I was reading the little summary textbox under the recently added Manufacturing Consent torrent, and was surprised to read this line:

(he has campaigned for office).

It doesn't bother me very much if it was true, after all other leading intellectuals have campaigned for office as well, but this sounds very much out of place in terms of Chomsky's position. I am thinking perhaps the person who wrote that summary may have mistaken the scene in MC, where an electorate sheet had Chomsky's name on it, and was ticked. But in that same scene, Chomsky was asked to run for President and refused in a jokingly manner.

So what do you guys think?

Impossible to find out it seems. Unless someone called chomsky or something. Til otherwise proven, I'll consider it to be bullshit used by sites to sell more Manufacture of Consent DVD's.

Reason being I've looked all over for references to this, and 99.9% of them were the exact same, the very description you mentioned.

Try this in google, +chomsky +"campaigned for office" 2300 results
And then this: +chomsky +"campaigned for office" -DVD 92 results
and finally: +chomsky +"campaigned for office" -consent 27 results

And none of them contain an explanation.

If it's true, I'm guessing it was for the Lexington school board or something like that. Chomsky often says he votes in local elections as they have much more of an impact than national elections, so it wouldn't surprise me if he got more involved and actually ran for one.

-Kabul