Dream Team
Cornel West, Jill Stein, Chris Hedges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i9BKJR9Nro Chris Hedges.
Jill Stein, 2016 Green Candidate, Now Running Cornel West’s Bid
By Gregory Korte 6/21/2023
Cornel West, the Ivy League academic and progressive activist mounting a third-party campaign for president, has chosen former Green Party candidate Jill Stein to help his challenge to President Joe Biden from the left.
Stein said Wednesday that she’s serving as the “interim coordinator” for the West campaign, a catch-all role that encompasses fundraising, communications and campaign management until West can build a more traditional campaign.
Stein’s role will likely rekindle the debate in liberal circles over whether third-party campaigns like West’s could divide the Democratic vote and make more likely the election of former President Donald Trump in 2024, assuming that he becomes the Republican nominee.
Many Democrats blame Stein for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election, pointing out that her vote total exceeded Trump’s margin of victory in the crucial battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Her involvement also signals that West will make a credible bid for the Green Party nomination, after initially filing in the People’s Party, a move that would ease his access to many state ballots and provide him with a party organization with a history of fighting access battles.
“I got involved as he was making a rapid transition into the Green Party process,” Stein, who received undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard, told Bloomberg News.
“Green campaigns often don’t have oodles of money to hire large teams of corporate lawyers to handle these things like filing campaign finance reports and getting on the ballot,” she said. “The thing about Greens is we’ve done it a lot and we know how to do it and we’ve had some success doing it.”
One of her key roles in the West campaign, she said, will be to help him get on the ballot in enough states to make him a national candidate. American third parties often face forbidding ballot access laws that require high signature thresholds or a history of past success in order to qualify for an election.
Stein appeared on 44 state ballots in 2016, winning 1% of the popular vote and coming in fourth nationally. West endorsed Stein in that race.
She denies having played the spoiler, citing studies showing that many of her supporters would have simply not voted if she hadn’t run.
“Certainly the power elites are going to go to the mat to protect their advantage,” she said, arguing that outsider candidates like West would gain traction as long as the two major parties continue to offer voters “an abysmal selection of candidates.”
Stein, who was also the Green Party candidate in 2012, cited an Economist/YouGov poll this month showing 44% of US voters said a third party was necessary, compared to only 29% who said the Republican and Democratic parties were enough.
West, who has leveraged his posts at Harvard, Princeton and Yale to become a prominent progressive media commentator, hopes to build a multiparty political system that would break the two-party monopoly on governing in the US, Stein said.
“I’m just thrilled and delighted to have such an eloquent and accomplished voice as Cornel West advancing our agenda,” she said. “His vision is really made for this moment. There are so many people who are hurting and are locked out and feel that they’ve been left out of our political system.”
