Green Party candidate Jeremy Karpen says that as he was greeting voters outside his Logan Square polling place on Election Day, he watched the same scenario time and again. A campaign worker for 39th District state rep Toni Berrios, whom Karpen was trying to unseat, would pull a voter aside, greet him familiarly in Spanish, hand him a palm card . . . and then tell him that Karpen was with the Tea Party.
The Greens didn’t run any African-Americans for office in 2006 and drew little support from black voters. Partly to broaden their appeal, they ran seven African-American candidates this time, the most notable being LeAlan Jones, the 31-year-old south-sider who sought Barack Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat. Jones had never run for office but wasn’t a complete unknown going into the race; he’d gained fame as a teen journalist describing life in the Ida B. Wells housing projects in two acclaimed National Public Radio documentaries. He got just 2.6 percent of the vote in Chicago and 3 percent statewide.
But the Greens also support universal single-payer health care, raising the minimum wage, repealing free trade agreements, and granting legal status to undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. They want to eliminate government subsidies and tax breaks for major corporations, and they’re for tax breaks and incentives for small businesses that would make it easier for people to produce, buy, and sell goods locally. Corporations conflict with “the ideals of representative democracy, and social and environmental responsibility and accountability,” the Greens’ platform says. It calls for a shareholder bill of rights to let people demand changes of corporations.
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The Illinois Greens think minority and low-income urban residents in particular should find their party’s platform appealing. They propose government incentives to help workers take over failing factories and call for reforming public aid so it offers more job training and education. They favor expanding services for those in financial distress and creating “green jobs” in energy and transportation.
Jones says he plans to run for office again and would consider running as a Green, but would likely do so only if the party makes his campaign its main focus. “The party has great ambition, but we’re spread too thin,” he says. “If the party wants to get something done on a major scale it will have to concentrate its efforts.”
“It’s inevitable that we’re going to attract people who have different ideas of how to attack the problems,” says Huckelberry, “but who all agree that the Democrats and Republicans are failing us. The Green Party takes the concept of grassroots democracy very seriously. When we say, ‘Think globally, act locally,’ we mean it. The reality is that acting locally in Englewood often means something different than acting locally in Lincoln Park. There’s definitely been a tension as we field candidates of color in trying to make these competing interests synthesize, but this should be seen as a creative tension that helps all of us build better politics and better solutions.”
