Age of the Geek

The candidate we need or the candidate we deserve?
     He's pro-choice, pro same-sex marriage, wants to implement tax reform, is for background checks on gun sales, and a government spending limit. He's an Independent candidate with a mission to give an alternative to the two-party system.
     And, in spite of the fact that he's not a real person, he's receiving the strongest Independent polling numbers since Ross Perot.
     His name is "Deez Nuts," and if that sounds incredibly juvenile, it's because he's the creation of 15-year-old Brady Olson, a western Iowa teenager who is turning a prank on the electoral system into a nationwide indictment of the political structure.
     It began innocently enough. The vetting process to get on the polls with the Federal Election Commission is not particularly thorough. As if the Republican primary race wasn't already evidence enough, apparently anybody can run for president.
     Yes, even fictional people, real animals and fictional animals. A 10-year-old illegal immigrant could, in theory, run a campaign. Actually getting on the ballot once Election Day comes around is another matter entirely, but virtually anybody can file.
     Joke candidates are hardly a new phenomenon. "Nobody For President" has been campaigning since 1964, Stephen Colbert came dangerously close to legitimately disrupting the 2008 election with his satirical candidacy, and cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny have long been the chosen representatives of the protest vote.
     Olson's joke campaign itself was just one of literally hundreds of candidates, but it's the one that happened to catch on and go viral. The prospect of casting a vote for "Deez Nuts" was enough for people to demand that Olson's alias be placed alongside Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in a North Carolina poll. This led to this hilarious scenario where professional reporters had to announce that 9 percent of the poll respondents chose "Deez Nuts" over Clinton or Trump.
     Since then, the imaginary candidate has found similar validation in Minnesota and Iowa and is currently working to take his campaign nationwide, just to see how far he can go.
     I'd like to say that a fake campaign couldn't possibly gain more traction than it already has, but I thought the same thing about Donald Trump's campaign. Clearly I've underestimated the number of people so fed up with the political system that their primary goal is to see it crash and burn in the most spectacular way imaginable.
     Currently Olson is considering several people to be his prospective running mate, including Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley. Another unusual candidate named Limberbutt McCubbins, a feline Demo-cat from Kentucky, is also on the running-mate shortlist.
     There are people that are upset with Olson for his antics, but I think that anger is misplaced. Olson may not be a legally viable candidate and is appealing to a demographic that favors lewd jokes as much as libertarianism, but he's clearly put a lot of effort into this. One may not like the fact that a high school student has made a larger impact on the presidential race than say, Bobby Jindal, but that's a problem with the political system.
     Getting angry at Olson for pointing out how broken the system is won't make the system any less broken.
     More importantly, any teenager willing to participate in the political system in any way should probably be encouraged to do so. Apathy is a far greater threat to democracy than any political policy, left or right.
     Do Olson's antics make a mockery of our election system? Probably, but no more than many of the legitimate, for lack of a better word, candidates out there. In the meantime, the primary purpose of the "Deez Nuts" campaign appears to be laying down the groundwork for future Independent candidates. Presumably human ones legally qualified to be elected.
     It's a noble goal, but I fear that the stranglehold of the two-party system will leave Olson with a different lesson: that a viable third-party candidate is nothing more than a figment of his imagination.
     But hey, stranger things have happened.

 
     Travis Fischer is a newswriter for Mid-America Publishing and can't wait to see the political signs that come out of this campaign.