alt prez / By Richard Wall

Alt Prez

The Other Candidates For President: Last in a six-part series

(Sept. 25, 2008)  What good can ever come from a bunch of third-party idealists running for President? A lot, actually. Because while you may forget about these alternative candidates even before the election, their best ideas live on and just might change society.

Democrats and Republicans generally like change only as a slogan and avoid the actuality whenever possible. That’s why it wasn’t the Ds and Rs but the Prohibition Party that first promoted giving women the right to vote, way back in 1872.

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Children working in factories 12 hours a day and losing their skinny little fingers in the cogs of industry? Democrats and Republicans thought it a capital idea. Third parties didn’t, and pushed for reform, as well as for other strange notions, such as public education, social security, unemployment insurance and minimum wages. Ruinous ideas all, according to the Democrats and Republicans, who later adopted those very ideas as their own.

Which crazy third-party idea will become the next political reality? Will Democrats appropriate the Greens’ sustainable, alternative energy policy? Or will Republicans steal the Thermodynamic Law Party’s idea of a Kelvinic Levitation wing that will create a shield of negative entropy around our nation making it impervious to hostile forces? One seems as likely as the other.

Race for Third Place

Brian Moore of Spring Hill, Fla., thinks the next third-party idea to be picked up might be the 30-hour workweek. That’s one of his proposals as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party USA.

“It’s tough to be a radical today,” says Moore. He’s been called a traitor, confused with Stalin, and placed under surveillance, “because I fit under that category of being a threat to our nation, undermining our policies, advocating that people don’t join the military, and things like that.”

He’ll be on the ballot in 11 states, yet he knows an electoral win is impossible. “But we can be in a position to pick up the pieces when the system fails,” says Moore. “We are on the verge of economic collapse and catastrophic chaos, and hopefully the people will turn to a system like ours, as opposed to turning to a left wing or right wing dictator.”

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