Occupy Congress: A Protester Runs for Office
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On the evening of Wednesday, February 22, protesters pitched tents in front of the district office of Democratic Representative Allyson Schwartz in the small hamlet of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. The group—which numbered about five, and has since expanded to 15 members, including at times veterans of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Philadelphia, and Occupy Delaware—was met with a mixture of alarm and bemusement from the mostly middle-class residents of the commuter town, population 4,000, located just north of Philadelphia; but Ed Foley, the mayor of Jenkintown, declared that they were welcome to stay as long as they behaved. “In Jenkintown, we’ve struggled with traffic calming and they’ve had an excellent traffic calming effect,” he toldCitizen’s Call, a local website. “No one is rolling through that stop sign anymore.”
Occupy Jenkintown was an act of solidarity with Nathan Kleinman, an avid Occupier and Jenkintown resident who is running to unseat Schwartz in the April 24 Democratic primary—and who has been dubbed “the first Occupy candidate” by Politico. Four people close to the Schwartz campaign had challenged the approximately 1,500 signatures Kleinman collected in order to appear on the ballot, and, as a result, the 29-year-old now found himself forced to wage a write-in campaign. Occupy Jenkintown wasn’t officially endorsing Kleinman, but they most certainly were livid at Schwartz. Hence the encampment outside her office. “There is strong precedent for showing force against a candidate who makes problematic decisions,” Chase Doyle, a Jenkintown Occupier and friend of Kleinman, told me.
For his part, Kleinman says that the Occupiers acted of their own volition. “The first I heard of it was from [Jenkintown Occupier] Michael Mizner,” Kleinman told me. “He said it, I thought as a joke, and I said, ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’ And Mizner said, ‘Autonomous action is a bitch.’” Now, whether Kleinman wanted it or not, Occupy Jenkintown exists. And, along with Kleinman’s campaign, it represents a noteworthy—and, to date, unusual—example of the Occupy movement inserting itself directly into electoral politics.
KLEINMAN GREW UP in Abington, right next to Jenkintown, where he attended a Quaker high school before enrolling in Georgetown in 2000. His passion for human rights led him to Madeleine Albright’s class as a senior and to the gates of the White House in 2005, where he fasted for twelve days to raise attention for Darfur. Back at home, Kleinman worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign and as a press aide for Joe Sestak’s failed Senate bid in 2010, following which he took a job with a local state senator.
Kleinman first set foot in Occupy Philadelphia on day six of the encampment, and, soon after, he resigned from his job in order to embrace the movement full time. “I was just really glad that people were standing up and refusing to accept the status quo any longer,” he told me.