Peace & Freedom Party’s Cindy Sheehan Declares for Governor of California

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan announced her candidacy for governor of California Tuesday morning on the steps of the state Capitol in Sacramento. 

Sheehan, a resident of Vacaville who rode her bicycle from Davis to Sacramento to make the announcement, said that her candidacy on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket will focus on economic and social justice and protecting California’s fragile environment.

“One of the goals of this campaign is to break the stranglehold on this state’s politics by the two parties of, by and for the corporations and the 1 percent,” Sheehan told an enthusiastic gathering of supporters outside the Capitol.

“I am devoted to improving the lives of the working and poor classes, and protecting our precious and compromised environment,” she added in declaring her long-shot candidacy.

In her relatively short yet fiery declaration, the Peace & Freedom candidate said that she was tired of “the struggle of living in a state that puts the bottom-line of corporations above the needs of its citizens; that puts prisons over education; that puts balancing the budget off the backs of senior citizens, students, and the physically and mentally ill over healthy job creation and bigger and expanded social safety nets.”

The campaign’s most difficult challenge, she told her cheering supporters, will be convincing the people of California that she’s “just not another bull-shitting politician like Jerry Brown.”

Unlike the Democratic incumbent, Sheehan said that she means what she says and says what she means.

The 75-year-old Brown, who was initially elected to the first of three terms as governor of California during the Watergate year of 1974, has amassed a reelection campaign war-chest of more than $10 million, including some $2.8 million raised between January and June of this year.  Sheehan, by contrast, expects to wage a bare-bones campaign, relying almost entirely on small donations from committed antiwar activists and economic and social justice advocates across the country.

Sheehan, 56, rose to international prominence shortly after her 24-year-old son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq in 2004.

An outspoken critic of President Obama’s failed foreign policy, the peace activist and Gold Star mother completed a three-month, 3,000-mile bike tour across the country earlier this summer.  Sheehan’s cross-country Tour de Peace, which received little in the way of publicity from the mainstream media, was organized to promote various causes and to demand, among other things, an end to wars and an end to immunity for U.S. war crimes.

Sheehan, who was the Peace & Freedom Party’s candidate for vice president last year on a ticket headed by comedienne-activist Roseanne Barr, is no stranger to uphill political campaigns.

In 2008, she waged a spirited independent campaign to unseat then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, garnering an eye-opening 46,118 votes, or 16.1 percent, while finishing second to the eleven-term incumbent Democrat in a four-candidate field.  Sheehan, taking her first plunge into electoral politics, finished nearly 20,000 votes ahead of the Republican nominee in that race.

In her most recent book — her seventh — Sheehan wrote extensively about that experience.  Titled, I Left My Marbles in San Francisco, her book will be available shortly.

In the meantime, Peace & Freedom Party leaders in California are growing increasingly excited about Sheehan’s candidacy, believing that her frugal, grassroots campaign for the state’s highest office could prove to be a watershed in the party’s storied 46-year history.

“I am delighted that we have a candidate who is so good at connecting to people, and so good at communicating with them on the important issues of the day,” said Kevin Akin, the party’s state chair.  “The frankness with which she expresses what millions are thinking and feeling really cuts through the fog of political obfuscation.”

Longtime party activist Maureen Smith of Santa Cruz agreed with Akin’s assessment.

“Cindy Sheehan is the unusually rare and quintessential example of a mother who takes a personal tragedy and turns it into an endless campaign for social justice and peace,” said Smith, a former three-time state chairperson and current member of the party’s State Executive Committee (SEC).

“The Peace and Freedom Party is so fortunate that she found us,” continued Smith.  “Now we have to take her message as far as we possibly can.  She is so much more qualified to lead this state than anyone else who comes to mind.”

Georgia Williams, chair of the party’s Fresno County Central Committee, believes Sheehan could be a genuine factor against Gov. Jerry Brown in next June’s “Top Two” primary, a race in which the incumbent Democrat — at least as of now — is expected to be heavily favored.

“If you’re a Republican or Democrat, you run to win, and no one questions that fact.  Such isn’t always the case with other parties,” said Williams, a co-founder of the recently-organized Peace and Freedom Party Renewal Caucus.  “But Cindy Sheehan is running to win, and because she’s running to win, she’s taking her campaign seriously.”

Reminiscent of novelist and longtime Socialist Upton Sinclair’s famous “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) movement during the Great Depression, Williams said that Sheehan’s multi-faceted “EPIC” campaign says it all:  “End Poverty in California, Establish Peace in California, End the Prison Industrial Complex, and Empower People Instead of Corporations.”