JAMES LILLIN
Staff Writer
Currently averaging a 3.6 percent on the RealClearPolitics aggregate of major national polls, Jill Stein is helping the Green Party reach new heights of popularity and recognition, considering it hasn’t broken .4 percent of the final electoral vote since Ralph Nader ran in 2000.
Stein has succeeded in bringing in and consolidating huge swaths of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ voters, while offering an alternative option for voters who view the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton matchup as a particularly troublesome choice between the lesser-of-two-evils. Sanders voters, while seemingly more reluctant to turn Stein into a living meme, are nonetheless enamored by her progressive credentials, seeing her as a sort of Sanders 2.0. Stein herself has helped to cultivate this comparison by inviting Bernie to take over leadership of the Green Party, saying that “he could lead the ticket and build a political movement.”
Plenty of essays and articles have been written tearing apart the reductionist lesser-of-two-evils view, urging pragmatism over idealism, especially in an election where a xenophobic, hate-mongering clownfish has a decent shot at the most powerful political office on the planet.
While I sympathize with the appeals to pragmatism, many of them cross a line into condescension that runs counter-productive to the goal of upping major-party turnout. There’s a better argument to be made that doesn’t delve into the complex and deeply personal morality of making a choice come election day: Jill Stein is not a good candidate.
Of all previous U.S. presidents, only four (Taylor, Grant, Hoover and Eisenhower) had never held elected office prior, but all either served as major war-time generals or as senior-level cabinet advisers to a sitting president. Stein has never held any type of elected office or government position, and would be far and away the most inexperienced presidential candidate this year were it not for the aforementioned clownfish.
The presidency is not a game of ideological battles and rhetorical arguments, but a complicated, multi-tiered job requiring years, if not decades, of public service, foreign policy-knowledge and economic foresight. President Barack Obama said it best in a 2010 Rolling Stone interview: “If there were easy choices, somebody else would have solved it, and it wouldn’t have come to my desk.”
Clinton and Stein agree on the vast majority of issues (many economic policies, gun control, abortion access, opposition to the TPP, demilitarization of the police and more), but they diverge slightly on many of the same points where Clinton and Sanders had their most contentious arguments. Clinton wants higher regulations on fracking, to remove marijuana from the Schedule 1 list of controlled substances, and make public college debt-free. Stein wants to completely ban fracking, legalize marijuana, and not only make public college free but cancel all outstanding student debt.
But Stein also shares a penchant for extreme progressive idealism that occasionally seems more concerned with generating tight soundbites than it does reality. Her Green New Deal states that “we can, and must, shift to an economy in which 100 percent of our electricity is generated renewably,” a noble goal with which it’s hard to disagree. Unfortunately, she offers no details on how she’ll achieve this goal, or any insight into the complex network of subsidies, opportunity-costs and free-market forces that would need to be fought against. Instead, she offers empty platitudes like her assertion that the entirety of the U.S. will stand behind a sudden “World-War II scale mobilization” to achieve the Green Party goals.
She advocates for an immediate $15 federal minimum wage further indexed to inflation, allowing no time for businesses to transition to the new environment. She advocates for unilateral nuclear disarmament, complete unambiguous elimination of all aid to Israel, and perhaps most disastrously, an immediate cut of at least 50 percent to the US military budget which, despite perhaps being a reasonable long-term goal, would have disastrous immediate consequences on both global and domestic safety and stability.
Moreover, Stein has a shockingly unscientific streak for a licensed medical practitioner. She has a relatively vague stance on vaccines and believes in placing a complete moratorium on GMOs, while the American Association for the Advancements of Sciences reports that 88 percent of scientists polled believe that GMOs are safe for consumption.
She believes that “we should not be subjecting kid’s brains” to wireless internet, despite absolutely no evidence that it causes harm. Perhaps most troublingly, she recently tweeted that “Nuclear power plants = weapons of mass destruction waiting to be detonated,” demonstrating a level of scientific and environmental ignorance that could have disastrous consequences as a commander-in-chief.
Stein appears to be, by all accounts, a good person and an even better activist, but as a candidate she leaves much to be desired. While she shares much of Sanders’ idealism and progressive goals, she has a fraction of his qualifications and an even more serious penchant for substanceless plans. While Stein may be closer to Sanders on an ideological level, Sanders has spent the better part of a year dragging Clinton further left into progressive land. Want to see any of Sanders’ ideas actually realized? Bite the bullet, and vote for Clinton.