IT'S NOT ALWAYS EASY BEING GREEN PARTY CANDIDATE

Margaret Thornton is wearing tiny peace-sign earrings and well-worn
Birkenstocks, but it's not what you think. She's staying with a
daughter who's a wildlife rehabilitator, and if she's pitching in to
care for the wounded birds and animals, that's not what you think,
either. She is simply being helpful.

Besides, says Margaret Thornton, laughing, "I'm too old to be a
hippie."

You have to say that up front when your husband is the Green Party
candidate for governor and people's notions about that party are so
askew - and entrenched. (For some perspective, read the commentary
outside of Connecticut about the state's Democratic Party. Did you
know that since the Democratic primary, George McGovern's people have
come back from the grave and are ready to party? That's not true, of
course. Senatorial candidate Ned Lamont is no more a lefty than I am
the Queen of May, but there you are: The chattering class has spoken.)

Clifford Thornton is the Greens' first gubernatorial candidate, and he
is not strictly a hippie, either. He is a former phone company
executive and a product of Hartford's North End whose mother died of a
heroin overdose when he was a senior at Hartford High.

Thornton is a former Breck girl, the daughter of a West Hartford
lawyer. She grew up playing piano and bridge. They've been married 19
years and have five daughters - parents themselves, students going for
their masters' degrees, teachers and a police officer - between them.
This is the second marriage for both.

She and her husband co-founded Efficacy, an organization that works to
reform the country's drug policies. The Thorntons say the war on drugs
is actually a war on people - mostly the disenfranchised- and that
what keeps it going despite its manifest failure is that it profits
people in power. Efficacy grew out of a radio show the Thorntons
started 10 years ago on WWUH-FM (91.3). The show was a public-affairs
program, but the conversation kept circling back to the country's
misbegotten handling of illegal drugs.

The death of Clifford Thornton's mother helped shape his opinion.
Margaret came to her own as she did research for the show.

"When you make drugs illegal, the drugs are controlled by criminals,"
she says. "They will never go away."

But that is not the candidate's only issue. Clifford Thornton also
talks about jobs - the need for more, and the need for a living wage.
He says a state lottery should pay for college educations. Politics
was not in their plans, but "I feel people should do what they have a
passion for," Margaret Thornton says.

She acknowledges that at this point if your name isn't M. Jodi Rell, a
Connecticut gubernatorial campaign looks quixotic. Rell's approval
rating is overwhelmingly high, and the two-party political system
keeps rolling along like the bloated tick that it is. Since Lowell
Weicker's A Connecticut Party, breaking in as a third-party candidate
- - an alternative to politics as usual - has been nearly impossible.
Never mind Team Lieberman. U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman lost the
Democratic primary not because of the party he belongs to, but because
his politics didn't jibe with the those of most Democrats in the
state. Thornton's campaign is entirely different. He has said that the
state needs politicians willing to make the tough decisions that might
lose them elections.

So far, Margaret Thornton's work has mostly been behind the scenes.
She will not perfect that political-spouse look, where spouses stand
on a stage looking at the candidate as a hungry dog would gaze at a
biscuit, but she's already thinking of her role as the wife of the new
governor. She'd like to bridge the gap between the haves and
have-nots, particularly among children. If children know each other as
friends, they can't very well turn on one another later.

But if things don't go that way - if Connecticut continues to vote
along party lines for its governor - Margaret Thornton will be fine.

"We can't lose," she says. "He's got a platform to say some of the
things he believes. People will listen to him."