Mission Impossible? Local Green Party Launches Senate Campaign

By Jorge Casuso

To outsiders, it might seem like mission impossible.

But tell that to the two dozen Green Party supporters who gathered at the party's Pico Boulevard storefront headquarters Tuesday night to raise money and plot the strategy for U.S. Senate candidate Medea Susan Benjamin.

The supporters -- who included a disgruntled former Republican in a business suit, a couple who once ran as one for the single Senate seat, a well-known local street musician, an Egyptian and two college student representatives - were greeted by the smell of incense, the dim glow of candlelight and encouraging words from party leaders.

"Medea is the kind of person we were hoping we could attract," said City Councilman Michael Feinstein, one of the founders of the California Green Party. "Having her do that is a measure of the growth of the Green Party. Just having Medea is really a good sign that we are growing and succeeding."

A globetrotting nutritionist, economist and human rights advocate, Benjamin will go head to head in November with a wealthy and powerful incumbent, Dianne Feinstein, and her Republican opponent Tom Campbell. But the founding director of the San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange - which was instrumental in organizing the World Trade Organization protests last year in Seattle -- is ready to come out fighting.

"People are saying this is the moment for the Greens," said Benjamin, who worked for ten years devising more sustainable models of development in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization. "Ralph Nader (who is expected to win the party's endorsement for president next month) is really running a serious campaign.

"To meet Greens across the state has been an amazing experience," Benjamin said. "Life is more than fancy cars and fancy houses. Their values are different than that."

Benjamin hopes to take her grassroots campaign across the state by "environmentally sound" bus - bringing her message of economic and social justice to the farmlands of the Central Valley, as well as to the run-down neighborhoods of big cities. The message: "Boom for Whom?"

"Half of humanity," Benjamin said, "is struggling on $2 a day, while the three wealthiest Americans have more money than 600 million people.... Yes, we need jobs, but we want to be treated with dignity. We as Greens believe everybody should be treated with dignity.

"We are at a point where this isn't even a left-right issue," said Benjamin. "Do you put the dollar at the top, or human dignity and environmental issues."

Benjamin acknowledges that getting the party's message out - it includes raising the minimum wage, building schools not prisons, reforming the election process and providing safe food and universal health care - will be difficult.

"Corporations have stolen our democracy," Benjamin said. The challenge, she added, is to "get out of the marginalization the media throws us in... by building a grassroots campaign."

Benjamin'a campaign strategy includes registering voters, funding the bus tour and writing a pamphlet titled "I, Senator." The pamphlet, based on writer Upton Sinclair's 1930s California campaign pamphlet "I, Governor," will look back at how things changed after a Green Party victory.

But reminiscing from a Senate seat will be difficult, if not impossible for any green Party candidate. The closest the Greens have come to winning a Senate seat was in Hawaii, where their candidate received 17 percent of the vote after the opponent was caught in a sex scandal.

Still, if the fledgling party can garner 5 percent of the presidential vote, it would qualify for matching federal campaign funds.

On Wednesday night, the local Greens dug into their pocketbooks and managed to raise $500. Senator Feinstein has $2.9 million in her campaign war chest.

The funding discrepancy didn't seem to discourage the candidate or her supporters, whose northern California counterparts have opened an office in San Francisco and assembled a full-time staff in Southern California.

"We're serious about this campaign," Benjamin said. "Our platform has quite a different feel and look."

For more information on Benjamin's campaign visit http://medeaforsenate.org/