If you love your country and want to devote your life to
improving it but can’t bring yourself to identify with either the Democratic or
Republican parties, here’s a suggestion: Don’t run for office. Forget what your
4th grade teacher told you in civics class — just because you can grow up and run for president doesn’t mean you
should, especially if you want to do something that matters. If you run for
public office as a third-party candidate on the state and especially the federal
level, your efforts to improve the nation will be wasted, and you will have
squandered time and money you could have spent actually making a difference.

Consider the cases of Ralph Nader and Kevin Barrett, both of
whom are currently running for federal office and have just received enough
signatures to appear on Wisconsin’s ballot in November. Nader first made
headlines in 1965 for exposing the automobile industry’s utter negligence of
basic safety features, spawning the mandated safety regulations that still
exist for the entire industry today. From there he helped found a massive
public interest group that investigated what he believed to be the threat of
government corruption, and founded over four dozen non-profit organizations dedicated
to fighting what he saw as the dangers posed by large corporations. However,
his active campaigning for president since 2000 — running in opposition to what
he sees as the corporate-dominated Democratic and Republican parties — has done
little more than make a vague political statement that grows weaker with each
passing election. The time he spends gallivanting across the country looking
for votes could, as his track record before the last several elections shows,
be better spent elsewhere.

Kevin Barrett, though not quite as good an example as Nader,
is another irrelevant political hopeful who used to make great strides toward
addressing what he thought to be a major issue in the United States. Several
years ago, while holding down a job as assistant lecturer at UW-Madison,
Barrett caught the nation’s attention by suggesting that the destruction of the
World Trade Center in 2001 was engineered by our own government. Whatever the
truth to his theory (none whatsoever), he sparked a national debate on academic
freedom and consequently brought an enormous amount of publicity to his cause.
However, Barrett, ravenous for attention, is trying to force his message
further into the public sphere, making a complete ass of himself in the process
and contributing nothing to his cause. In the middle of conservative writer
David Horowitz’s guest lecture last semester, Barrett stood up, rudely
interrupted Horowitz with a totally irrelevant question about 9/11, and was
subsequently booed out of the auditorium. Now he is running as a third-party
libertarian candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional
District, and doesn’t have a prayer of winning. How will a fruitless run for
Congress prove his conspiracy theory or convince the public that he’s not a
grade-A wacko, instead of doing just the opposite?

The true tragedy lies in what these two campaigners could
accomplish in the time it takes them to gather enough signatures to appear on
the ballot (a tragedy in Nader’s case, anyway — Barrett’s case is tragic
primarily for himself). While it is unfortunate that most elections in this
country are limited to two parties and candidates with gobs of money and
connections — that is simply the way our system works — and no amount of complaining
or acting contrary to convention will change that. But persist anyway, to
assume that only a president or a congressman can truly solve problems is
childish, on the level of a 4th grader still learning civics. And if they
really don’t expect to win some petty election, why are they in the race at
all? Are they trying to shove their cause further down our society’s throat — to
force us to pay attention to their campaign by thrusting the question of to
vote or not to vote for them upon us? Do they really believe this will support
their ideology, achieve their ends more effectively than working within an
already established public interest empire to hold corporations accountable, or
consulting actual scientists to review the site and gather more convincing
evidence?

Nader and Barrett’s desperate attempts to grab the public’s
attention instead of working within their means to solve their own personal
crusades speaks of oversized egos crying out for the public spotlight to shine
on them, not their causes.

Jack Garigliano ([email protected])
is a junior majoring in history and English.