Boston public radio station WBUR entered the debate this week over whether or not ballot-qualified candidate Dr. Jill Stein was worthy for inclusion in the gubernatorial debates.

In Controversy Grows Over Excluding ‘Outsider’ Candidates From Debates, WBUR features this nails-on-chalkboard quote from its own big-d Democratic political analyst, Dan Payne:

Because Jill Stein will get one quarter of the time and camera and she has not a million-to-one chance to become governor. For her to be given a seat at the table is unfair to the voters, who will then have to wade through the clutter of a fourth candidate in the race.

My question to WBUR: care to hire me as your Green-Rainbow Party political analyst? Who the hell appointed him as a guardian and protector of “the voters”?

From the Stein for Governor campaign:

The 9-member Boston media consortium sent a letter to Jill Stein today telling her that they intended to exclude her from their upcoming televised debates.  The letter, signed by Jen Peter of the Boston Globe, said that “Jill Stein does not meet the criteria for participation”.

Upon being informed of the letter, Stein responded “The people of this Commonwealth deserve to hear about how badly the Beacon Hill establishment has failed them under both Democratic and Republican governors.  They deserve to hear from the one candidate who isn’t taking money from the lobbyists or from the favor-seeking CEO’s.  They deserve to hear from the one candidate who is advocating for secure jobs across the Commonwealth – not just low wage casino jobs in three communities – for universal health care, for comprehensive fair tax reform and for ending the wars that consume 10 million Massachusetts federal tax dollars each day.  These badly needed solutions will assuredly be ignored in the debates if we let the three establishment candidates crowd me off the stage.”  

As the dust settled on the first televised debate for this year’s gubernatorial contest in Massachusetts, one clear truth emerged. There was one candidate, and only one, who could legitimately be called “the people’s candidate.”

While Scott Brown positioned himself as the people’s candidate in his January special election victory, a late surge of campaign cash and get-out-the-vote efforts from Wall Street executives and lobbyists and other special interests surely put his campaign over the top. Capitalizing on the Democratic Party machine’s condescending sense of entitlement to the late Senator Kennedy’s seat, Brown asserted that it was “the people’s seat”, and rode his truck right into the leadership vacuum that the Democratic Party has helped to create. But Brown’s slick posturing does not make for genuine leadership. And as economic and ecological meltdown continues, that leadership vacuum continues to grow.

Enter Jill Stein. Mother, medical doctor, public health advocate, climate activist, and community leader. As the Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, Stein is running the kind of campaign that is easily marginalized and sidetracked. In this two-party political system, voters and pundits alike don’t know what to make of third-party political upstarts like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party (the Green-Rainbow Party is the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the U.S.). Even in Massachusetts, where 50% of registered voters are registered unenrolled, i.e. independent, there is a tendency to write off third-party candidates as a wasted or spoiled vote.  

Nothing else in the world… not all the armies…  is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

                                                           — Victor Hugo

Last night I got to see Bill McKibben deliver a typically rousing and depressing speech in his hometown and the home of the American Revolution, Lexington, Massachusetts. McKibben is one of very few leading lights building a global climate movement up to the task of preventing an all-out climate catastrophe. I credit McKibben more than any other single person with pushing those concerned about climate change to take meaningful collective action. So I was a little nervous when I got to ask him a question from the audience about something I find troubling about his approach.

Early in his talk, McKibben pointed out that the number 350 — equal to the maximum safe level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere — was entirely non-ideological. He went on to suggest that we can build a movement that can shame and pressure our elected officials to act to price carbon high enough that we begin to phase out our devastating use of fossil fuels. Missing from this approach, however, is McKibben’s own analysis that the paradigm of economic growth is an underlying cause of the climate crisis. While McKibben was clearly embracing the task at hand as a political one, he seemed excruciatingly timid about the fact that the political task at hand is an ideological one.