The fringe after New Hampshire.
Last Tuesday's NH presidential primary was rough for most of the 37 candidates on the two parties' ballots. Even the Rev. Al Sharpton, always a factor in New York City politics, won only one-tenth of one percent of the vote. Although the Rev is still out there campaigning, he was out-polled 419-347 by non-candidate Dick Gephardt, the melanin-deprived Missouri congressman who quit the race after doing the Iowa caucuses. The New York Times editorial page on Wednesday morning immediately declared Sharpton a non-person who should be barred from future presidential debates. That would be a pity?he's been the only reason for watching them.
Other Democrats polled even fewer votes. Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., 81, former New Yorker, anti-Semite and ex-con (he did five years in federal prison for tax evasion), whose conspiratorial worldview embraces Queen Elizabeth, British bankers, the Pope and the Jesuits, the Trilateral Commission, drug cartels, environmentalists, Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy, George Bush, the CIA and FBI, Osama bin Laden, gays, Israel, the Clintons, Margaret Thatcher and the Jews, now in his eighth presidential campaign, received 90 votes last week. Four years ago, when he polled 124, he blamed a conspiracy led by the New Hampshire secretary of state. I can't imagine what explanation he will put out this time. One can't imagine even LaRouche admitting that the people just don't like him.
Even further down the list, New York real estate developers R. Randy Lee and Fern Penna received 15 and eight votes, respectively. Landlords just don't cut it anywhere.
As for the Republicans, President George W. Bush polled 53,962 votes?85.4 percent?in defeating his various opponents. New York Press columnist Paul Krassner was nearly right in claiming that New Hampshire would propel journalist John Buchanan to the top of the pile of fringe Republicans opposing the president. Buchanan published a series of reports based on his research in the National Archives and Library of Congress showing that Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush, allegedly "served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his 'enemy national' partners." One might think that a person doing business with the enemy after Pearl Harbor might have received more than a slap on the wrist in 1942: Prescott Bush became a United States senator after World War II. Moreover, whether George W. Bush, who was born in 1946, should be held accountable for his grandfather's misconduct is a good question and the voters apparently answered it. I might have taken Buchanan more seriously if he had argued that the Bush family fortune should be seized as founded on war crimes.
Unfortunately for Buchanan, Richard P. Bosa, former mayor of Berlin, NH, turned perennial candidate (president, congress, state senator, you name it), used a home court advantage to poll 841 votes to Buchanan's 836. Another New York Press favorite, Billy Wyatt, the t-shirt Republican, apparently was outpolled by aging B-movie actor Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin, 153-154. Twelve years before, Laughlin had polled 3251 in the Democratic presidential primary. Perhaps time has passed him by. One Republican candidate whose time caught up with him was Robert E. Haines, whose campaign obtained sufficient publicity to get him arrested and held without bond last November for parole violation in connection with a 1995 gun charge.
Still, some could look back on Tuesday with joy. Democrat Leonard Dennis Talbow had been a write-in candidate for governor of Arizona in 2002. Then, he polled one vote?presumably his own. Last Tuesday, he polled eight in New Hampshire.