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.