PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : ‘Want to Run for Vice President?’ : A ‘nice person’ has fun on the little Socialist Party slate--until she realizes what Bush and Clinton fail to say.

Three weeks ago I found a message on my answering machine that the vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Party had died. Could I help get his obituary into the papers? (“And by the way, you wouldn’t want to run for vice president, would you?”)

I’m a proud, though inactive, member of the Socialist Party and I agree with the platform. Still, I hesitated to become a candidate. Could I withstand the media scrutiny?

My taxes are straightforward enough; my sex life is even more boring than George Bush’s. But there’s always something that you wouldn’t want seen in the glare of publicity. I thought about the elderly man who sent me the manuscript that I lost. I kept putting him off until he finally stopped calling. And what about the neighbor I didn’t get around to visiting in the hospital before she died? My grown daughter says that I often made jokes when what she needed was a hug. (Will that play like Patti Davis and Nancy Reagan?)

I don’t suppose my rivals wince at things like that. After all, one of them is a governor who flew home to facilitate an execution in order to appear as tough as the other one, who has proved in both the White House and the CIA that he’s not afraid to order killings.

I guess I deserve to be the Socialist candidate. And they deserve me. If capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce good, then socialism is an extension of “family values.” (Even if you don’t like him, you wouldn’t let your brother-in-law sleep in the gutter, would you?)

In Norway and Sweden, these egalitarian values, administered by rather unsentimental socialists, have produced dynamic economies. But here, the tiny Socialist Party attracts nice people like me. Well, I can get tough, too.

“If I’m the candidate,” I bargain with the party, ‘we’re going to put more stress on exposing that deceptively titled North American Free Trade Agreement. “Fine with us,” they answer.

“And I demand my own button.”

“You got it,” said presidential candidate J. Quinn Brisben. “With all the button collectors out there, we always make our money back on a button.”

At first it seemed almost quaint that the vice-presidential nominee of the party of Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller and W. E. B. Dubois has to wait until after 11:00 p.m. to make long distance phone calls. I was tickled when I was asked to give the keynote address at the party’s Indiana State Convention, to be held in Terre Haute in Eugene V. Deb’s attic. What a bit of radical retro chic!

Then I turned on the television to watch my opponents. It no longer seems cute or campy to be the candidate with a $1,500 campaign chest when you’re the only one explaining the difference between health insurance “reform” that would prove once again that government programs don’t work and a genuine pick-your-doctor and get-taken-care-of health plan--the kind Canadians and many Europeans take for granted.

It’s true that “socialized medicine,” like Social Security, was once a utopian Socialist scheme. But it’s mainstream now. Where’s the second party to implement this well-tested reform?

Discussion of the North American Free Trade Agreement was even more distressing. It’s being scored as though it was a tug of war over jobs among the United States, Mexico and Canada, with Carla Hills negotiating for our team. In fact, Mexican, U.S. and Canadian capitalists, sitting together, have drawn up their declaration of corporate independence. If implemented, it will lower U.S. wages so effectively that, after a while, no one will bother moving factories to Mexico. Many Mexicans oppose it, too, because it locks in their dreadful sweatshop conditions.

If Clinton really explained what Bush has cooked up, he’d win for sure. But once he started, the campaign contributions would vanish. He’d be raving into a megaphone, like me, about the consequences of this “free-trade” agreement: demolished health and safety laws, banks allowed to own insurance companies, an explosion of pesticide use, innumerable worker benefits eliminated by being ruled “disguised subsidies.”

If there were a normal opposition party, I’d be happy talking about pure democratic socialism on college campuses and phone-in shows. But it’s terrifying to be the candidate of a third party that has to do the work of the second. What started as a lark has become a fearsome responsibility.