Will third party candidates once again make the difference they made four and eight years ago? Or will they not be able to influence the outcome of the elections this time around? 

The Agence France Presse finally discovered such candidates, spending an entire article on them. Sadly, not about their policy proposals as such, but only about the level of support they currently receive and their chances of ‘ruining’ this year’s election for either major party.

Luckily the AFP did spend some time describing the views of the third parties:

But as a committed supporter of individual liberties, Barr has split with Republicans in recent years over a host of Bush administration’s measures, such as the Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law introduced in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks that, critics say, quashed individual freedoms…

 

“Barr conceivably could be to John McCain what Ralph Nader was to Al Gore in 2000: ruinous,” wrote conservative columnist George Will in Newsweek magazine.

Barr is himself competing with Chuck Baldwin, another former Republican, who is running as a candidate for the Constitution Party, which has an election manifesto very similar to the Libertarian’s. Baldwin is standing in at least 37 states.

Consumer advocate Nader, 74, is undertaking his fifth bid for the White House, this time as an independent candidate, and will be on the ballot in at least 46 states.

 

But unlike 2000, Nader has been virtually ignored by the media in 2008 — in no small part because Obama has generated so much enthusiasm with left-leaning voters.

Like the Democrats, the Green Party also has an African-American candidate in Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia congresswoman from 1993 to 2003.

 

It is encouraging to see the AFP finally cover the third parties a bit, as we have tried to do frequently at this site; in the end, John McCain and Barack Obama are not the only ones running for president. Their are very reasonable other alternatives out there, all representing a considerable part of the American population and their views, even if those individuals do not vote for those candidates but for one of the major parties’ candidates instead.