“The Spoiler” Speaks -
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on her campaign and building an alternative to the two corporate parties.

Stein's analysis of the Sanders campaign:

You mentioned this voter revolt within this wider climate. How much of this do you attribute to the Bernie Sanders campaign? Do you consider his campaign a success despite how it ended?

Yeah, definitely. In my view it’s an incredible success because it mobilized a movement that lives way beyond the constraints of Bernie Sanders’s politics, which, unfortunately, are still married to the Democratic Party.

It was a lesson in real time for his supporters, showing that you cannot have a revolutionary campaign inside of a counterrevolutionary party.

On Bernie running as a Democrat:

Do you think the Sanders campaign could have achieved the same level of success and profile if it had been an independent one?
Absolutely not. In a way this was the perfect storm — and not only because Bernie started in the Democratic Party and then the Democratic Party destroyed his campaign.

It wasn’t just in the campaign, you could also see it at the DNC in the way that his supporters were silenced.

They were locked out of some meetings. The spokespeople like Nina Turner were kept off the stage. Bernie was relegated to a Monday night, not a high-profile Wednesday.

On the Johnson campaign:

Most voters, whether they’re in the Sanders campaign or more generally, don’t know about us as an option. There’s been much more publicity around Gary Johnson. He has much more funding because he takes corporate money and the media is happy to cover him.

They are not happy to cover us because we truly are a threat, while Johnson is not. He’s more of the same.

Of course, some people are more informed about him. For example, if you look at what was going on at the DNC, where the super-informed members of the Sanders camp were, you can see that they knew about their choices. You didn’t hear any chants of “Gary, not Hill.” The chants were “Jill not Hill."

And debates:

We debated Gary in 2012 in independent debates, and Gary does not like to appear with our campaign because we beat him in front of his own constituency on the third-party debates.

In fact, in debates that were organized by Libertarians with all the independent candidates, our campaign was voted the winner by a largely Libertarian audience.

More good stuff at the link: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/jill-stein-green-party-bernie-sanders...