I think not.
> .... This guy certainly did
>not enjoy establishment support of any type.
This is not evidence against the proposition that "the system is stacked against third parties". Only if the claim were "the system is so stacked that no third party can win" would this be so. I also doubt if your claim that he "did not enjoy establishment support of any type" is quite true. I consider the media "establishment" and I'll bet he got a fair amount of coverage from them.
>As Jerry Brown also noted a while back, you can
>get somewhere if you have the appeal to get a
>following. In the same vein, if money was so
>all-important, the Dems would have had their
>asses handed to them this time around. ...
Ventura did not win this race without money. Nobody, as far as I know, claims that "money [is] so all-important". If you haven't yet, why not peruse Tom Ferguson's *Golden Rule* on this point? He covers many of your complaints quite well. You might therein read the concluding chapter, "Money and Destiny in Advanced Capitalism: Paying the Piper, Calling the Tune" and the appendix "Deduced and Abandoned: Rational Expectations, the Investment Theory of Political Parties, and the Myth of the Median Voter". Both of these chapters are relatively short and accessible.
Bill