Good news, ASU, one of our own is running for president.
It's about time someone who wasn't a Yale grad ran for the job (read: Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Kerry, Lieberman and Dean). Yale has had a stranglehold on the White House for 12 years. Our hopes of showing that Sun Devils are just as capable of running the country as those Ivy League snobs from Yale rest in the hands of Harry Braun, class of '71.
I know what you're thinking. Writing in the name of a third-party candidate is tantamount to throwing your vote away and may even help the candidate you support the least. Besides, anyone who would run for president without the endorsement of a major party would have to be crazy, right?
Yep.
Braun is everything short of visionary. He can best be described as a less successful Greenpeace version of Howard Dean: idealistic, a bit touched in the head and very, very loud. While "campaigning" before an environment and justice class on campus Wednesday, Braun conjured up flashbacks to Dean's infamous scream speech. OK, maybe he wasn't that over the top, but you get the idea.
Environmental causes and clean energy sources are the centerpiece of Braun's platform. Tired of the ineffectual energy policies of both candidates, he is basing his campaign around ... (drum roll) ... hydrogen "windships."
Now, to be fair, this isn't actually such a bad idea at face value. Remember, oil, coal and nuclear power do have some rather unpleasant side effects. And they're non-renewable. The "windships" are really massive arrays of fans that generate electricity that is then used to produce hydrogen from seawater. The result is a clean source of energy. And in case you're wondering, most cars can be inexpensively converted to run on liquid hydrogen (distinct from hydrogen fuel cells which are still quite cost prohibitive).
But there's a catch. It would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million of these contraptions to provide enough power to the entire country. Braun thinks it can be done by 2010, complete with the "windship fleet" and an infrastructure of hydrogen pipelines.
When asked the cost of this endeavor, Braun managed to say $6 trillion without batting an eye. And you thought we had budget problems now.
Harry Braun is also a walking sound bite on any other political matter you can think of. To help fund the $6 trillion hydrogen-based U.S. economy he wants to tax gasoline $1 per gallon. Being rather concerned about the over-fishing and destruction of sea-life, he advocates the Navy begin sinking fishing trawlers. Yeah ...
We haven't even gotten to the best part, yet. Because Braun is relatively unknown (read: not even on the map) and getting into the game rather late, he needs to get his message out in a hurry to a lot of people. Don't expect a TV advertising blitz anytime soon, though. His campaign doesn't have the money for that.
No, Braun's gone a different route: e-mail. It seems good ol' Harry has gotten his hands on the email addresses of 175 million Americans and plans on sending out massive amounts of spam to all of them. Braun expects to get about a million loyal supporters.
Somehow I think Yale is going to hold on to the White House for four more years. John Kerry and George W. Bush never looked so good.
Scott Phillips is a justice studies senior. Reach him at scott.phillips@asu.edu and read his blog online at asuwebdevil.com
