John Eder

John Eder (born January 18, 1969) is a Green Party Leader, social activist, and American politician from the U.S. state of Maine. Eder lives in Portland and is a member of the Maine Green Independent Party, the Maine affiliate of the national Green Party. He has served in the Maine House of Representatives as the legislature's first member of the Green Party for two terms and was elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2004. Until his defeat in 2006 Eder was one of only a handful of independent or third party state legislators in the country and was the highest-ranking elected Green official in the United States.

Biography
Raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Eder left an abusive and alcoholic home at the age of 15. After moving between friends and relatives and finally being homeless he entered the Hope House facility for troubled boys in Port Jefferson, New York. At 18 Eder entered college in Buffalo, New York to study philosophy. Disenchanted with college and suffering from post-traumatic stress and depression as a result of his negative childhood experiences, Eder soon grew restless and dropped out. He spent the next several years studying philosophy on his own and working at the Greyhound bus station in Buffalo. Inspired by Buddhist teachers and the writings of the Beat poet Jack Kerouac, Eder traveled around the country&mdash;backpacking, hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and working as a migrant farm laborer. He went from place to place volunteering and engaging in direct action around a wide range of social justice issues. He spent this period squatting amongst a network of travelers from New York City to Mexico. While living in Austin, Texas he did a short stint as a Hare Krishna. A girlfriend from this period of Eder's life recounts her relationship with him in a highly popular episode of This American Life entitled "Cringe." "I love connecting with all kinds of people and hearing their stories," Eder said. "In my travels I learned that American people, especially the poorest ones, would give you the shirt off their backs and that they valued honor, family and friendship above all. It all made me very hopeful for this country."

In 1997 Eder took a cross-country bicycle trip that ended in Maine. He was briefly married to a woman who picked him up hitchhiking there. He lived in a solar-powered shack in the Western Maine Mountains with no running water and later attended massage school in Portland. In 1998 he was practicing massage, caring for the mentally ill, and painting houses when he became the co-chair of the Portland Green Party. In 2002 leaders of the Maine Green Independent Party asked him to run for an open seat in the Maine State House, formerly held by Maine House Speaker Mike Saxl, who was unable to run for reelection due to term limits. He met his wife, former park ranger Suzanne Kahn, in Acadia National Park. Kahn lives with Eder in Portland and works at the Children's Museum of Maine.

2002 Election to Maine House of Representatives
As a first-time candidate in 2002, Eder took nearly 65% of the vote. His victory was in large part do to his strategy of bucking political convention and engaging Portland's youth voters between the ages of 18-35 who turned out to support him. His Democratic opponent, who had run for office in the past, received 35%. There was no Republican candidate in the race. Eder had widespread support from Democrats, Republicans, Greens, independents, small business owners, and active members of organizations such as the NAACP and the Maine People’s Alliance. Eder was endorsed by Maine Friends of Animals and the Maine Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance, and by Representative Michael Quint. The week before Election Day Eder received the endorsement of all three Portland area newspapers: Portland Press Herald, The Portland Phoenix, and Casco Bay Weekly. Eder's campaign was managed by crime novel writer Patrick Quinlan, author of Smoked. On election night Eder received a congratulatory call from Ralph Nader. Nader sent Eder a box of books as well as several pieces of model legislation for Eder to introduce in the Maine Legislature. Upon election, Eder became the second Green elected in the City of Portland, joining School Committee member Ben Meiklejohn.

Since legislators unenrolled with a political party typically caucus with one of the two major parties, it was assumed by Maine political observers that Eder would be forced to do the same. However, he was able to secure recognition of himself as a one member Green Party caucus in the House. This established him as a truly independent figure in the legislature, giving him more power vis-à-vis the Democrats and Republicans than if he had just caucused with one of the two parties. He negotiated to have a dedicated staff person assigned to him, something individual legislators in the Maine House - who serve on a part-time basis - do not have. With this Eder established the first ever Green Party Minority legislative office in any state.

Redistricting and service in the House
In 2003 Eder was voted Portland's Best Politician in a readers poll conducted by that city's alternative weekly newspaper, the Portland Phoenix, just as redistricting in Maine was threatening to unseat Eder by separating him from his base of support in Portland's West End. The redistricting was seen by many as a deliberate effort by legislative Democrats to oust Eder. In response, Eder moved his residence to rejoin the district he had previously represented and face off against Democratic incumbent Rep. Edward J. Suslovic. In the end, his Democratic opponent found he couldn't compete against Eder's strong base of support.

Eder won with 51% of the vote, compared with 41% for Suslovic and 8% for Republican Arvina Magno.

In March 2005, Eder used his powerful position as a swing vote in the closely divided Maine House of Representatives to earn himself a seat at the table in budget negotiations on Governor John Baldacci's biennial budget. Eder came away with $200,000 for the Portland Bilingual Program and $500,000 to establish the state’s first "creative economy incubator" in Portland, along with an appointment for himself as co-chair of the Governor’s Creative Economy Council, which was established to advise the Governor on how this creative economy should be fostered.

On June 17, in the last days of the 2005 legislative session, Eder entered into budget negotiations with Democratic Party leadership and secured a commitment from Governor Baldacci on tax reform. Eder organized a handful of fellow "Progressive" Democratic representatives who refused to support the budget unless a bill for meaningful reform passed before the end of the session. But as pressure mounted to pass the budget, House members succumbed and voted in favor of it, but without securing a commitment to address the tax model. Finally, only Eder and Representative Joanne Twomey (Biddeford) remained. Then Eder was able to negotiate a letter from Baldacci committing to hold a special legislative session on tax reform. In the end Eder voted for the budget but Twomey never voted for the budget.

In 2006, with switches of several of their members from Democrat to unenrolled, the Maine Democrats held a slim 74-73 numerical edge over Republicans in the House giving Eder a position of advantage as the only third-party member in the House. Along with the unenrolled representatives (Thomas Saviello, Barbara Merill, and Richard G. Woodbury), he exercised enormous influence over votes that fell along party lines.

Eder enjoyed great support among Portland's residents. In April of 2006, for the third time in the four years since he began serving in the legislature, Eder was voted "Best Local Politician" in a reader’s poll conducted by the city's alternative weekly The Portland Phoenix. Of Eder's most recent readers poll award the Portland Phoenix staff wrote, "Seriously, how can you not like John Eder?"

2006 elections
Eder lost the 2006 election to the Maine House by about 60 votes to Democrat Jon Hink. Eder entered the campaign as a favorite, and many environmental, gay-rights, labor, and progressive organizations lined up behind him.

A controversy erupted when Eder paid for an automated phone call to voters with a recorded message from the head of the local chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) endorsing Eder and questioning Hink's position on women's rights based on Hink's answers to NOW's candidate questionnaire. Hink declared himself pro-choice, but he did not commit to supporting a women's right to an abortion in every circumstance. The phone calls didn't mention that they were paid for by Eder's campaign. Hink claimed that the call violated state elections law by failing to disclose who paid for them. A new law passed earlier that year required that a automated robocall include a "tag" identifying who paid for them. The commission fined Eder $100.

Hink won the election with 51.5% of the vote to Eder's 48.5%

Contributions
Eder is credited with helping to propel the Greens to their present position as the second party of contention in Portland. Eder demonstrated that Green Party candidates can offer a viable and attractive alternative to the Democrats who have long dominated the political landscape in Maine's largest city. A record number of voters cast their ballots for Greens in 2006. In a post election article in Portland's online political magazine The Bollard, editor Chris Busby wrote, "...though the Greens in Portland lost Eder, they held their own on the school board, made a giant gain on the council, and darn-near unseated two popular and longstanding state legislators." In the four short years since Eder first won his breakthrough election, the Greens have gone from holding one seat on Portland's School Committee to holding eight seats across various municipal offices today.

Several young activist who worked on Eder's campaigns won office in '06. Rebbecca Minnick won a seat on the Portland School Committee where she joins three sitting Greens on the nine-member committee while David A. Marshall and Kevin Donoghue took seats on the Portland City Council, becoming the first registered Greens to serve on that body and the two youngest members ever to serve in the council's history.

Reflecting on his service in the Maine Legislature, Eder is quoted as saying, "We completely changed the paradigm and brought the power of the disenfranchised, young people and low income voters to bear on Portland politics so that now a politician running for office in this town can't win office without addressing these constituencies. Seats all over town used to go uncontested, we've made politics competitive and exciting again and have demonstrated the truth in what Margaret Mead said about the ability of a small thoughtful group of people to change the world."

Post Election
Eder currently works as the Executive Coordinator for Friends of Merrymeeting Bay, an organization dedicated to the protection of Maine's Merrymeeting Bay. This ecologically significant inland river delta is a confluence of six rivers, among them the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, through which nearly one third of all of Maine's surface water drains.

Eder sits on the Green Party's Peace Action Committee working to end the wars in Iraq and Afganistan and to prevent the U.S from going to war with Iran. He is currently writing his first book which is part biographical account of his colorful life and service as the nations highest elected Green Party official and part how-to manual encouraging regular citizens to run for local office as a means to personal transformation. He travels the country lecturing and training citizen's in methods of grassroots organizing and electoral participation. He is presently serving on the Cumberland County Health and Human Services Committee.

Eder has been mentioned as either a candidate for his old seat again in 2008 or possibly a candidate for Maine's 1st congressional district since Representative Tom Allen is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Susan Collins.