BANGOR – Green Party presidential candidate Jesse Johnson is in Maine this week as part of a campaign swing through several northeastern states.

On Tuesday, Johnson stopped by the Bangor Daily News to talk about some of his reasons for seeking the nation’s top elective post.

“I don’t see leadership in the country, and a leader has to have vision,” said Johnson, a 49-year-old resident of West Virginia.

He said he became a political activist after seeing the damage that mining has done to the mountaintops in his native state and how state officials bungled their response to two major floods, 18 months apart that ultimately destroyed his childhood home.

As Johnson sees it, the candidates from the two major traditional parties – Republican and Democrat – have become more focused on fundraising than on upholding the values of our nation’s forefathers.

“I think we’ve lost all of the values we’ve held dearly,” he said, citing individual constitutional rights and stewardship of the environment as chief among them.

“These are the things that we all collectively [believe in] and have to fight for in this country,” he said.

Though both rank high among the core values of the Greens, he said, few U.S. voters know it, largely because the party has been left out of meaningful national debates.

If more American voters were aware of the party’s positions, “they would find that they’re probably Green and just don’t know it.”

Because he is a so-called “third-party” candidate, Johnson said he has been excluded from national presidential debates.

More information about Johnson and his campaign can be found at his Web site at www.jesse08.org. His campaign contact in Maine is Patricia LaMarche, who can be reached by e-mail at patlamarche@

hotmail.com.