Blame it on the Bossa Nova. On Monday night, the six-ring circus they call the Iowa Caucuses mutated into a midwestern version of I Love Lucy, where everyone ran in different directions in search of the problem. The result was a cannonball plunge into murky waters and steered the future of this awkward gathering of tribes toward oblivion.
The Iowa Democratic Party relies on more than 1600 volunteers, many of them retirees not up on modern technology, to ensure the process runs smoothly and the results are reported accurately. On Monday night, the volunteers’ years of caucusing experience ran into a smartphone app they either didn’t use or couldn’t log into and a help line that left them on hold for hours. “What a revoltin’ development THIS is,” cried Chester A. Riley of Lost Nation, Iowa. “We look like a bunch of goobers out here.”
All this is just more grist for the Primary Mill, a place where candidates enter via one door and often depart confused, chagrined, chastened and complaining from another. The primaries have a colorful history of wild and wacky developments, dastardly deeds and dirty tricks, colossal upsets and historic blunders. In small states like New Hampshire, a citizen might open his door to find a smiling candidate standing there proffering cookies, tickling the baby and offering to pave the driveway. Meals down at the diner are often interrupted by backslapping pols who sit down at your booth right in the middle of the meatloaf entree. People in New Hampshire are not put off by all this. They expect, even insist that a candidate or two show up in their own backyards, hopefully to help shovel snow. They enjoy the tasks of assessing, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, playing an integral part in the politics of the nation. And just when they think they’ve got it all figured out, people like this show up:
1872
This was a busy year for presidential candidates, and amid the bustling crowd was the venerable Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to vie for the presidency as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Her White House bid came nearly 50 years before the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Victoria was a busy girl, a former clairvoyant and psychic medium, a business maven who opened the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street and a radical newspaper publisher whose Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly regularly dealt with taboo subjects like legalized prostitution, birth control and free love. If hippies had arrived 105 years earlier, Woodhull would have been the leader of the commune.
Victoria campaigned on a progressive platform, which included women’s suffrage and abolition of the death penalty. She didn’t win, of course, but she did raise a lot of hell. Just days before the election, she was jailed on charges of distributing obscene literature for publishing an article accusing a prominent minister of having an extramarital affair. Alas, even that wasn’t good enough as Woodhall was roundly trounced and disappeared from political view.
Meanwhile, back at the office, Horace Greeley was honing his tongue. You remember Horace—the erstwhile founder of the New York Tribune, a brilliant and eccentric newspaper editor known for dabbling in everything from temperance and vegetarianism to spiritualism. Greeley managed to snare the nominations of both the Democratic Party and the offshoot Liberal Republicans but he was no match for incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. Political cartoonists like Thomas Nast had a field day satirizing Greeley’s appearance— he sported a set of unruly whiskers and often wore a flowing white overcoat—and despite his past support for the abolition of slavery, Horace was widely criticized for championing post-Civil War reconciliation with the South. Then, a stroke from the cosmos intervened. Greeley’s wife died just before the election, Grant cruised to victory and Horace’s failing health forced him to check himself into an asylum. He died on November 29, 1872, becoming the only candidate in history to die before the electoral college has been totaled. If there’s a message here, it might be Don’t Mess With Ulysses.
Deez Nuts
In 1936, as the Nazis tightened their grip on Germany, a fringe religious mystic and Adolph Hitler acolyte named William Dudley Pelley launched an unlikely bid for the presidency. A native of Massachusetts, Pelley had previously worked as a Hollywood screenwriter before a near-death experience inspired him to create Liberation Doctrine, a religious system that combined elements of spiritualism and New Age philosophy. He later became the subject of intense government scrutiny for founding a fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant paramilitary group called the Silver Legion of America. Pelley made his White House run on the upstart Christian Party ticket, campaigning against Roosevelt’s New Deal and arguing that “The time has come for an American Hitler and a pogrom.” Guess what? The time hadn’t quite come yet.
You may not remember that George Burn's’ wife Gracie Allen once ran for president. During the 1940 election, George threw her hat in the ring as a nominee of the fictitious Surprise Party, which featured a kangaroo as its mascot and a slogan of “It’s in the bag.” Gracie’s radio show was wildly popular so fans flocked to see and hear the candidate on her whistle-stop tour. “We should be proud of our national debt,” Gracie told them. “It’s the biggest in the world!” Asked about a running mate, Allen swore there would be no Vice in the White House. Despite being endorsed by the Harvard University student body, she failed to nab the presidency but was unofficially elected mayor of a small town in Michigan.
And then there was Deez Nuts, the fictitious name of a character who ran against Trump and Clinton in 2016. Later identified as 15-year-old Iowa farm boy Brady Olson, Deez was polling at 9% in North Carolina. Apparently, those Tarheels will do anything for Nuts. The candidate says he was encouraged by the earlier candidacy of Limberbutt McCubbins, a cat from Kentucky, but that’s another story. You won’t believe this, but there are dozens of citizens named Deez Nuts in the United States, all the way from West Hartford, Connecticut to Phoenix. According to the Federal Election Commission filing, the Deez Nuts who ran for president lives at 2248 450th Avenue in Wallingford, Iowa, which poses another question, namely why are there 450 avenues in Wallingford, Iowa? Someone should drop in there and ask Deez, himself.
Has Anybody Here Seen Vermin Supreme?
Or Vermin Love Supreme, to be technically correct. You remember Vermin, a candidate for several local, state and federal offices in years past. Supreme is famous for wearing a boot on his head, which is not as easy as it looks. He also carries a very large toothbrush, since if elected he will pass a law requiring people to brush every day. Vermin has campaigned in the past on a platform of zombie apocalypse awareness and time travel research. If he ever wins, he will give a free pony to every American, which gets him a heavy female vote. VLS grew up near Boston, which explains a lot, and participated in the Great Peace March for Global Disarmament in 1986.
Among his political views is a dislike for Libertarians. “These guys are just for the abolition of government and letting shit fall where it may,” he says, while conceding that the Libertarian Party is the only group which aligns with his anti-state, anti-war, and anti-authority core principles. Supreme has previously called for the careful gradual dismantling of government while citizens take up the slack. In the Washington D.C. presidential primary of 2004, Vermin received 149 votes, so who’s laughing now?
High points: October 29, 2011, participated in a satirical debate against a representative of the campaign of deceased British occultist Aleister Crowley. December 19, 2011, participated in the Lesser-Known Democratic Candidates Presidential Forum at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm’s College and glitter-bombed rival candidate Randall Terry. February 2, 2012, participated in a live debate with Republican fringe candidate Jimmy McMillan in honor of Groundhog Day. August 25, 2012, announced the inception of the Free Pony Party with Jimmy McMillan as his running-mate. The latter contended that he would stick with his own Rent Is Too Damn High Party and that Supreme would be his partner on the ticket. Sad to say, they never worked it out.
“Well, Everybody Said They Were A Bunch Of Crooks.”
So Keith Russell Judd, an actual crook, didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t run in the 2012 West Virginia Democratic primary. Judd, aka Inmate #11593-051 at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Beaumont, Texas, was serving a 210-month prison sentence for extortion at the time.
A self-proclaimed Rastafarian/Christian Democrat, Judd paid the $2500 presidential filing fee, then shocked the world by getting 41% of the vote in the West Virginia primary and earning one delegate at the Democratic National Convention. Unfortunately, he failed to get on the ballot in any other states. Take heart, though. Keith Russell has since been released from the pokey and is seriously considering a run for the presidency in 2020. “Along with all the other crooks,” he says.
Good old Lyndon LaRouche has the distinction of being the second person in history to run for president from a jail cell, preceding Judd by 20 years. He liked running for president so much he did it eight times, once for his own U.S. Labor Party and seven times for the Democratic Party nomination. In 1992, having been convicted of fraud related to fundraising, LaRouche refused to consider abandoning his regular bid.
In the 2000 Democratic primaries, LaRouche received 53,280 votes—22% of the total—in Arkansas, where they appreciate a good outlaw candidate. And in 2004, according to Federal Election Commission records, he had more individual contributions than any other candidate until John Kerry surpassed him in the final quarter of the primary campaign. Say what you will about Lyndon, he thought big. His LaRouche Movement, a network which promoted his philosophies and ideas, was among the first entities to seriously consider the colonization of Mars. Where Lyndon, of course, would be a heavy favorite to be president.
Swinging For The Fences
Homer Tomlinson, erstwhile founder of the Church of God, had even greater aspirations than LaRouche. First, he gave himself the title of Bishop (hey, it was his church, right?), then he founded the Theocratic Party, the aim of which was to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth by getting members of the congregation elected to public office. Tomlinson’s platform consisted of replacing taxes with tithing, establishing Bible studies and prayer in schools and creating a variety of faith-based cabinet posts like “Secretary of Righteousness”—maybe James Brown could be considered—and “Secretary of the Holy Bible.”
Homer, alas, never came close to winning an election. But he wasn’t one to be easily discouraged, setting his sights on an even higher office. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Jerusalem, where he started wearing a gold-painted crown. “I’m the King of the world,” he would tell his subjects and anyone else who would listen. “You HEAR me? King of the WORLD!” Good thinking, Homer. In for a dime, in for a dollar.
“Yes, We Can!” In Turkmenistan
If you don’t cotton to our elections in the United States, you can always move elsewhere. Turkmenistan, for instance, where the country’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov was so revered the people let him rename January after his mother.
His successor was Gurbanguly (“All the way with Gurbangu-lay”) Berdymukhammedov, so the bumper stickers only fit on large cars. GB learned from Saparmurat how to stay in power: don’t have too many elections. He won a national referendum on extending his rule in 1994 with a razor-thin margin of 99.9% of the votes. Gurby decided it would be okay to have another election in 2012, but over the years he fell out of favor with a certain segment of the population and his approval rating fell to a piddling 97%. Deeply chagrined, he determined to show a lighter side, making a rap video with his grandson in 2018. On the world stage, the effort was as noticeable as a fart in a tornado.
In 2019, Berdy disappeared for awhile, prompting speculation he had been offed in a drive-by. No such luck. On August 4, the state TV network broadcast a 35-minute montage of the president singing, dancing, riding a bicycle, firing an automatic weapon in combat gear, bowling with astonishing accuracy, riding a horse, working on a new book, writing a song and driving an SUV through the desert to the Gates of Hell, a perpetually burning crater. And you thought Donald Trump was fun.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
