Did Jill Stein Help Elect Donald Trump?
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"She has been running for decades for any and every political office in sight — one attempt for a seat in the Massachusetts House, two tries for the governorship of Massachusetts, and now two runs for the White House. Over two decades, she has won only one race — a council seat in the town of Lexington, MA. In all her other political adventures, she did not just lose but fizzled. In her two races for governor of her home state she actually lost ground from one race to the other, going from 3.5 percent of the vote in 2002 to 1.4 percent in 2010. As a presidential candidate in 2016 she managed to grab only 1.1 percent of the vote as a second-time candidate, running against two extremely flawed main party candidates.
If she intended to promote a specific cause or causes Stein was drowned out by the general cacophony of far bigger personalities with fatter bank accounts and clearer messages. There was the teeming horde of Republican primary contenders, many of them famous names with long political careers. There was the Bernie Sanders Road Show with his boisterous young supporters on the left. There was Clinton’s historic run as the first female nominee of a major political party. And there was the three-ring circus of the tabloid celebrity who spoke of himself in the third person and liked to be called “the Donald.” Stein was even overshadowed by another third-party candidate, an inarticulate, and at times
befuddled, campaigner and former New Mexico governor named Gary Johnson, who ran on the Libertarian ticket.
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"Still, it is tempting to ask whether, in the final analysis, Stein’s candidacy, marginal though it was, might have made a difference in the final result. Might, in fact, have helped put Trump in the White House.
The 26 months since the election have shed little light on questions surrounding Stein’s presidential campaign. They have barely been asked, let alone answered. Again, why did she run? Once in the race, why did she not go all out on the pressing issue which gave the Green Party its name and its identity? Instead, her “Green New Deal” served to check off a box rather than as a driving force of her campaign."
Much has been made of the fact that Flynn sat next to Vladimir Putin at that lunch; far less has been made of the fact that Stein sat at the right hand of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s powerful press secretary, arguably the figurative head of RT, and the man with whom Trump’s operatives were discussing a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Stein has insisted that her campaign paid for the trip, but that merely raises a different question — why waste precious political donations in order to have lunch in Moscow?
On that same trip, Stein took the opportunity to make a campaign video address in the shadows of the Kremlin in which she expounds on the need to constrain “American exceptionalism.”
That is a position that politicians of various stripes could make on any given day, but as it was delivered in Moscow, outside the Kremlin, by a politician who had recently supped with Dmitry Peskov and Putin, the words take on more freight — she was delivering a script that Putin and Peskov could have written themselves.
And that was not Stein’s only message on Russia. Like Trump, she all but mirrored Russia’s own position on Ukraine, castigating the Obama administration for installing a government in Kiev that was “hostile to Russia.” So much for notions of democracy or independent rule among the former Soviet Union states.
If Stein’s actions and pronouncements seemed odd, so did the posture of her political party. The Green Party insists that it is not “just about the environment,” that it has in fact three other equal pillars: social justice, grassroots democracy, and non-violence. So hard is the party trying to distance itself from its fourth pillar (the environment) that the latter is now called “ecological wisdom.”
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The Green Party’s 2016 national convention just happened to be kicked off by Julian Assange, broadcasting from London to the party faithful on a large screen. The date was August 6, a little over two weeks after Assange had dumped over 19,000 hacked Democratic emails in what he proudly called his “Hillary Leaks Series.” The convention hall echoed with chants of “Wikileaks… Wikileaks!”
Someone wandering by might have mistaken the occasion for a Trump rally. And, since the election, Green Party officials have been anything but chagrined at the outcome. Midway through 2017 Sherry Wells, the Green Party’s chairwoman in Michigan, said, “In some ways, Trump is one of the best things to happen to this country because look at how many people are getting off their posteriors. So part of me is giggling.”
https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/01/29/did-jill-stein-help-elect-donald-trump/
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