To lifetime of challenges, she adds a try for lieutenant governor

BELCHERTOWN -- Martina Robinson has no money and no experience in public office. She entered the race for lieutenant governor months after everyone else, and her Green-Rainbow Party is unknown to many voters.

The challenges her campaign faces do not stop there: Robinson uses a wheelchair to get around, and a speech impediment sometimes blurs her words. When she gives speeches, an aide reads the text aloud after she has finished, for those who might have trouble understanding her.

Robinson knows the odds are steeply stacked against her. She wants to win and thinks she has a chance, but winning is not her sole objective. She also hopes to set an encouraging example for other disabled people.

``I doubt Harriet Tubman, when she was trying to end slavery, ever thought she would be the end of it," she said. ``Someone had to start somewhere."

Robinson, 30, has cerebral palsy, a brain disorder that impairs muscular coordination. An activist for the rights of disabled people, she describes herself as ``mostly African-American" and bisexual, and she acknowledges with humor her distinctiveness in a field with three white men -- Republican Reed Hillman, Democrat Tim Murray, and Independent John J. Sullivan.

For Robinson, who has railed all her life against the idea that she should have to fit someone else's idea of ``normal," the outsider role seems a comfortable fit.

As a child, she said, ``being in a wheelchair never bothered me. It bothered me the way other people kept trying to fix me -- the way everyone focused on me learning how to walk and being normal, whatever that means."

Robinson was an adviser to the Green-Rainbow Party a month ago when party leaders asked her to step into the vacancy left by Wendy Van Horne, who dropped out of the race for personal reasons. Robinson has made just a handful of campaign appearances. Even in Belchertown, her Western Massachusetts hometown, where she has run for office three times, few people know that her name will appear on the ballot next month.

That will change if she participates in campaign debates, the first of which is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 17. Robinson will ask to be given extra time so her words can be repeated by a reader. Grace Ross, the Green-Rainbow candidate for governor, has no doubts about Robinson's debating skills -- ``she's brilliant and she has tons of public speaking experience," Ross says -- but she is less confident that Robinson's disability will be accommodated.

``I'm a little concerned about the ability of the political process to handle it," Ross said.

Robinson has blazed a trail before. Growing up in central Pennsylvania, she was the first severely handicapped student in her school district to attend classes with her fully mobile classmates all the way through high school, she said. She always planned to go to college, because, she joked, ``I knew I wasn't going to be a bricklayer." Rather than stay close to home, she enrolled at Purchase College , outside New York City.

Eager to live on her own after graduation, Robinson moved to Massachusetts in 2000 because the state offered better healthcare benefits. Those included 16 hours of care each day by a personal attendant who helps her with bathing, dressing, cooking, and other tasks. In Pennsylvania, she said, she would have received three hours of home-based help -- not enough to allow her to live in her own apartment.

Robinson fiercely believes that a lifestyle like hers -- in her own home, where she sets her own schedule and priorities -- should be available to all disabled people. If elected, she said, she would seek federal grant money to help disabled people move out of institutions.

Robinson is one of a growing number of disabled candidates around the country. They include Republican Kristen Cox, a blind woman running for lieutenant governor in Maryland; and Democrat Tammy Duckworth, a veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, who is vying for representative of Illinois's Sixth Congressional District. In 2000, US Representative James Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat, became the first quadripeligic elected to Congress.

Robinson said she turned to the Green-Rainbow Party after watching Democrats fail to address the needs of disabled people. She first sought election to the Belchertown Board of Selectmen in 2003 because she was homesick and wanted to make Belchertown feel more like home -- a place with more public transportation and sidewalks.

She lost, winning only 8 percent of the vote, and ran and lost again the following year. Her third try, in May, also fell short. But Robinson calls the result a ``near success" because she received almost 14 percent of the vote.

Robinson believes the fact that she was new in town hurt her more in the election than her disability. Her former campaign manager, Ken Elstein of Belchertown, agreed. ``Other people might be able to climb stairs, but they can't out-think her," he said.

During a two-hour interview, Robinson spoke softly and had to repeat herself a few times, but most of her words were clear. She says ``people have trouble understanding me because they don't want to understand me," but she acknowledges that her speech was her biggest concern when Ross asked her to join the ticket.

A frequent speaker on disability rights, Robinson traveled to New Delhi last year for a meeting on women's health. She makes some money writing and teaching dance classes for disabled people, but her main income is her $800-per-month disability benefit. For fun, she writes fiction. Her last story featured a disabled girl who declines God's offer to heal her.

``If she wants to do something she's going to do it," said her mother, Diana, a nurse. ``When she wanted to go white-water rafting, I said, `Don't tell me when you're going, just call me when you get back.' "

Compared with some of her greater challenges, Robinson said, the job she seeks looks pretty easy.

``I've chaired lots of meetings," she said. ``I can do that in my sleep."

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.