Bill McGaughey, a Minneapolis landlord and author, is also a candidate for President in 2004. If you want an outsider, check out this candidate:

* McGaughey is one of the nation’s leading experts on the economics of work time, having authored a book to support the last major drive for federal shorter-workweek legislation (A Shorter Workweek in the 1980s) and coauthored another with Eugene McCarthy (Nonfinancial Economics: The Case for Shorter Hours of Work), which provided an economic and moral justification for reducing work time.

* He has a strong sense of history and of historical trends. He is author of “Five Epochs of Civilization: World History as Emerging in Five Civilizations” published in 2000. A Chinese-language version will be published in China this year. (See the book’s multilingual web site, http://www.worldhistorysite.com. If you type “predict the future” in the Google or Yahoo search engine, this website comes up #1 on the list.)

* He was an early critic of NAFTA and free trade. His 1992 book “A U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement: Do We Just Say No?”, outlined a positive alternative to free trade. It was used by leading opponents of NAFTA to bring their members up to speed on these issues.

* As a small landlord in a less affluent neighborhood of Minneapolis, he is intimately acquainted with big-city problems, including racial and neighborhood politics, housing, and crime. He has prospered in the city despite the efforts of elected officials and neighborhood groups to run him out of business in 1995.

* A scrappy political fighter, he helped engineer the defeat of top Minneapolis city officials in the 2001 city election. The following year, he ran for U.S. Senate in the Independence Party primary against the party-endorsed candidate. Embracing issues that were anathema to the political establishment, he finished second (of three) in the primary with 8,482 votes, or 31% of the total.

* A CPA, he is financially literate. His accounting career included employment in manufacturing and public transportation. He has made money as a stock-market investor.

* Not totally an outsider, he attended the same college as President Bush and was in the same graduating class as Senator Joe Lieberman.

Bill McGaughey is a man with a vision of a better society. While the other candidates tinker with problems, he puts forth basic solutions. Having written the (world history) book, he understands the requirements of politics in an age of entertainment.