It was news late in May when Gov. Deval Patrick tried to cap off a gushing scandal about patronage in hiring at the Massachusetts Probation Department by calling the department, headed by John O'Brien, a "rogue agency." It sounded tough, it sounded true—but it took Green gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein, the soft-spoken Harvard-trained doctor from Lexington, to expose the slippery level of the governor's rhetoric.

As Stein recognized immediately, the word "rogue" cut two ways. It made the Probation Department sound bad, but it isolated the agency and made the rest of the state government, by implication, sound pretty good.

That's a misstatement, to say the least, says Stein.

"Anyone who watches Beacon Hill knows that Commissioner O'Brien's appointment of Democratic Party friends, family, and political allies to jobs in the Probation Department—and the collection of campaign donations from employees—are routine practices," Stein told the press last week. "This problem is not limited to one 'rogue' agency, or even to the Democratic Party. There are flagrant examples of this practice occurring under Republican administrations. For example, we had patronage appointments and lax oversight at Massport under Governors Weld and Cellucci and the problems Joe Malone faced with employees stealing from the Treasury."

Stein didn't hold her fire at that point. She had plenty more to say about corruption centering around campaign donations.

"The Legislature voted in favor of corruption in 2003 when they repealed the voter-approved Clean Elections Law on an unrecorded voice vote," she continued, referring to the Legislature's killing of an election finance reform measure favored by two-thirds of voters in the state. "That vote continues to reverberate with a continuing series of scandals and indictments and sweetheart deals secured through campaign donations—from Big Dig contracting to Deval Patrick's footbridge for Robert Kraft." (The Patrick administration had proposed to use $9 million in stimulus funds to build a pedestrian bridge to Gillette Stadium from an office park Kraft planned to build across the street, but federal officials forbade it.)

It's tempting to say that Stein will never be governor. Actually, that's not a safe thing to say anymore. In 2002, to be sure, she ran for governor and got only 3.5 of the vote, though she won widespread praise in the press for her performance in electoral debates. But in 2004, she won 21 percent of the vote in a race for state representative, and in 2006, when she entered the race for Secretary of State, she ran away with 20 percent of the vote and a number of newspaper endorsements.

As her website points out, with a four-way race for governor this year, it's possible to win with only 26 percent. Stein is popular in Western Mass., and further consolidates that popularity with her choice of Richard Purcell of Holyoke to run beside her as candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Purcell, a veterans' advocate who served as a military medic in Iraq, works as a surgeon's clerk and ergonomics specialist at Baystate Medical Center.

You might say that Stein is a perennial loser, but there's another way to look at it: with each campaign, her message has gained her respectful listeners, some of whom have turned, incrementally, into a base of support. And many who don't consider it realpolitik to vote for her admit that she gives conscience and common sense a voice in Massachusetts. This statement from her announcement of her candidacy in February seems additionally prescient since the BP oil spill: "... the old paradigm of infinite growth and corporate profiteering is colliding with the physics of a finite world, and the morality of a human one."