[note: Erik Greenfield is a Journalism student at UW Oshkosh. He wrote the story below for an upper-level course in news reporting. Tony Palmeri]

It's not easy being Green.

Tony Palmeri, the Green Party candidate for the 54th state Assembly seat, knows that all too well, judging by the clutter in his small office in the Arts and Communication building. He knows it will be hard to beat Republican incumbent Gregg Underheim, especially as a third-party candidate with a full-time job already.

"One of the reasons why it's so difficult to defeat incumbents in Wisconsin is because we have a full-time legislature," Palmeri says, "and Gregg Underheim is literally getting paid to campaign. Meanwhile, I'm out working a full-time job trying to make a living. He's out knocking door-to-door, shaking hands."

Over the summer, Palmeri also did his share of hand-shaking and door-to-door campaigning.

"It's easier to vote for someone when you've looked them in the eye," Palmeri says. "Over the summer, I was able to get to a little over 2,000 households. Not nearly enough, but at least a dent."

In addition to running against Underheim and Democratic challenger Gordon Hintz, Palmeri ran against Underheim in the same race eight years ago, in 1996, as a Democrat. Palmeri says it was an uncomfortable experience for Underheim, who was used to running unopposed.

"When I challenged him in '96, he got very paranoid," Palmeri says. "He made a public statement that he was going to try to get my student evaluations of teaching. Those student evaluations were going to demonstrate that I was some radical that couldn't be trusted. Even the local paper, which hated me, ended up writing an editorial saying he was going too far."

Palmeri ended up getting 41 percent of the vote in 1996, not bad for a first-time candidate and for someone who it seems has grown up a perpetual underdog.

Palmeri was born in 1961 in Brooklyn, NY, the middle of three sons. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a homemaker, and even in a working-class Italian-American family, his parents gave him and his brothers got every opportunity to succeed.

"My parents didn't have money, but they recognized the value of education," Palmeri says, "so they put themselves in a significant amount of personal debt sending my brothers and me to private, parochial Catholic school."

After high school, Palmeri attended St. John's University in New York as a rhetoric major, and it wasn't until the fall semester of his senior year at St. John's that one of his professors persuaded him to go into teaching.

"He said, 'What do you think you'll do when you graduate?'" Palmeri says. "I hadn't even thought about it, to tell you the truth. He said, 'If I were you, I would think about getting into college teaching. I notice in class you ask very good questions. The ability to ask questions is something that a teacher should be able to do.' Having that little conversation in the hallway between classes was very influential."

From there, Palmeri attended Central Michigan University for his master's in communication studies and got his doctorate degree in 1987 at Wayne State University in Detroit. Palmeri worked at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York for two years before joining the communication department at UW-Oshkosh in 1989. It was here that Palmeri was first able to indulge his love of politics on a professional level, with the creation of "Commentary" on Titan TV in 1991.

"I was actually in my classes here complaining about how poor Titan Television was," Palmeri says emphatically. "I said we've got this tremendous resource, and I thought so much of the programming was just utter garbage, and I would tell students and the faculty that."

The show has been mostly student-produced over the years, and, with co-host Jim Mather, Palmeri has welcomed guests including then-Attorney General and current Gov. Jim Doyle, as well as Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton, Mayor Stephen Hintz, and various local officials.

"From the time I was very young - I'm saying maybe 9, 10, 11 - I would always watch the Sunday morning political talk shows, 'Meet the Press,' 'Face the Nation,'" Palmeri says, chuckling at the memory. "My parents thought I was deranged. I just always had some kind of real fascination with the way people are persuaded by speech."

Palmeri doesn't look the part of a political nonconformist. He regularly wears a dress shirt and tie to work, eschewing the increasingly casual attire professors sometimes prefer. His hair is neatly trimmed and slightly graying. He's lean and tan and speaks cordially but forcefully. His most distinct feature is his face, with slightly flared nostrils and a toothy grin. It seems appropriate that, physically, his mouth draws the most attention, because it's his words that turn heads.

"Tony was engaged and idealistic from Day One," says Dr. James Simmons, chairman of the UW-Oshkosh political science department. "Tony had a much broader perspective on what a faculty member ought to be doing. Almost from the beginning, his focus was more on social ideas, the community."

Palmeri suspended production of "Commentary" for his Assembly campaign in 1996, but after he lost the election, he ran into problems in bringing it back, specifically with former Chancellor John Kerrigan.

"Dr. Kerrigan simply did not like that program," Palmeri says. "He did not like what it represented, and he put up roadblocks for me to start that program again."

"Commentary" received support from some in the administration, though, and when Kerrigan tried to stop the show in the summer of 1998, Jim Fitzhenry, the editorial page editor at the Oshkosh Northwestern, sent a list of questions to the chancellor's assistant on the subject and threatened to put all responses on the record.

"Well, they didn't want to go public with any of this," Palmeri says, "so they then basically let me have the show. They didn't bother me anymore."

The show is on hiatus now because of Palmeri's current campaign, but he has lofty goals for the show in the future if he wins the election.

"My goal is to, if I get elected, I want to start 'Commentary' from the capitol, which I think would be just fascinating, and have on all the officials and the bureaucrats," he says.

Some of Palmeri's legislative goals include a five-year tuition freeze for students, creating more living-wage jobs and universal health care, especially for students.

"There are so many students on this campus whose health care plan is, 'I hope I don't get sick,'" Palmeri says. "They're off their parents' plan, or they don't have their own work-related plan. I mean, I see health care as a human right."

David Jones, the UW-Oshkosh chairman of public affairs who works on campaign finance for Gordon Hintz, wonders if Palmeri's goals are realistic.

"Gordon's positions are more in terms of what's doable," Jones says. "Tony's ideas, frankly, may be very good ideas, but I think at this point in time are not reasonable. I think his heart's in the right place. I just don't think what he stands for are the kinds of things that are realistic. It's good to work on what can be accomplished rather than on utopia."

Palmeri dismisses such criticism. He counts turn-of-the-century Wisconsin Gov. Robert LaFollette and two-term New York Mayor John Lindsey as his political inspirations, and he takes a page from LaFollette when it comes to organizing citizens' movements.

"If I do get elected, most of my governing is not going to be in the capitol; it's going to be on the steps of the capitol," Palmeri says. "I plan to organized and spark massive citizens' movements. For example, my universal health care plan. The only way we're going to get it is if 5,000 show up regularly outside the capitol and demand it, and I'm just crazy enough to pull off something like that (laughs)."

David Barnhill, a UW-Oshkosh environmental studies professor and member of the Lake Winnebago Green Party, has known Palmeri for a little over the year. He says Palmeri has the necessary ingredients to be successful in his campaign.

Tony has "a personal integrity and the ability to communicate that in talking with the public," Barnhill says. "Usually, I hear politicians talking. When I hear Tony talk, I hear somebody who's got real values talking in a real way to me."

Barnhill is also impressed with Palmeri's grasp of the Green Party values - social justice, ecological wisdom, peace and nonviolence, and grassroots democracy.

"He is a truly progressive candidate that we don't normally get, especially in our area," Barnhill says. "One of the things I've been so pleased about in coming here is that there are a few real progressives, and Tony is that way thoroughly in all aspects, from environmental issues to social issues to the question of creating a real democracy."

Palmeri saves most of his frustration for the state of American government, including both major parties but especially the Democratic Party. He is running as a Green instead of a Democrat this time out because he's "through supporting corporate parties." He calls the Democrats' actions in trying to keep independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader off several states' ballots "disgraceful," "anti-American" and "beneath contempt."

"All the time the Democrats are spending doing that is time they should be spending going after their base of Democratic voters," Palmeri says angrily. "They're so obsessed with Nader that they're forgetting to remind their own base to vote."

Despite the obstacles he's had to overcome to get this far, Palmeri and his supporters remain cautiously optimistic that he can win the election.

"He's certainly an underdog," Barnhill says, but "he's got a shot for a number of reasons. One is he ran for office as a Democrat eight years ago, and he has a TV show, so he's got name recognition that most third-party candidates would not have. He's also smart politically in knowing how to communicate with people and what to do, and he's got some very enthusiastic support from students and other local people. I can't say I'm optimistic, but I think he's going to give it a good shot."

"A lot of working-class people in Oshkosh realize I'm a straight shooter," Palmeri says. "Even if I disagree with them, I'm going to tell them what I believe, and they find that appealing. I'm under no illusion here, I know that a Green Party candidacy is a long shot, but this is the United States of America. We can do it."