Does Everybody REALLY Hate Jill Stein? Not This Blogger!

There is a fascinating article in VICE about two-time Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Jill Stein and here is the title (good clickbait for sure!)

Everybody Hates Jill

So I had to read it for sure (see clickbait works!) and I was fascinated.

Now let’s make it clear – I don’t hate anyone; rather my feelings for Dr. Stein is to the contrary some degree of admiration and respect for her.  She won over 1,400,000 votes but yet Hillaryites are mad at everyone that might have caused her defeat (they have not blamed me yet!) including Stein:

In the process, she’s become both a punchline and a scapegoat. Despite receiving a mere 1,457,050 votes nationwide last year, she became the perfect patsy (alongside many other targets) for devastated Hillary Clinton supporters to project their post-election grief onto. In Clinton’s election memoir, What Happened, she writes, “Stein wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the fact that she won thirty-one thousand votes in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin was smaller than twenty-three thousand. In Michigan, she won fifty-one thousand votes, while Trump’s margin was just over ten thousand.”

Roll over Jill Stein and tell Rob Sarvis the news!  Sarvis was blamed for the Cuccinelli loss in 2013 even though the exit polls did not support that conclusion.

And I found wonderful how Stein feels about running for office:

Arguably, Stein’s career peaked during the 2002 Massachusetts governor’s race. She loved running for office—”it was so much fun,” she told me, oozing with girlish excitement—and performed surprisingly well, coming in in third place with about 3 percent ofe the vote.

Not quite BTSED and I am sure Jill Stein would never say it like that (maybe I shouldn’t have but it was to be good clickbait) but running for office can be exciting and even fun.  Ask some of the victorious Dems now in the House of Delegates.

It helps to run for office (and might be more fun) especially if you are essentially a multimillionaire:

When I emailed her spokesperson to confirm or deny whether she was a multimillionaire, a claim supported by a 2016 Daily Beast report, she sent me four paragraphs that emphasized how her “time, energy and financial resources have been focused on dismantling economic inequality and a political system serving the economic elite,” so yes, her “family income, being a two-doctor couple, has been very generous,” but make no mistake, her family has “had minimal expenses—driving old and used cars, rarely taking vacations (the last was ten years ago), sending [their] kids to public middle/high schools, eschewing fancy jewelry, clothes, vacation home and private clubs of any sort,” and then going into the “deceptive smears” she receives “from the DNC apologists.”

In short, yes, Jill Stein is a multimillionaire—she’s just unable to answer the straightest of questions in fewer than three paragraphs.

But I think Stein is being sold short in this very respectful article.  It is okay to be nuanced on issues like this.  Is it better for Jill Stein to spend her personal money to make her ideas better?  Look at Green registration:

Although Green Party membership fell to a 15-year low in May 2016, with only 216,200 registered Greens, Stein’s post-election recruitment efforts seem to be paying off—as of August 2017, there are 257,389 registered Greens throughout the United States, down from the 2004 high of nearly 319,000, but a solid number for an American third party.

BTW, the Libertarians have over 500,000 registrations!  And Stein was helping local parties:

Since the election, Stein has been traveling around the country to support local Green Party groups. When we first met, Stein was preparing to fly to Salt Lake City for the official launch of the Utah Greens.

But I do agree with the criticism of useless spending of millions on crazy recounts after the election:

It’s true that everything she does gets pilloried by national political observers. After Hillary Clinton’s razor-thin 2016 loss, Stein led an effort to recount the votes in the Midwestern swing states that gave the election to Donald Trump, raising over $7 million.

What could seven million dollars do for local Greens?  Greens in Virgnia?  (I could use some of that money for missions trips!)  Major ad campaigns for their ideas.

Let me make it clear:  I disagree strongly with some aspects of the Green Party platform.  Too much climate change nonsense and globalism.  But also some things I do agree with:  Fewer US wars.

But I admire the heck out of Dr. Jill Stein for running and standing for what she thinks is right.  We do need choices – a lot more choices – at local and state and the national level for politics.  Third parties seldom win but they do influence the debate.