Could there be a higher concept for reality TV than running for president?

Could there be any greater opportunity for a talented but unknown political thinker than free nationwide airtime?

The FX network will soon begin soliciting candidates for "American Candidate." The weeding-out process, according to Daily Variety, is to begin in January. The show finale is slated for July 4, 2004, when a decision to run for real will be made.

Sounds like a mix of a serious documentary and a show such as "Survivor," except that it's debating instead of eating bugs.

Sure.

Sign me up.

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There are three major failing in modern politics.

-- It's votes versus money and money is winning.

-- The debate is brain-dead. If an idea can't fit on a bumper sticker or eight-second soundbite, forget it.

-- Thanks to scandal-as-a-sport reporting, political candidates must come from a very narrow pool of the population (generally, the people we made fun of in high school).

Maybe this TV show can change all this.

What follows here is addressed to the show's producers. Readers might find the platform or the First Dumpling more interesting.

* * *

To be a ratings success, this show will need to be entertaining instead of annoying. This show will need candidates that are media savvy instead of talk show wannabes.

Having spent years interviewing politicians while in the news business, having been interviewed on TV, having written political speeches, I qualify as savvy as opposed to being a know-it-all blowhard. The truly great politiicians know listening is a valuable skill.

The show will need somebody who can think PBS but talk CBS. The show will need someone at least okay looks-wise, and somebody in the bridge age (I'm 44) most conducive to connecting with both Gen X and The Greatest Generation.

The show will need humor. Politics is very similar to cold-call selling, and the candidate is going to need to show a great deal of grace. The best way to get people to like you is to make them laugh. Has anybody tried stand-up politics in a comedy club?

The show will need platform ideas good enough for major candidates to steal. Platitudes are nice -- nobody is against children -- but substance adds credibility. In an odd twist in an already odd blurring of reality and TV, there could be more issues of substance aired in this series than in the real campaign.

There's one more consideration that may be most important of all. In politics, it's called the narrative, the quick little biography that summarizes the virtues of the candiate. My life story is so packed, I once considered a wack publishing idea -- "The Autobiography of Anonymous" -- as a way to get somebody to read an autobiography without that somebody being famous first. Anybody else out there been shot at? Anybody else witness an execution?

Quite frankly, there are many, many folks out there who would run for office if they didn't have to answer questions about smoking pot in the '70s instead of equitable tax policies for the poor.

Finally, the prospective candidate needs to stay out political party label traps. I've ghost-written for both Republicans and Democrats, and prefer to describe myself this way:

I am a cynical idealist. I first look at everything in terms of the perfect, then factor in the real world from there.

I'm a militaristic peacenik. War is an ugly nasty business and anyone who has ever experienced grief first hand should know military action is to be avoided at most every cost, but not all costs.

I'm a free-market believer with a great big asterisk. An unfettered free market will generally serve in the best interests of everybody but the poor (as it's hard to make a profit on people without money).

I'm a free speech advocate who needs to remind people of Churchill's famous line: 'Truth is so precious, sometimes it needs a bodyguard of lies."

I'm against capital punishment in every case until proven otherwise. For instance, seeing as how Timothy McVeigh wanted to die, I'd have commuted his sentence to life, built him a cell permanently plastered with pictures of his victims and dared somebody to call it cruel and unusual.

Yeah, I'm human, too.

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G.L. Marshall learned a lot about balancing the ideal with the practical while working as an RA in a college dorm.