{news} Mass Greens "Gang Green" (weeklydig.com)

[Green Party-CT]

GANG GREEN  After supposedly torpedoing the Dems’ gubernatorial chances last time around, the Green-Rainbow Party girds for another go
JOE KEOHANE  
  Remember 2002? There was something so supremely hysterical about Shannon O’Brien, coming off a series of jaw-droppingly bad gubernatorial debate performances, evoking the dread specter of Ralph Nader to dissuade people from voting for exceedingly polished and likable Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

“Ultimately, the voters of Massachusetts are very smart,” O’Brien said. “They're not going to put someone in there who needs on-the-job training.”

Ironically, minutes later, O’Brien got soundly clubbed by Romney to the tune of 10 percentage points. Stein took 3 percent. Republican control over the corner office continued, and the navel-gazing about throwing your vote away began anew. 

This time around, with the field already crowded with left-ish candidates, the talk is expected to intensify, but longtime anti-poverty activist and Green-Rainbow candidate Grace Ross isn’t having any of it.

“If people think they’re going to get what they want from government,” Ross says, “without having a real political debate that talks about the things that matter the most to us, then they have a misconception. We’re not going to move this government back to being progressive unless we have several progressive candidates running at once.”

The Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party—a four-year-old alliance formed partly to alter the Greens’ image as a party of middle-aged liberal white women, and partly to bail out the Rainbows, who numbered like 400 before the merger—unapologetically represent the far left in this year’s race. Calling for an end to poverty, war, global warming and corporate welfare, and encouraging diversity, tolerance and a living wage, Ross, along with 22-year-old running mate Wendy Van Hornec, is sick of what she calls the “institutional failure” of the state government to stand up to “the national administration” on economic, environmental and geopolitical issues, and to effectively represent those citizens struggling to stay afloat amid Massachusetts’ increasingly inhospitable economic climate.

“I think the first commitment has to be to the voices of people and to make sure regular people on the ground aren’t struggling with impossible circumstances,” Ross says. “And we all are. We’re either working two or three jobs trying to make ends meet, or we’re underemployed and we’re desperately wandering around trying to find a job that will pay enough for us to put food on the table and pay the rent.”

While still light on hard solutions to the state’s problems, Ross is heavy on idealism. She suggests harnessing the money and brainpower behind the BU biolab and putting it toward finding a solution for global warming; she’s calling for a reform of the income tax to ease the burden placed upon what she calls “the regular folks,” insisting that “if people saw their taxes going to what they wanted them to go to, they’d be fine with [paying the income tax]”; and she wants to implement a Canadian-style universal health care system to replace our shiny new one, which she feels places an undue burden on the already-cash-strapped citizenry.

But will the message resonate? For all their discontent with the two-party system, voters’ general wariness of long-shot third-party candidates can be ascribed to three things: 1. The fact that third-party politicians are generally unpolished and sometimes seemingly nuts (looking at you, Libertarians). 2. A fatalistic fear of throwing a vote away and swinging the election from the bad guys to the badder guys. 3. A lack of relevant experience on the part of the candidates.

Ross is smart and amiable, though somewhat untrained in the art of the punchy soundbite; and she clearly isn’t buying No. 2. As for the experience gap alluded to by Shannon O’Brien, she’s not having that, either.

“I don’t have an experience gap. I’ve been part of working from the people end of passing legislation for 23 years, and pieces of legislation that I helped write have been passed into law at the level of town and city bylaws, the state legislature 
 I bring the kind of experience that a citizen activist brings, and I’d be happy to have a contest with the other candidates on writing a good piece of legislation and seeing what happens with it. I’d love that.”

As for the horror scenario of spoiling it for whoever gets the Democratic nomination—well, if the Dems lose, it might ultimately have more to do with their just generally sucking than any third-party vote poaching. But while Ross notes, “I’m running against a pretty poor showing by the Democratic Party,” she remains realistic about her chances. 

“If I wake up on November 8, regardless of the percentage of the vote, regardless of what the polls say about public opinion, I want us to be able to look at things and say [we have] people working on 
 things that will make a concrete difference in people’s lives. I think people should vote for candidates who are about creating the changes we need.”
  
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