“One shall stand. One shall fall.” Optimus Prime spoke those immortal words to Megatron before their final apocalyptic battle of good vs. evil. As a half-baked metaphor, their situation is somewhat analogous to the upcoming presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Wait a second! Aren’t there than two candidates seeking office, you ask? In a word, no. America’s political establishment is a two-party system, and like the QWERTY keyboard, we’re stuck with it.

Our government is dominated by Republicans and Democrats. While it certainly has its share of failings, it does manage to get a lot of things right. Would you rather be living someplace else? Canada, perhaps? I didn’t think so. Our country is the best on earth, and so is our government.

Third parties want to change all of this. Not just a little bit, either. It wants to radically alter the way things are done in this country. Ralph Nader wants to bitch-slap big businesses and socialize medicine. Pat Buchanan wants to end immigration. Harry Browne wants to legalize controlled substances and eliminate federal income tax.

Luckily, our founding fathers created a system where radical candidates’ wacky ideas would stay in their wacky little heads. The Electoral College strictly protects the establishment from a third party coup. This is a good thing, because the current crop of lesser-known candidates can’t hold a candle to the credentials of Bush or Gore.

Let’s start with Nader. Here’s a great guy who’s done a lot of great things for our country. He wrote “Unsafe At Any Speed” in 1965 and founded Public Citizen in 1971, a consumer justice group. Since then, he’s been raking in millions (and to his credit, donating most of it) in technology stocks, on the lecture circuit and running for president. He may be a great consumer advocate, but it still doesn’t make him qualified to lead our country.

Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan is a Hitler-loving, homophobic, anti-Semitic, chauvinistic racist.

He’s also rather outspoken and has said so many interesting things I can quote only one. In his book, “Right from the Beginning,” he wrote, “The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer.” Whoa.

Libertarian Harry Browne sounds like a nice enough guy, but his ideas are the craziest of all the candidates combined. His idea of ending the war on drugs sounds reasonable compared to his pledges to end federal income tax and revert the federal government to its Constitutional powers. That sounded fine until I realized I like the USDA, EPA and all the other agencies that protect from carcinogens and premature death. I knew he was truly nuts when I caught him on C-SPAN advocating $1 billion rewards for the assassination of world leaders America didn’t like as a foreign policy. I don’t think that one would go over well with U.S. embassies.

The third party candidates all have plans for sweeping reform, but even if they were elected, their proposals would never see the light of day. If you’re a political science major or have ever seen “School House Rocks,” you know to turn something into law, a bill must be proposed by someone in the Legislature, debated, modified and ultimately passed by the House and the Senate before it ever reaches the president’s desk. That’s why it’s very unlikely that the following situation would occur:

President Nader: Mr. Lott, Mr. Gephart, thanks for coming. Please pass legislation for the public financing of public campaigns, a motion to withdraw from NAFTA and the WTO and socialized health care.

Mr. Lott and Mr. Gephart: We’ll get right on it.

Lott: Let’s not put any pork-barrel in it, either.

Gephart: Yeah, and let’s donate our salaries to save the rainforest!

Lott: Totally.

Nader: Being president kicks ass.

In the real world, the presidency is an extremely important and difficult position that we can’t give to just anyone.

Bush has experience as the governor of the second largest state, and Gore has spent many years in the legislature and as vice president.

No matter the victor, our next president will still have to work endlessly and surround himself with a plethora of competent advisors to govern our nation at Clinton-esque proficiency.

America should not elect a third party candidate to the presidency until we are presented with one who has the skill and experience to lead our nation equal to that of a major party offering. That has yet to happen.