In The Guardian: ‘Can Roseanne Barr help the Green party break out?’ on Astini News

Writer Dan Gillmor writes in the UK newspaper The Guardian, wondering if comedian Roseanne Barr, now contending for the Green Party's presidential nomination, will help to raise the profile of the Green Party of the United States, which struggles a great deal compared to its European counterparts.  Interestingly, Gillmor cites a tweet by Barr saying that she does not expect to win the nomination.

Barr's announcement highlights the state of American politics these days. The major parties seem owned and operated by the 1% – the wealthy and powerful interests that have all but taken control of Congress and state governments in the past decade. Minor parties like the Greens are hobbled by laws, written by major parties, that make serious challenges at high levels next to impossible; and their candidates tend either to be unknown or implausible in other ways. This conundrum is less the case in some other countries, where the Greens, enabled in part by laws friendlier to greater political diversity, have won seats in national legislatures…

Obama has governed from the political right, including assertions of executive power – including a penchant for secrecy and antipathy to civil liberties – that are even more extreme than Bush's. The Republicans, meanwhile, have moved much further to the right. They flaunt their love for the 1% and contempt for the environment (when it gets in the way of commerce, at any rate).

In such circumstances, one might imagine an opening for a third party that, among other things, believed in civil liberties; advocated genuine reform of the corporatism that now rules the economy and government; and pushed for an energy policy that sharply reduced America's carbon footprint. The Greens' platform endorses all three. But are their candidates plausible?

Certainly Barr, while by no means a dummy, is not. Even she agrees: if we are to believe this tweet, she expects Jill Stein to win the nomination at the party's July convention in Baltimore. In other words, her campaign is a statement and not much more.