Tagged: Presidential Debates

What's it like to be a third-party candidate running for president? Ralph Nader can tell us.

"You're excluded from the debates," he says. "You spend an exhausting amount of time, until Labor Day, trying to get over the ballot access barriers. Your petitioners are harassed in the streets; you're subjected to baseless lawsuits by one party or another."

Nader has run for president three times – four if you count the time he ran unofficially. In 2000, he managed to win almost 3 percent of the national vote.

For those concerned that Americans weren't paying close enough attention to the presidential election, a tall, fluffy, yellow bird helped change that this week.

Two days after the presidential debate in which Mitt Romney brought up the Sesame Street character in a reference to federal funding for PBS, the "Save Big Bird" debate continued.

Independent fact checkers have not been particularly kind to Mitt Romney since Wednesday's first presidential debate in Denver. But one of the candidate's claims turned out to be so far off the mark that he had to be corrected by his own aides — a fact not unnoticed by the Obama campaign.