Albuquerque is getting a visit from a presidential candidate this week – no, Obama and Romney are spending their time elsewhere, thank you – but a rival candidate is here looking for votes.
Peta Lindsay, the nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, spent much of Tuesday on the University of New Mexico campus talking with students and faculty members and anyone else passing by on the mall outside the Student Union. She is a Los Angeles based antiwar and immigrant rights activist whose message seems certain to resonate with those on the Left.
“Our number one priority is jobs,” Lindsay said. “We want to make a job a constitutional right. We believe everyone has the right to work, and the government should be funding jobs programs now before they do anything else. We believe health care, housing and education should be rights.”
Lindsay has a little problem, though. She’s 28, and the Constitution says the president has to be at least 35 years old.
She points out that young Americans have the highest unemployment and poverty rates, and then there’s the socialist take on modern warfare.
“The average age of a congressman is 60,” Lindsay said. “The average age of a person fighting in Afghanistan is 19. So the people who make the decision to go to war are more than three times as old as the people who have to do the fighting.”
Peta Lindsay acknowledges she will not win, saying her mission is to keep her issues alive for the voters.
Lindsay is on the ballot in 13 states, including New York and New Jersey and Minnesota, but not in New Mexico, where third parties complain that state law makes it much too hard for them to get their candidates on the ballot with Democrats and Republicans.
