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.
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