“I come up here and I say, no guns — like in England, Holland, Japan, Australia, where there were 20 or 30 gun murders and we had 20,000 or 30,000 [in this country]; mental health courses in high school, no wars, guaranteed jobs using private charitable dollars, and nonviolent foreign policy, based on feeding, clothing and educating the Third World poor.”
Everybody runs around acting as though President Obama has no primary opposition, but that’s not technically true. O’Donnell, who is 63 and a self-described Philadelphia philanthropist, is running against him. So are Cornelius Edward O’Connor of West Palm Beach, Fla., Randall Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis of Lake Elsinore, Calif., and Vermin Supreme of Rockport, Mass.
In fact, Obama is way down the Democratic ballot of 14 candidates, in the 10th slot. There are 30 names on the Republican ballot.
You ever think of running for president, New Hampshire is your place. Pay the secretary of state $1,000, and you’re good to go.
That all seems right and fair and worthy of respect to the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College, which hosted the lesser-known candidates’ debate in December, and to C-Span, which broadcast it.
And that seems right and fair to local political gadfly Glenn Ouellette, who opened the lesser-known presidential candidates headquarters a month ago.
Ouellette put a red-white-and-blue runner on the long conference table and a couple of fake flowers in a whiskey bottle printed with the Declaration of Independence, set up a TV camera and invited all the candidates who couldn’t poll their way onto a debate stage.
He hoped it would be a sanctuary of respect for those usually treated as absurdist performance artists — and bad ones, at that.
What’s really absurd, after all, theorized Ouellette, is that “the president creates a committee of 12 — six Democrats and six Republicans — and they can’t get together in a period of two or three months to find $1.2 trillion of waste to trim the deficit, because they don’t want to.”
It’s high time the lesser-knowns got their own clubhouse; there’s plenty of them every cycle. The all-time high was in 1992, when 36 Democrats and 25 Republicans were on the ballot.
“We’re called the lesser-known candidates,” airline pilot Christopher Hill, who wants tax reform to let middle-class Americans keep more money, said at that debate. “Tonight, we stand for the lesser-known Americans.”
Ouellette has run for office several times, most recently for mayor, and he finally won a recent election to serve as an independent selectman. On Tuesday, he’ll get up at 4:30 a.m. for his first day as a ballot inspector, which is what selectmen inspect.
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