PORTLAND (AP) – Green Party vice presidential candidate Pat LaMarche urged Greens on Thursday to “vote their conscience” in the Nov. 2 presidential election – but to hopefully do so without helping President George W. Bush.

LaMarche, who is David Cobb’s running mate, said she could “care less how many votes we get.” And while she said she wouldn’t tell anybody how to vote, she called Bush the worst president in U.S. history.

“I feel we’re on the Titantic in this country right now,” LaMarche said. “With (Democratic challenger) John Kerry, there’d be lifeboats. With George Bush, there are not.”

LaMarche held a news conference at the Maine Green Party’s office to give an overview of her 14-day “Left Out Tour,” where she spent nights at homeless shelters and on the streets in 14 cities. She hoped to draw attention to homelessness, the lack of affordable housing and the lack of health coverage for millions of Americans.

LaMarche gave a city-by-city rundown of her tour, describing her encounters with anger and despair, unsanitary conditions, “rats as big as cats” and people sleeping in chairs.

Staying at the New York City shelter was the “most unbearable experience of my life,” she said, while the shelter in Detroit could serve as a national model. She met battered women and jobless men and parents whose children were taken from them because they were homeless.

The homeless population, she said, has been ignored by the government.

“It was horrible to find people in misery and leave them just as miserable as you found them,” she said.

LaMarche, a 43-year-old single mother from Yarmouth who won 7 percent of the vote as a Green candidate in Maine’s 1998 gubernatorial election, was chosen as the vice presidential nominee at the Green Party’s party’s national convention in June.

The party has said a top priority is to evict Bush from office, and that it would not campaign heavily in swing states such as Maine where the vote is close.

LaMarche was quoted last summer as saying she might not even vote for her own ticket. But she backed away from that statement on Thursday, saying she will vote for herself because it appears Kerry will handily win the state’s 1st Congressional District, which is where she lives.

Still, LaMarche said George Bush in her opinion has surpassed James K. Polk as the worst president in U.S. history. She gave Polk, the 11th president who served from 1845-49, low marks for taking America to war with Mexico and mistreating American Indians.

“Polk was an ignorant man in an ignorant time,” LaMarche said. “George Bush is an ignorant man in an enlightened time.”

The Cobb-LaMarche ticket is on the ballot in 28 states.

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