Cornel West is running for president. He announced last Monday in a short video referencing issues including Medicare for All, “decent housing,” abortion rights, the war in Ukraine, and ensuring that everyone has “access to a job with a living wage.”

Dr West has a record of writing and activism on many of these issues that stretches back several decades. And he has a way of talking about them that conveys not just a political perspective but a deeply compelling moral vision. I can hardly think of anyone I’d rather see replace the deeply mediocre Joe Biden as president of the United States — to, as West said in a recent appearance on Democracy Now!, become “the head of Empire to help dismantle it.”

Unfortunately, West is planning to run on the ballot line of an obscure third party. I doubt that as many as 1 percent of American voters even know that the “People’s Party” exists.