(OT) Gang, I just copied this from CNN....
ELECTION 98 MAIN
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Election attracts some
unusual candidates
By TED ANTHONY
AP National Writer
Clayton Suddith mortgaged his pickup for a shot at the U.S. Senate. Fred
Tuttle is heartily campaigning away for his opponent. Robert Healey Jr.,
longshot candidate for Rhode Island governor, once ran for office using this
slogan: "a strange man for a strange job."
They're regular well, slightly unusual folks putting themselves before the
public and asking for votes this Tuesday. And they are hardly alone along
the less-watched margins of Election Day 1998.
Consider Bob Davies. He said President Clinton should pay for his "treason"
by being shot. Consider Paula Sage, who found a photo of herself,
bare-breasted, circulating around town. Consider Diane Ellis, who claims
her opponent is dead (he says it isn't so).
Then there's Bob Kern. He altered a check from $15 to $515,
impersonated a female judge over the phone and was accused of threatening
to shoot a bank employee when his ATM card didn't work. He wants
Indiana voters to send him to Congress.
Lurking beyond the perks, PACs and punditry, this is the odd matinee of
American democracy in its up-from-the-populace grace, grit and gaudiness.
And, come Tuesday, these are its foot soldiers.
Some have seen the spotlight before.
Al Lewis, the New Yorker best known as Grandpa from the 1960s TV
series "The Munsters," is 88 now and the Green Party's candidate for
governor. He tried (unsuccessfully) to be listed as "Grandpa" on the ballot.
In Minnesota, former pro wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura is more serious
as a Reform Party candidate for governor, waging a populist campaign of
citizen empowerment. Still, he knows the flamboyant side of his image can
help.
"Maybe it will be a popularity contest," he said recently. In fact, he has
succeeded in making it a three-way race with Democrat Hubert H.
Humphrey III and Republican Norm Coleman.
Perhaps the most unusual is Ellis, a Clearwater, Fla., Democrat running for
the Statehouse against Gus Bilirakis. Ellis said in September that the real
Bilirakis was dead and the man opposing her was an impostor hired by
Bilirakis' congressman-father.
"I'm putting my whole self out on this because I believe it and I know it," Ellis
said.
Forced to prove he was alive, Bilirakis countered: "I'm here and my name is
Gus Bilirakis. I've been in this community for many years and a lot of people
know me."
In Johnston, R.I., trash hauler and former pig farmer Louis Vinagro wants to
be mayor. No matter that his brushes with the law date to the 1970s and
include charges of sexual assault and running pit bull fights. No matter that he
once ate pig food to prove its worthiness and threatened to deploy 17,000
porcine marauders in a neighboring town whose residents had complained
about hog smell.
Vinagro, by the way, has a pig-shaped pool and a pig-shaped briefcase.
Down the road in Providence is Healey, who sports a ZZ Top-like beard, is
running for governor on the "Cool Moose" ticket and is given virtually no chance of winning.
Tuttle who began his campaign after starring in a movie in which he ran for Congress defeated his opponent in Vermont's GOP primary, and then promptly handed his support to incumbent Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy.
Sometimes the weirdness gets menacing. When Davies, a statehouse
candidate in Montana, suggested last month that Clinton committed treason
for allowing a U.S. corporation to give military and satellite technology to
China, bipartisan condemnation was quick. He called his words
"intemperate."
In Shawnee, Okla., Ms. Sage has spent the past month dealing with a flier
showing her smiling with her sweater lifted. The text claims she'd be "a
disaster and embarrassment" if elected Pottawatomie County associate
district judge.
"That was done at a private Halloween party," Ms. Sage said. "It was just
kind of a lark deal. ... I'm evidently the most unlucky woman in the world."
And Suddith, the retired Alabama ironworker who mortgaged his pickup?
Summer campaign finance reports showed his opponent, three-term
incumbent Sen. Richard Shelby, with $5.6 million. Suddith had just over
$10,000.
(02 Nov 1998 03:51 EST)
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