Pat LaMarche feels left out And not just because the Green Party's candidate for vice president wasn't allowed to debate with Dick Cheney and John Edwards BY SAM PFEIFLE

David Cobb, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, resorted on Friday to civil disobedience, getting himself arrested in St. Louis while ambushing the second presidential debate of the campaign. (Cobb will be in Rhode Island on Sunday; see "Phillipe &Jorge’s Cool, Cool World," page 4.) That’s the kind of tactic you need to get attention in the presidential campaign if you’re a third-party candidate. It’s clear that getting ballot status in 28 states and representing a party that collected 2,882,995 votes in the last presidential election isn’t enough.

His running mate, Maine’s Pat LaMarche, took a slightly different tack. On September 21, the Providence native decided to embark on her "Left Out" tour, wherein she would sleep either on the streets or in homeless shelters in 14 cities across the US, "to raise awareness about America’s least-privileged citizens" because "no vice presidential candidate has ever been bold enough to walk in their shoes."

Sure, it was a bit of a public-relations gambit, but LaMarche hardly took the easy way out. She traveled by herself, with fellow Greens picking her up at airports and helping her with transportation but then dropping her off to fend for herself in what were possibly dangerous situations. As LaMarche notes in the following interview, women are raped after only an average of 11 days on the streets. LaMarche spent a total of 14, winding up in Cleveland on the day when John Edwards and Dick Cheney debated there, while the rest of the vice-presidential candidates had their own debate across town.

The Phoenix sat down with her on a beautiful Thursday morning, once she’d returned to Maine and had a bit of rest:

Phoenix: Did you know that running for vice president was going to be so glamorous?

LaMarche: (laughs) I had no idea, certainly, about glamour, but I had no idea it was going to be so hard.

Q: You chose to undertake what must have been a grueling tour — what were your goals when you set out, and do you feel like you’ve achieved them?

A: Well, I wanted to raise poverty issues to the vision of the other candidates, and certainly to the electorate. Poverty is very expensive. It isn’t just a scourge on humanity that we have people living on the street and in squalor and in horrible conditions, but there are a lot of slumlords ripping off the taxpayer, to boot, so it’s expensive to keep people in that condition, and there are a lot of people who want to keep them there, for very selfish reasons. And that was a real eye-opener: the extent of that sort of greed and opportunistic behavior, based on the poor.

I kept saying, "I hope my brain’s big enough for this learning curve," but I had no idea how much I was going to learn. It was amazing. And the hardest part of it was, I found these people in desperate, miserable conditions and I left them there.

Q: Well, you said you wanted to raise the profile of that. Do you feel like you succeeded? Did you get some coverage throughout the country? Did the media pay attention to what you were doing? Did the people in those communities pay attention to what you were doing?

A: We got a lot of local coverage everywhere we went, and we got some national press, which was amazing, and it was the only national press that the campaign’s gotten the whole campaign. So that was really quite something. We knew it was a heroic event and luckily it did pay off a little, at least as far as raising awareness for the issue, but nobody has asked me as many questions as you have.

Q: Well, in terms of the vice-presidential campaign, the campaign got a lot of attention on October 5 with the debate. Where were you while they were debating?

A: Grrrr. Gnashing my teeth watching it with the rest of America. But I was actually at Baldwin Wallace University, right across the city of Cleveland, in the, well, I guess the "second string debate." (Laughs.) We had many third-party candidates on stage. It was really an exciting, interesting debate, I thought. There was real discussion of issues and topics, and we didn’t bicker once. (Laughs.) And after our debate ended — we debated for an hour and a half, also — we all sat together and watched the debate.

Q: At the televised debate, the big issue, obviously, was the war in Iraq, and we heard a lot about a middle-class tax cut, and about [the candidates’] respective records. Now, in your experience in meeting a lot of homeless people, a lot of people who are in poverty, do you think they care about the war in Iraq and the middle-class tax cut? Is that something that enters the mind of someone who’s wondering where their next meal is coming from and where they’re going to sleep tonight?

A: The biggest impression I got of the homeless is of their anger. They’re very angry. They don’t think that politics is ever going to include them, that they’ll either be an objective of politics or a concern of politics. But they’re angry. And you’d be angry, too. Anger is contagious in that environment. I started getting angry at about the eighth day, too. It was like, "Okay, I’ve got to be really pleasant on the phone with my son because I’m angry, but he didn’t do anything."

If you had no sleep, and when you did sleep you had no protection, you closed your eyes and your ears enough to sleep only so someone could victimize you while you were sleeping. You couldn’t lock a door. You didn’t know where your next meal was coming from. You have a job, or you’re looking for a job. You play the lottery to see if you can get a bed in the shelter, and the shelter’s horrible. And then day after day after day, after sleep deprivation and fear and attacks — the average woman after 11 days on the streets is raped. It takes 11 days.

You’d be angry. I’d be angry. The problem is, they’re angry at the wrong people. They take their anger out on each other. That’s why you see these brawls in the street, when they should be angry at the system, they should be angry at a society that allows, simply because of money, people to live worse than animals.