did not respond to an interview request—is an absolutely awful torchbearer for the far left. She's a Harvard-trained physician who panders to pseudoscience. She mangles pet policy issues. And her cynical retelling of the past eight years has nothing to do with the reality of recorded history.

Let's begin with Stein's platform. Some of the ideas, like a $15 minimum wage and free college tuition, are mainstream these days, thanks to the work of progressive activists and Sanders himself. Others, like moving to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 (while ditching nuclear), are deeply unrealistic, if admirable in spirit. And more than a few sound like they were hatched in an old Bay Area commune. Cut defense spending in half and close more than 700 foreign military bases? Sure, maybe after we get done levitating the Pentagon.

Tucked into this long, starry-eyed list of progressive causes are a few lines that remind you of the far left's fraught relationship with biological science. There's a call not just to label genetically modified foods but to “put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe.” Never mind that scientists have studied GMOs extensively and found no signs of danger to human health—Stein would like medical researchers to prove a negative. She would also “Ban neonicotinoids and other pesticides that threaten the survival of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.” This is a nod to the discredited theory that some pesticides are driving the collapse of honeybee populations (which, by the way, are not actually collapsing). Again, this is somewhat standard stuff on the far left these days, but coming from a physician, it's discouraging. It is also in keeping with the last official Green Party platform, from 2014, which supports the “teaching, funding, and practice” of “alternative therapies” such as naturopathy and homeopathy, i.e. funneling money into quack medicine. (Stein first ran for president as a green in 2012).

Worse, though, was Stein's response during a Reddit AMA when she was asked about her party's stance on vaccines. Her answer was a 380-word evasion in which she allowed that childhood immunizations had “made a huge contribution to the public health” while simultaneously suggesting that Americans have good reason to be wary of the drug approval process and that there's “a lot of snake-oil in this system.” She wrote:

In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs. In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs. So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US. So who wouldn't be skeptical?
Despite clearly understanding that vaccines are safe, Stein is pandering to her audience by telling them their worries are justified and offering fuel for those fears by painting a dark picture of a corrupt regulatory apparatus. For comparison, consider Bernie Sanders' answer on the same life or death issue, as reported by as reported by the Daily Beast:

“I think obviously vaccinations work. Vaccination has worked for many, many years.” He went on to note, “I am sensitive to the fact that there are some families who disagree but the difficulty is if I have a kid who is suffering from an illness who is subjected to a kid who walks into a room without vaccines that could kill that child and that’s wrong.”
That's a straightforward answer about vaccines. Risking the health of other people's children to satisfy your own minority concerns about medical science is wrong.

Mercifully, dying pollinators, GMOs, and vaccines aren't at the core of Stein's campaign. But she doesn't fare much better on other issues. During a June interviewwith Cenk Uygur, Stein explained her strategy for wooing voters more or less boiled down to promising them she would forgive their student loans. “There are 43 million young people, and going into middle age and beyond, who are trapped in predatory student loan debt,” she said. “They happen to be very well-networked. They're really good at self-organizing on the internet. There’s only one place that they can put their votes in order to cancel their debt.” (The section starts at 17:34 in the video below.)

This, it should be noted, is not a very progressive idea, despite its popularity among the collegiate left. A disproportionate amount of student debt is held by comfortably paid professionals who went to private colleges or graduate school. Forgiving their loans in a mass jubilee would not be the greatest use of limited resources if you're interested in fighting inequality. But forget all that for the moment.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were far less toxic than bonds that weren't backed by the housing agencies. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's stated explanation, that the central bank was trying to make it easier and cheaper to get a mortgage by reviving the market for mortgage-backed securities, makes plenty of sense on its own.

If Stein is trying to simplify the "secret bailout" story so she can say the government is going to do for students what the Fed did for the banks, then she's lying about the details of a conspiracy theory. But Occam's razor suggests Stein probably just has no idea what she's talking about. That's likewise disturbing, given that this is the single policy proposal she thinks is going to win her 43 million voters, the amount she claims she'll need to win the presidency. Beyond that, Stein wants to move the various Federal Reserve banks into the Treasury Department, ending their independence while also putting an end to fractional reserve banking, which underpins our whole monetary system. I'm sure she has all the details of those grand plans straight, too.

Top Comment

So maybe Jill Stein and Ben Carson can get together and start another party: Physicians Who Don't Understand the Science that Underpins Their Profession 2.3k CommentsJoin In

Finally, I would be remiss not to note the plainly self-interested way in which Stein elides the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. This is, of course, standard third-party politicking. But in Stein's case, it's especially egregious. Her 2015 response to the State of the Union is replete with comments about how Barack Obama “led the charge for austerity” and “made the Bush tax cuts permanent.” Obama did, of course, team with John Boehner to push for a grand bargain to raise taxes and cut entitlements—a push that failed, by the way. He also made some, though not all, of Bush's cuts permanent. But he did so in the face of a radicalized Republican opposition that has repeatedly threatened not to raise the debt ceiling (which, according to Stein's On the Issues page, she also opposed raising, preferring a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts—the definition of austerity) and at one point followed through on its threat to shut down the government. To ignore that is to blind yourself to eight years of political history.

I could go on. This doesn't even touch the sort of mundane conspiracies Stein likes to weave into her rhetoric, such as the Trumpian claim that the government's “unemployment figures ... are designed to essentially cover up unemployment.” The bottom line is that Jill Stein is not a figure anybody should trust. She's not just an uncompromising progressive. She's a panderer who raves about subjects about which she appears to lack the vaguest understanding. She is right about one thing: There is a lot of snake oil in the system. And she's selling it.

Jill Stein’s Ideas Are Terrible. She Is Not the Savior the Left Is Looking For.

 

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[Domingo Halliburton]

Roseanne Barr (yes, her), who ran a failed primary campaign against Stein is pulling fewer than 50,000 votes. In Massachusetts, Stein ran fourth, with fewer than 20,000 votes, even though every Democrat in the state realized he could cast a spoiler vote if he wanted to

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

Sounds like kingsmen could get behind her.

 

[StatUS]

Jill Stein is for a moratorium on GMOs. Do you understand how disastrous that would be on our food supply? And how that would drive up prices on natural food?

On the other side you have Dems running with Monsanto and big agriculture while they use pesticides that the World Health Organization has called possibly harmful. The problem with people who dislike left positions is they think they're absolute without malleability. So if someone like Jill gets into office there probably won't be a nationwide study on GMOs like Switzerland but you could actually have somewhat of a fight against these food corporations and we can get policy that gets met halfway.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

She's objectively smart, but I just can't get that liberal. She's out of her mind when it comes to policy.

 

[Deutsche Bank]

Yehudi think piece writers coming out hard against other Yehudi candidates who tell the truth in this election.

In that case, the far left should probably just stay the fukk home then. shyt, gays already have a gang of rights. HiIlary's whole shyt is horrible trade agreements and a gigantic goddamn bank bailout when the cascading defaults begin.

Not to mention all the bullshyt war she's gonna start trying to overcompensate for being a woman under the guise of "standing with Israel".

Might as well be voting for '04 George W. Bush.

@ Democrats now being pro-GMO trying to cape for this scumbag Hillary. Jesus fukking Christ what a buncha cucks.

 

[thaKEAF]

@JudgeJoeGorilla

Spoiler