Check out this look at real Americans seeking change during the 2016 election and took matters into their own hands. The occasional celebrity cameo. These days, the presidential campaign seems more like a cable TV roast. Once upon a time, we looked at the race to be Commander in Chief as a way to vet the person we want to lead our nation. Now, it often feels like the process is one table-flip shor
t of being a Bravo reality show. It all makes great entertainment. But lost in all this is that pure, innocent belief that running for the highest office in the land should really mean something. Which is precisely where The Can’t-idates: Running For President When Nobody Knows Your Name, the new book and pagefrom veteran journalist Craig Tomashoff, comes in. While politicians continue to turn the election into a late-night comedy sketch, this book/page instead tell the amusing, amazing stories of a handful of Americans who believe so much in the process of running for president that they are risking the loss of friends, family and finances on a goal they know deep down they’ll never achieve. Why are they doing this thing that few will respect them for? The Can’t-idates explores the other side of the 2016 election to find the surprising and moving answer to that question. Today there are roughly 1,600 “regular people” who’ve hit the campaign trail after getting their Federal Election Commission paperwork approved. (That’s more than triple the number who ran in 2012.) Sure, 99.9% of them don’t have a shot at the job. And most of us assume they’re simply lunatics living in mom’s basement, surrounded by a dozen cats. However, Tomashoff spent three weeks driving 10,000 miles across the country last spring to speak with some of these “citizen candidates” and discovered that their quest is as much personal as it is presidential. This book and page explore what drives them, and should be considered not just a place to learn about them but also a forum for anyone with presidential aspirations to share them with those who understand.
