Candidate LaMarche Green Party vice-presidential pick lets her conscience be here guide

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Few women live in the moment as much as Pat LaMarche.

Last Saturday, she was a happy-go-lucky radio personality looking forward to joining other Mainers in relishing what’s left of the receding season we call summer. Today, she’s unemployed and the vice-presidential candidate for the Green Party of the United States.

A single mother of two, LaMarche’s willingness to assume huge personal financial risks to pursue her political convictions is difficult to fathom for most Mainers. But those who know her well are not even mildly surprised.

“Patricia’s dedication and commitment to her country and her children have always been the driving forces in her life. She’s driven by the need to make this a better world,” said her longtime friend Maribeth Stuart of North Yarmouth.

Earlier this week, LaMarche stood in the State House Hall of Flags where she pledged to work with Green Party presidential nominee David Cobb to defeat President Bush while campaigning for job creation, improved access to health care and a responsible environmental policy. Now on the campaign trail in Oregon, the 1978 graduate of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor will try for the next few months to whip up support for Green Party candidates in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

LaMarche’s entry into the national political spotlight has been accompanied by an onslaught of media requests that eclipse the interest shown in the 43-year-old candidate’s bid for governor in 1998. At that time, she picked up the banner for the Maine Green Independent Party which was struggling to maintain ballot status and needed a gubernatorial candidate who could attract at least 5 percent of the statewide vote.

With a working budget of about $20,000, LaMarche ensured the party’s legitimacy in Maine and actually won 7 percent of the vote. Then she took her two children, Becky and John, who today are, respectively, 18 and 17, and flew to Holland on an educational grant to pursue a master’s degree in European history.

As an American student abroad, she became acutely aware of European perceptions of U.S. foreign and military policies. She returned to Maine a year later with a more global attitude about life and new ideas that held greater implications for her future than the European past she had studied.

1999: Good-bye, Brewer; Hello, Amsterdam

On May 10, 1999, LaMarche was driving through Brewer when she was pulled over by a Brewer police officer for failing to stop at a red light. The patrolman claimed to smell an alcoholic beverage in the vehicle and LaMarche subsequently was charged with drunken driving after she refused to take an alcohol breathalyzer test from the officer who had stopped her.

It was LaMarche’s second drunken driving apprehension, after her arrest and conviction for operating under the influence in 1997. In what she said was an attempt to deter others from making the same mistake after that first arrest, the talk show host also had given a newspaper interview on the experience from Cumberland County Jail. Photos from that interview of LaMarche in an orange prison jumpsuit continue to make the rounds on the Internet today.

Two months after her 1999 arrest, a District Court judge threw the case out of court and the Penobscot County district attorney subsequently dismissed the charge. By the time Maine Secretary of State Dan A. Gwadosky ruled that the Brewer Police Department never had probable cause to make the drunken driving arrest in the first place, LaMarche was on her way to Amsterdam.

Living in the basement of a Dutch bicycle shop, she and her children quickly got a taste of how Americans were perceived on the continent. LaMarche said some U.S. citizens she knew would claim to be Canadian “just to keep the dialogue down.” On one occasion she remembered standing behind a “really nasty American” who was arguing with a local over some issue.

“I was hoping I could summon enough Dutch so that no one would know I’m not with that person,” LaMarche said. “I couldn’t imagine that someone probably saved a lifetime to go to Holland just to be rude.”

LaMarche was amazed that European perceptions of America are shaped largely by the media – particularly some of the foul-mouthed, ready-to-rumble Americans portrayed on “The Jerry Springer Show.”

“But the good news is that the Simpsons play three times a night there, which is great because that is America – Doh!” she said.

There goes Jenny Judge

Right after delivering her position statement Tuesday at the State House as the Green Party’s vice-presidential nominee, LaMarche met with executives at WEBB, B98.5-FM in Augusta where her on-air persona, “Jenny Judge” had been a morning staple for central Maine listeners.

Two hours later, she was unemployed.

“I miss my listeners, Jenny, and being her,” LaMarche said. “I loved the community. It’s real Maine.”

It wasn’t the first time LaMarche got the boot from her radio show. She was fired from a Portland station in 1997 after the drunken driving conviction. A year later, she had to leave another station after questions were raised about the possibility of the station providing equal time for her gubernatorial opponents. Although this time she was running for a national office, similar concerns were raised at WEBB.

Staging attention-grabbing stunts such as living in an Abrams tank at the Maine Army National Guard base in Augusta to raise money for The Salvation Army, Jenny Judge teased her listeners to expect the unexpected from the flamboyant talk show host. LaMarche left the station this week, convinced she could help others and stand up for her political and social beliefs by accepting the Green Party’s nomination, which, at the moment, does not include a stipend.

Now the most unexpected part of her daily routine focuses on what happens when the monthly bills come due.

“Jeepers, I don’t know – I don’t have a job right now,” she said. “We’ll get travel expenses, but I don’t know if it will pay the mortgage. But I’ve waited tables before and I’ve bartended before. I could worry a lot about a $500 a week job or I could worry about the country. Hopefully, I made the right choice.”

Welcome to my world

Whenever LaMarche returns to Bangor, she’s greeted by dozens of friends and dissolving images of earlier memories from her old hometown. These days, she lives in Yarmouth, and, although she doesn’t consider it her home, she knows her children do. Both have excelled in local schools while mixing with upper-middle class and upper-class Mainers who live fairly traditional lives.

The experience leaves LaMarche feeling a little like the proverbial square peg in a round hole.

“I don’t know very many people as a single mother in a town that’s almost all couples,” she said. “Everyone’s very nice to me, but when you have the dinner party with the kids’ parents, you don’t invite that one odd mother. So I kind of keep to myself.

“I have two homes I think, I have the Bangor that I remember and I have Holland.”

Anti-Bush Green convention

LaMarche pretty much sums up everything that’s wrong in America today in two words: George Bush. Whether hearing accounts of American citizens beheaded in Iraq, U.S. troops who have been injured or killed while fighting for their country or chief executive financial officers walking away with millions of dollars in corporate buyouts, LaMarche says she senses a persistent theme of dishonesty directly linked to the American president.

It is, in many ways, the singular reason she plans to put her personal future on hold while she campaigns for a job that she doesn’t really expect to win.

“The bottom line is that administration has lied to us about everything, and American people don’t like being lied to,” she said. “You can like a lot of things about George Bush, but when push comes to shove, the man should not be president of the United States. We want Bush out. And we’re going to get that message to as many people as we can who will listen – and a lot of people who won’t.”

Greener than whom?

It’s hard to tell who is least impressed with the Cobb-LaMarche ticket – the Republican Party or some of the founding members of the Greens who have split off from the Green Party of the United States. Those members, such as Nancy Oden of Jonesboro, would have preferred the Greens endorse the candidacy of consumer rights activist Ralph Nader whom they view as more consistent with their activist philosophy and capable of packing a bigger punch nationally.

Oden was never a LaMarche fan and said Greens who support Cobb over Nader have abandoned the party’s activist roots.

“Pat LaMarche is no threat,” Oden said. “She’s basically a Democrat. She’s not going to push movement activism over electoral politics because she wants to be out with her picture in the paper. But I don’t blame her. She is what she is.”

LaMarche brushes off such critical observations, saying Greens “have a right to disagree with each other too.” Still, she doesn’t completely disavow a certain attraction to Democrats – if they just didn’t act so much like Democrats.

“If I could be Democrat, I would be one – I’m not one,” LaMarche said. “The problem is that they spend more time pushing me away than including me. If I were a Democrat, I’d be scratching my head saying: ‘Why don’t Pat LaMarche want to be one of us? She’s not so bad, kind of smart and occasionally right.’ If I could be one, that’s what I’d be. But luckily there’s a Green Party and I’ve got a party that sticks up for what I believe in.”

Additional information about the Cobb-LaMarche candidacy can be obtained on the Internet at http://www.votecobb.org