Onstage in the spotlight, in front of a studio audience of City Club of Chicago members for the WTTW-Ch. 11 debate last Thursday, Julie Samuels looked out of place. She was admittedly unprepared for the questions she was asked and awestruck at seeing so many prominent pols in one room that evening.
“It was intimidating to say the least,” said Samuels, the Green Party candidate for lieutenant governor and an Oak Parker for 34 years. “It was like one of those dreams when you’re sitting in a room full of famous people … It was a really interesting experience, you know, the common humanity we all have, the good intentions everybody has. It’s just a sick system, unfortunately.”
The televised debate with incumbent Democrat Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn and GOP challenger Joe Birkett was like a game of catch between two major leaguers, with moderator Elizabeth Brackett tossing the little kid Samuels the ball every once in a while so she could get a turn. And she did so seemingly out of courtesy or duty, not because anyone wanted to hear what Samuels had to say.
But that’s OK, Samuels said the next morning at George’s Restaurant in front of a poached egg, hash browns and a cup of coffee. The Green Party is “not going to engage in that kind of dialogue,” she said, not going to take turns calling their party the party of change, or argue in which party corruption runs deeper.
Samuels and the Greens are more about face-to-face, cup-of-coffee conversations, not sound bites. They’re about grassroots, not fundraising. One example of how they’re different: Rich Whitney (Samuels’ running mate for governor) and his wife sleep in the Samuels’ unheated back porch when they’re in town and rely on them for rides.
Whitney and Samuels will not likely be the top vote-getters next Tuesday, but like a kid playing ball, success is relative. They’ll win if they get just 5 percent of the vote. That mark will open doors for future elections, allowing the party to establish an internal committeeman structure and decrease the number of signatures needed to get candidates on the ballot.
Recent polls have projected they’ll get as much as 14 percent of the vote.
A two-party system that works against independent candidates? “That’s not a democracy,” Samuels said. “Greens are real patriots. That’s what drives us.”
Samuels grew up in East Cleveland, her mother one of six kids in her family raised during the Depression with scant resources. “She taught me how to mend my socks,” Samuels said. “It’s the right way to live in this world.”
Samuels has looked all over for socks to mend. Resource management-not garbage, mind you-has been one of her many causes. She’s a member of the Chicago Recycling Coalition and has worked on waste issues in Oak Park, too.
After graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1966, she went to New York City to “change the world” as a social worker. “I quickly realized that helping people adjust to a bad system was the wrong thing to do, so I changed to being a kind of community organizer, getting people to rise up and revolt over a bad system,” she said.
It was in New York that she met her husband, Bruce. After a few years of marriage, they moved to a farm in Upstate New York briefly before moving to Oak Park in 1972 with two young kids and a third on the way.
She found the system lacking in Oak Park, too. Samuels helped found the Oak Park Food Coop, the Oak Park Women’s Exchange, and, more recently, the South East Oak Park Community Organization (SEOPCO).
In the 1970s, she and Bruce volunteered as real estate testers (“We were steered” away from the south and east sides of the village), and were “redlined” when they tried to buy their first house-that is, a local bank that was issuing mortgages in other states would not lend to them because the house they liked was in an undesirable (at the time) part of town. Their efforts to fight the practice helped bring about the federal Community Reinvestment Act.
Bruce Samuels has run for village trustee three times, but has never won. He prides himself on being the first Village Manager Association candidate to lose an election, his wife says. The couple has since help found the Village Citizens Alliance (on whose ticket Bruce Samuels lost in a bid for trustee in 2003) and later the New Leadership Coalition.
Julie Samuels has never run for local office, but has run twice for state representative in the 8th District. Since Ralph Nader’s bid for president in 2000, Samuels has focused on building the Green Party in Oak Park and throughout the state.
She believes the local Greens are the third most-active group in the state, behind Carbondale and Champaign-Urbana. “So many people [in Oak Park] get it,” she said, adding that many leaders in renewable energy and other progressive fields live here.
Samuels said she and Bruce share a vision of what the world should be like, and how to make it better. And one of her favorite parts of this campaign has been meeting fellow travelers from around the state, people with the same goals and lifestyles. “We finish each other’s sentences,” she said.
On Monday, Whitney told the Sun-Times that no matter the outcome of the election, “On Nov. 8, I’m still going to be fighting the same fight.”
The same goes for Samuels.
“I feel like I have an important job to do before I leave this planet,” Samuels said. Like the Girl Scouts, she plans to “leave it better than I found it.”
