Pitt prof runs for Congress

Titus North will live in his mother’s basement if he is elected to Congress.

North, a… Titus North will live in his mother’s basement if he is elected to Congress.

North, a professor in Pitt’s political science department, is running as a Green Party candidate against incumbent Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pittsburgh) for U.S. Congress.

He said he hasn’t started looking at real estate in Washington, D.C., yet, but if he were to win, his mother resides conveniently just outside the city.

“I think this country needs someone who is willing to speak truth to power and is willing to live in his mom’s basement,” North said.

To gain a place on the ballot, North was required to gather 6,000 signatures petitioning for his participation.

Many of those thousands of signatures came from Pitt students. And when the last signature was taken and North’s petition for candidacy was turned in, the Democratic Party challenged its authenticity.

North saw the challenge as a test to his dedication.

“They challenged 3,800 [signatures] saying they weren’t valid,” he said. “So I had to spend four weeks in Harrisburg going through the signatures one by one, sitting next to a representative from the Democratic Party.”

Two-thirds of the contested signatures were valid. The others, according to North, weren’t accepted because many were from college students who had registered under one address and moved recently to a new one.

North slept in a tent during the four weeks he spent at the state capital because a hotel room wasn’t in the budget, he said. But he was eventually granted a place on the ballot.

With petitioning out of the way, North began his campaign.

“Even though this is a low-budget campaign, we’re a serious campaign,” he said.

His platform includes a call to pull troops out of Iraq, demilitarize, end threats to Iran and North Korea, legalize same-sex marriage, impose a national healthcare system and transfer to a renewable energy system.

Citing the strategic redeployment idea — an idea that Doyle supports — as ineffective and “not enough of a peace position,” North promotes a complete military pull-out of Iraq.

“I want the American military to immediately stop operations and then promptly bring all of the troops home from the Middle East,” he said.

North’s foreign policy platform also pushes for redistribution of foreign aid. He disagrees with the current administration’s monetary support of Israel in their dispute with Lebanon.

“Hezbollah came out of the war stronger and Israel came out of it disgraced,” North said. “So it was nothing to cheer for. And Congress has been for decades writing Israel blank checks for policies that are ultimately very self-destructive.”

North would rather foreign aid be directed toward less fortunate countries.

When it comes to the energy crisis, North speaks in favor of a turn to renewable energy; he advocates energy sources like water, wind power and solar power, among others.

And though many politicians list renewable energy as a concern of theirs, their intentions should be questioned, North said.

“We need to transform from a petroleum based economy to one based on renewable energy,” he said. “It’s easy for a lot of politicians to talk about it, but if you actually go and see where they’re getting campaign funds from, a lot of them are from the oil industry.”

North acknowledges that the Democratic machinery will be able to reach a number of voters that he, as a Green Party candidate, will not, but he remains up for the challenge and reliant on the voters.

“Mr. Doyle has been unopposed for so long,” he said. “And I feel that people should have some sort of choice.”