PORTLAND – Green Party vice presidential candidate Pat LaMarche urged her fellow party members on Thursday to “vote their conscience” in the Nov. 2 presidential election – but, it is hoped, to do so without helping President Bush.

LaMarche, who is David Cobb’s running mate, said she could not “care less how many votes we get.” And while she said she wouldn’t tell anybody how to vote, she called Bush the worst president in U.S. history.

“I feel we’re on the Titanic in this country right now,” LaMarche said. “With [Democratic challenger] John Kerry there’d be lifeboats. With George Bush there are not.”

LaMarche held a news conference at the Maine Green Party’s office to give an overview of her 14-day “Left Out Tour,” where she spent nights at homeless shelters and on the streets in 14 cities. She hoped to draw attention to homelessness, the lack of affordable housing and the lack of health coverage for millions of Americans.

LaMarche gave a city-by-city rundown of her tour, describing her encounters with anger and despair, unsanitary conditions, “rats as big as cats” and people sleeping in chairs.

Staying at the New York City shelter was the “most unbearable experience of my life,” she said, while the shelter in Detroit could serve as a national model. She met battered women and jobless men and parents whose children were taken from them because they were homeless.

The homeless population, she said, has been ignored by the government.

“It was horrible to find people in misery and leave them just as miserable as you found them,” she said.

LaMarche, a 43-year-old single mother from Yarmouth who won 7 percent of the vote as a Green candidate in Maine’s 1998 gubernatorial election, was chosen as the vice presidential nominee at the Green Party’s national convention in June. The Cobb-LaMarche ticket is on the ballot in 28 states.

The party has said a top priority is to evict Bush from office, and that it would not campaign heavily in swing states such as Maine where the vote is close.

LaMarche was quoted last summer as saying she might not even vote for her own ticket. But she backed away from that statement on Thursday, saying she will vote for herself because it appears Kerry will handily win the state’s 1st Congressional District, which is where she lives.

Still, LaMarche said, George Bush in her opinion has surpassed James K. Polk as the worst president in U.S. history. She gave Polk, the 11th president who served from 1845 to 1849, low marks for taking America to war with Mexico and mistreating American Indians.

“Polk was an ignorant man in an ignorant time,” LaMarche said. “George Bush is an ignorant man in an enlightened time.”

Dwayne Bickford, executive director of the Maine Republican Party, said LaMarche is “playing class warfare” and that hundreds of Mainers are volunteering for the Bush campaign.

“My initial reaction [to her comments] is that the voters aren’t going to take much stock in a former disc jockey who’s running for [vice] president,” Bickford said. “They’re going to make up their own minds.”

On the Net: Cobb-LaMarche campaign: www.votecobb.org.