In rare televised spotlight, Greens clean up remarks on vaccines and ‘Uncle Tom’
The Green Party's presidential ticket got a rare national audience Tuesday night, with CNN bringing Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka together for the third of its minor party "town halls." Two prior specials with the Libertarian Party ticket had made few headlines but proved competitive in the ratings. The Green Party special, pitched as the latest CNN event, was more daring, elevating the ticket with the least political experience in the field and the lowest level of public support.
Stein used most of the airtime to repeat her campaign's themes, from the cancellation of student debt to the cancellation of much military spending. She told one Bernie Sanders voter that the senator had been "relegated to a very low-profile role" at the Democratic convention — which was untrue — and told another that bankers' debt was "canceled" by the Troubled Asset Relief Program. When pressed to explain how she would force the Federal Reserve to buy student debt, Stein skittered around the details, and Baraka bailed out the segment with the suggestion that Americans "get propped up once in a while."
But most of the challenges from moderator Chris Cuomo centered on better-established candidate gaffes. Cuomo twice asked Baraka to explain why he had referred to President Obama as an "Uncle Tom."
"Well, it's not good to be Uncle Tom," he said. "There's no good Tom, none of that. What I wanted to do was basically to tell people who had — who still had this hope in Barack Obama, that if we were concerned and serious about how we could displace white power, we had to demystify the policies and the positions of this individual. So that was how it got framed, to sort of shock people into a more critical look at this individual. And that's how I did it. And I stand by that, even though it sounds very inflammatory and provocative, and probably very strange to this massive audience here tonight."
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/18/in-rare-televised-spotlight-greens-clean-up-remarks-on-vaccines-and-uncle-tom/?wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1
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