Cheryl Crist has been a lot of things: high school teacher, military wife and mother, radio personality, stockbroker, manager of an adult day care facility, real estate agent, yoga teacher, antiwar activist.

Now Crist, a progressive Olympia Democrat, is making her second serious run for the 3rd Congressional District seat. And though the state Democratic Party snubbed her at its convention in Vancouver last month, she’s determined as she travels across the district delivering her message about the high costs of war and the choices the nation faces.

She stresses that she is not anti-military. Her 37-year-old son is on active duty in the Air Force. She was married to an Air Force fighter pilot for many years.

Yet she warns that the United States government is starving domestic programs and threatening future generations by funding the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and maintaining 800 military bases in more than 130 nations around the globe.

“We are building eight new military bases along the east coast of Africa to protect our oil,” she told The Columbian’s editorial board. That money could be going to education, health care and other domestic needs, she said — and to building “a peaceful green economy.”

On campaign stops, Crist hands out a pie chart from the website www.nationalpriorities.org showing that 48 percent of federal government spending goes to current and past military expenses. Taxpayers in the 3rd District have paid $2.5 billion toward military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, she says — enough to pay the salaries of 3,094 elementary school teachers or build 9,048 affordable housing units.

Crist has been endorsed by the Progressive Caucus of the state Democratic Party, which is considerably to the left of the state party leadership. She favors public funding of political campaigns, a progressive position.

To raise money for the federal government, this former stockbroker advocates a tax on financial transactions. The nation had such a tax until 1966, she said, and restoring the tax could balance the federal budget after nearly a decade of red ink.

At a July 8 candidate forum in Vancouver, Crist advocated the establishment of state banks to make loans to small businesses that can’t get credit from private banks.

She also drew a smattering of applause when she advocated opening Medicare to everyone as a way to guarantee universal health care.

Crist is well-known in Olympia, where she has been a Democratic precinct committee officer for a dozen years. She campaigned for U.S. Rep. Brian Baird in his successful 1998 race for Congress, but says, “Baird left us” when he supported President George W. Bush’s Iraq troop surge. She ran against Baird in 2008 and decided to make the race again this year because of her concern about the nation’s priorities. “I knew too much to sit and do nothing,” she said.

Crist runs a no-frills campaign and delivers her dire message with a disarming cheerfulness and the expectation that people will be receptive.

“I have always expressed my strong belief that peace is not only good for the heart, but also for the pocketbook,” she says.

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