Exhibiting a bull-sized taste for revenge, Rocky's unanticipated Senate candidacy was clearly aimed at Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other ruthless Florida Democratic leaders for refusing to place his name on that state's March 15th presidential primary ballot.
"I'm trying to restore democracy and bring fairness to our electoral process," the irrepressible candidate asserted in a recent press release. "The hurdles the system has in place are overwhelming. People need to become aware of how unfair the system has become or they may continue to suffer the types of candidate choices they are faced with today."
Like a majority of voters, he's not remotely impressed with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. He doesn't care too much for the Libertarian candidate either.
De La Fuente acknowledges that he was initially intrigued by Trump's candidacy, "until he started opening his mouth." In fact, it was the real estate mogul's inflammatory rhetoric against Mexicans and Muslims that propelled De La Fuente into the race a year ago this month. "If it wasn't for him," asserts De La Fuente, "I would not be in this race."
It's not surprising that the other real estate tycoon-turned-presidential candidate -- the one most Americans have never heard of -- is particularly appalled by Trump's grandiose and mean-spirited proposals to deport millions of illegal immigrants and build a wall approximately 2,000 miles in length along the U.S. southern border. After all, this is a guy who once exchanged 787 acres of privately-owned land with the state of California to be used in construction of the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in the foothills of Otay Mesa in exchange for 310 acres next to a planned international border crossing where the prison was originally planned to be built. De La Fuente didn't want a massive prison complex to be the first thing visitors and newcomers from Latin America to see when entering the United States.
Needless to say, the erratic Republican nominee doesn't impress him in the slightest, politically or professionally. "Any success he has, in anything he's done in any business -- I have done it better," De La Fuente matter-of-factly told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this past spring.
Hillary, he maintains, isn't much better. "The lady thinks she's queen," the longshot candidate declared while campaigning in the Alaska caucus earlier this year. "This is a democracy. This is not a dynasty." He's also deeply troubled by the former Secretary of State's growing e-mail scandal and has long believed Clinton may eventually be indicted, even if she's sworn in as America's 45 th President in January.
The Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson, he says, simply isn't up to the task. The two major parties, De La Fuente told this writer, "have offered extremely flawed candidates and opened the door for a third party to have a major impact," but the Libertarians, the only alternative party with ballot access in all fifty states, "nominated a candidate who does not appear to be interested in seriously challenging the status quo."
While the blustering GOP candidate promises to "make America great again" and his Democratic rival insists "America never stopped being great," Rocky takes issue with both of his major-party rivals and says that he won't rest until he makes the United States "ten times greater than what it is today."
A minor-party version of Donald Trump, but in a very positive and endearing way, the wealthy real estate developer will appear on the ballot in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming and is also expected to have write-in status in more than fifteen other states, including heavily-Hispanic Arizona and California, as well as the District of Columbia. In most of those states De La Fuente's name will appear on the ballot as an independent or as the nominee of his newly-created American Delta Party.
In the crucial battleground state of Florida, where he recently waged a somewhat unorthodox and colorful campaign for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination -- a contest in which the socially liberal and fiscally pragmatic political centrist garnered more than 61,000 votes and outpolled better-known progressive firebrand Alan Grayson in populous Miami-Dade County by nearly a thousand votes -- De La Fuente will be listed on the ballot as the candidate of Ross Perot's Reform Party, a party that had been on death's doorstep in recent years, but is now experiencing a mild resurgence largely due to Rocky's candidacy.
Theoretically, those 35 states will give the determined political outsider, a candidate completely ignored by the presumptuous and all-powerful media gatekeepers -- the same folks who don't mind endlessly subjecting their audiences to a disarmingly pleasant, but dangerously contemptible austerity monger and intellectual lightweight like Gary "What is Aleppo?" Johnson -- a fighting chance to compete for more than 270 electoral votes on November 8 th .
While seeking the Republican presidential nomination four years ago, Johnson -- America's Heinrich Bruning, the German chancellor whose punitive austerity measures led directly to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 -- called for an immediate $1.4 trillion, 43 percent across-the-board cut in federal spending, a draconian proposal that would have had catastrophic consequences for our most vulnerable citizens while wreaking untold havoc on both the U.S. and global economy. The resulting deflationary spiral and devastating destruction of the country's social safety net, resulting in unnecessary pain and suffering inflicted on poor and lower middle-income Americans, would have been immeasurable.
Yet of all of the candidates running outside the duopoly this year, the astonishingly clueless ex-governor of New Mexico, a rabidly right-wing fiscal extremist who supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- the 12-nation trade deal viewed by many as "Wall Street's Trojan Horse" -- is the one and only third-party candidate the media inexplicably preferred to regularly parade in front of the electorate in a year of widespread discontent with both major-party candidates.
This is all the more astounding when one considers that the little-scrutinized Libertarian candidate preposterously believes that the "Invisible Hand" of the mythical free market will solve global warming, wants to repeal existing minimum wage laws, opposes the federal student loan program, and proposes substantially raising the eligibility age for Social Security and abolishing the federal departments of Commerce, Education, and Housing and Urban Development while eliminating corporate taxes and implementing the regressive "Fair Tax."
Like the Green Party's Jill Stein, who has qualified for the ballot in 44 states and in D.C. -- an impressive feat and a record for her left-leaning party -- and the Constitution Party's Darrell Castle, a relatively obscure bankruptcy and personal injury attorney and ex-Marine from Memphis whose name will appear on the ballot in at least two-dozen states on Nov. 8, De La Fuente remains puzzled by the lack of coverage provided to the nation's other minor-party candidates for the presidency in this increasingly tempestuous and topsy-turvy election cycle.
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