Peta Lindsay understands she’s probably not going to be elected president on the Socialism & Liberation ticket. Moreover, she understands that even if elected, at age 28 she’s seven years too young to serve.
“Darn, you figured me out,” Lindsay said with a laugh. “There were points in the Constitution when I wouldn’t have been eligible because I’m a woman or I’m African-American. The Constitution has been changed.” She noted that the average age of members of Congress is roughly three times that of the average soldier — many of whom are currently engaged in wars that, Lindsay believes, could only have been authorized by a Congressional declaration of war according to the same Constitution that her candidacy ignores.
“Elections are a sham,” she said.
The S&L party is on the ballot in 13 states, including New York as well as Colorado, Utah, Florida, Washington and Wisconsin; in four of those states, another candidate heads the ticket to avoid Lindsay’s eligibility issues.
Lindsay will spend the week ahead in upstate talking about the party’s 10-point program. It includes making a job, health case and housing constitutional rights; forgiving all student debt; raising the minimum wage to $20 per hour; shutting down all foreign U.S. military bases; and the rather open-ended promise to “seize the banks — jail Wall Street criminals.”
“People understand their interests are aligned with what we’re talking about,” said Lindsay, who talks about three settings faster than the standard politician. A longtime activist who’s currently studying to be a teacher in Southern California. “These are things that the two major parties are not talking about.”
Lindsay cracks up at the suggestion that the oft-repeated conservative charge that President Barack Obama is a socialist might be raising her party’s profile.
“People calling Obama a socialist is so fundamentally, so false. Obama gave $700 billion of taxpayer money to the banks. … It was the largest transfer of public wealth into private hands in U.S. history, which is the exact opposite of socialism.” (The Troubled Asset Relief Program, it should be noted, was signed into law by President George W. Bush, although Obama’s administration ended up handling its implementation.)
She said that current conditions are playing a greater role in leading people to explore new political solutions. “Part of the reason that capitalism has been able to maintain its traction, its hold on the public is that working people could always say, ‘My life is very hard, but I know my kid’s life will be better.’ … But that is coming to an end.”
Lindsay says that frustration was evident in last year’s Occupy protests, although she recognizes the limited viability of a movement that is by definition leaderless.
She isn’t the only candidate on her ticket who would be ineligible to serve if elected: Lindsay’s running mate, Yari Osorio, was born in Colombia and grew up an undocumented alien before becoming an American citizen. John Conklin, spokesman for the state Board of Elections, said that every candidate is assumed to be eligible until a formal challenge is made.
Nor is Lindsay the only socialist candidate who’s hoping to rack up votes in New York: The Freedom Socialist Party is mounting a write-in effort for Stephen Durham and Christina Lopez; Durham will make his own upstate visit next week.
Why, you might ask, should socialists choose the write-in FSP effort over the S&L’s balloted campaign? Susan Williams, who’s organizing for Durham in New York, says their agenda is more feminist-centered. (Even so, “Equality for women and free, safe legal abortion on demand” is the sixth item on the Lindsay/Osorio plan.)
“We don’t think the main effort here is one socialist competing against another,” Williams said. Instead, the party is hoping to draw attention to the fact that “third parties have been largely iced out of the electoral system.”
Lindsay isn’t concerned about her candidacy drawing a potentially key fraction of votes in any of the swing states where she’s on the ballot — a margin that could make the difference between Mitt Romney and Obama claiming victory. In 2008, the PSL drew a mere 1,639 votes in New York after securing a ballot line.
“It’s strange to me the Democrats feel so entitled to the votes of progressive people when they don’t do anything that progressive people want them to do,” she said. “As Eugene Debs said, ‘I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don’t want and get it.’”
Along with Romney and Obama, Lindsay joins Green candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Constitutional Party hopeful Virgil Goode (whose platform calls for a moratorium on green cards until unemployment is under 5 percent) on the state ballot for the presidency next month.
