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  The Fringe, Part 4

  Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 4:30 PM | By Chadwick Matlin
  This is the fourth entry in "The Fringe," a periodic look at the lesser-known candidates for president. You can read the whole series here.

  Tom Koos gets it. He knows that a 41-year old facilities manager from California isn't going to win the Democratic nomination. He understands it's unlikely he'll even earn a delegate in New Hampshire, where he'll only campaign for a week before the primary. But he's not running for president to become president. He's running so he can figure out who to vote for.

  Koos has wanted to become president since he was 7. He looked up at the calendar and realized that he'd be 35 by 2000, which meant that in 28 short years, he could be taking the oath of office. So, in 2000, he threw his name in the ring. Nineteen people voted for him—one more than the Fringe's last subject, Michael Skok.

  Considering Koos finished 76,881 New Hampshire votes behind Al Gore in 2000, what is there to gain by running again? Koos told me he wanted to get a better sense of what his own opinions were on the election's major issues so he would know which candidate to endorse.

  As a result, Koos' platform is essentially a composite of his opponents' stances. Like Joe Biden, he wants a soft-partitioned Iraq. Like Hillary Clinton, he supports a national-service academy. And like Dennis Kucinich, he advocates a universal, single-payer health-care system. He's the Voltron of presidential candidates.

  Does this mean Koos is once again embarking on a selfish, self-indulgent pursuit? Perhaps. But he said he's also running to try and convince his friends and family to pay attention to the elections. When he tells people he's running for president, he gets to discuss current events and politics with relative strangers. Plus, he said, running for president is "an awful lot of fun." Some might call it a midlife crisis, but Koos thinks of it as a boyhood dream.

  Filed under: The Fringe

About Chadwick Matlin

• Chadwick Matlin is the staff reporter for Slate's The Big Money, a new business site launching in the fall. He can be reached at Chadwick.Matlin+TH@gmail.com

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