The third-party dilemma.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Jill Stein of the Green Party of the United States

DR. JILL STEIN IS THE GREEN Party candidate for President this year. Her candidacy has won the endorsement of several prominent progressives, such as Medea Benjamin of CodePink and author Chris Hedges. But others question the wisdom and the utility of Stein's run.

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Stein, sixty-two, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, is an internist by training. She specialized in studying the environmental threats to children and to the elderly. In 2002, she ran for governor in Massachusetts against Mitt Romney on the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party ticket.

One day in June, Stein dropped by The Progressive's office to talk with me about her candidacy.

"We're in crisis," she says. "People are losing their jobs, decent wages, homes by the millions, access to higher education. Our civil liberties are under attack, and the prospects of a livable climate are disappearing before our very eyes. Meanwhile, the wealthy few who crashed the economy are rolling in more dough than ever while the political establishment inflicts austerity on the American people." She adds that we're "squandering trillions on wars, and on tax breaks for the wealthy, and on bailouts for Wall Street."

She offers a withering critique of President Obama from the left.

"Working people have been betrayed by Obama," she says. He didn't fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have helped unions to organize. He also didn't fight for minimum wage increases, she says. She also cites his appointments of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner to oversee economic policy and his willingness, last year, to cut a deal with John Boehner to slash Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare in the so-called grand bargain that never was sealed but that Obama still offers.

On foreign policy, she notes that Obama "expanded the drone wars and surged the troops into Afghanistan, tripling them."

On the environment, she says Obama has "undermined international accords and scuttled the effort to get climate change under control."

And on civil liberties, she says that Obama has been following in the footsteps of George W. Bush "by approving indefinite detentions, engaging in targeted assassinations even of U.S. citizens, and codifying the use of the military against U.S citizens on U.S. soil."

She doesn't buy the quadrennial argument that prospective Supreme Court appointments should compel anyone who is progressive to vote Democratic.

"Don't hold your breath," she says. "If you're waiting for the Supreme Court to get us out of this mess, it ain't going to happen. It needs to be pushed by a social movement. It's not going to deliver that social movement."

Nor does she put much stock in the idea that Obama, if reelected, would all of a sudden turn dramatically to the left. "There is no evidence that Obama is going to fix things,"...