OK, people, tell me when you last contemplated Jill Stein, perennial Green Party candidate for president.
“Y’all, this is a little spicy, but I have thoughts,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a recent Instagram post criticizing Stein’s third attempt at running for president.
Truly, “a little spicy” and “Green Party candidate Jill Stein” do not often come up in the same sentence. Or paragraph. Or train of thought.
But this is the season when we start to fret a lot about third-party presidential candidates who could divert enough cranky voters from the real options to change the outcome of the election.
We will stop now for a moment to remember the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2000, Ralph Nader, who drained just enough support from Al Gore in Florida to tip the election to George W. Bush.
Or, um, Jill Stein. Whose presence on the ballot in a few swing states was just enough to keep Hillary Clinton from beating Donald Trump in 2016.
The danger isn’t nearly as great as it was a few months ago, when it looked like the race was going to be Biden-Trump and millions of depressed voters were wondering whether to write in the name of a close friend or, hey, George Clooney.
But still, you can never tell how things might get screwed up, particularly since any outcome not involving the election of Trump is going to lead to months of legal battles and protests.
So feel free to worry about Stein — or other presidential candidates, like Cornel West, whose only major achievement this time around has been not making the ballot in Pennsylvania.
They’re not exactly building a movement, and as Ocasio-Cortez said, if “all you do is show up every four years,” you really ought to be doing something else. Maybe running for a less ridiculous office, the way Ocasio-Cortez did when she knocked off an entrenched and deeply unthrilling House veteran in 2018.
Or sign up for a night-school class. Clean the basement. Reread “War and Peace.” The options are endless. Get a life.
"s VP and Billy boy had "the left" pissed off as fuck for screwing over labor and being a womanizing predator. So you had Clinton baggage attached to him. After the Democrats have now done all this work to rehabklitate Bush andn Cheney by becoming the party of Bush and Cheney this Nader blaming attack seems even more hollow.
do this brillant Pied Piper Strategy of colluding with the media propping Trump up to make him viable. So inevitability they will rehabilitate Trump too as the ratchet effect continues and the Democrats go from the party of Clinton to the party of Bush and Cheney to the party of Trump.
”We should improve society somewhat” is 
”That's the way things work, buddy, deal with it”.
