By Michael Daniels,Bethel Citizen

The grandson of two former Maine state legislators from Bethel is seeking to become the next U.S. Senator from California.

Todd Chretien, 36, is the Green Party candidate in the upcoming race for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

Chretien is the grandson of Addison and Emily Saunders, who lived at 63 Main St. in Bethel. The Saunders, Democrats, each served terms in the Maine Legislature in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chretien’s paternal grandparents, Vi and Don Chretien, were also from Bethel, and Sue Farrar is his grandaunt.

Chretien’s parents, Eileen and Mike of Auburn, grew up in Bethel and graduated from Gould Academy. They raised their sons, Todd and Joel, on a horse farm in Gray-New Gloucester, but the family continued to spend part of their summers at the Saunders’ camp on Songo Pond – along with Addison and Emily’s 16 other grandchildren.

Chretien moved to Oakland, Calif., in 1994, but he is back in Maine this week, wrapping up an East Coast speaking and fundraising tour.

When he returns to California, Chretien faces an uphill battle. He is running against a popular and powerful two-term Democratic incumbent.

This is hardly the first time Chretien has stepped up, even against long odds, to battle for a cause he believes in. In November of last year, Chretien appeared on Fox TV’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” After the show, The San Francisco Gate, a daily, online publication of The San Francisco Chronicle, published a guest editorial by Chretien, calling on Bill O’Reilly to come to San Francisco and rejoin the debate. To date O’Reilly has not taken up the offer.

Chretien’s mother believes she knows where her son gets a lot of his feistiness.

“I think he shares a lot of genes with his Aunt Sue,” said Eileen Chretien. “She’s never been afraid to speak up.”

While he is relatively young for a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Chretien’s resume as a political activist is already extensive.

According to his campaign biography, in 1988, at the age of 18, he became the youngest elected delegate for Jesse Jackson at the Maine State Democratic Party convention.

After a year at Middlebury College, he spent eight months in El Salvador and Nicaragua as a human rights worker and English teacher.

In 1991, he entered Columbia University and became a leading student activist in the movement against the First Gulf War. Soon after, he joined the International Socialist Organization and has been an active member since.

Chretien moved to Oakland, Calif., in 1994 and has lived there ever since.

In that time, he has been active in dozens of organizing coalitions from defending affirmative action to global justice actions against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and World Trade Organization to the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

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