A Tale of Two Campaigns

And you think you've got problems.

Try running for president without a major party organization behind you. Without any reporters who care about what you think. Without anyone to bounce your ideas off of. That's problematic.

With the Massachusetts primary next Tuesday, 15 Minutes uses this issue to profile two of the major minor presidential candidates. Larry Agran and Lenora Fulani, and two minor presidential candidates, Howard Phillips and Michael Levinson. In addition, we offer a personal account of what it's like to be a marginal political candidate.

As if running a presidential campaign wasn't hard enough, the fringe candidates have to run two campaigns at once. One is the campaign to present the candidate and his or her ideas. That's all that the "Big White Five," as Lenora Fulani calls the five major Democratic candidates, have to do.

The other is the campaign which Fulani's people call a "democracy" campaign-the struggle to be included in the race. If you're on the fringe, you've got to bust your ass to get on the ballot, fight to get into debates, and yell to get reporters to cover you.

Because all the little candidates have the same problem of anonymity, they sometimes find that it's best to stick together.

The campaigns of two of the biggest of the little candidates--Agran and Fulani--have become quite close. Madelyn Chapman, Fulani's press secretary, questions why "Larry" isn't considered a major candidate.

"Is it because he's Jewish? Because he's short? Why is it?" she asks.

It's probably because the guy's never held an office higher than mayor in his life. But Chapman is right in one sense. Why is it that the press and the major parties decide who gets to make a serious run for the presidency? And is this system fair?

In this issue, we tried to give readers a look at some of the candidates in the shadows. Unfortunately, we couldn't get them all. We did find, though, that even on the fringe there are the powerhouses and the small fry.

With some of these fringe candidates, their home phone number doubles as the campaign phone number. Their spouse might answer the phone. That's small-time even for the fringe.

If they have a campaign office and a press secretary, you know that they're a big-time fringe candidate. Or at least they have money--which is more or less the same thing.

Some of the most interesting fringe candidates ran in New Hampshire but aren't on the ballot in Massachusetts.

Guys like Charles Woods, a 70-year-old Nevada millionaire with World War II burns on his face and an eye patch over one eye. Woods picked up 2862 votes in New Hampshire--good for seventh in the primary and 2 percent of the vote. And Tom Laushlin, the actor from the "Billy Jack" movies who pulled a Reagan and made the move to politics. He got 3251 votes in the Granite State--that's sixth in the primary.

Ron Kovic, the Vietnam vet whose life was portrayed in the movie Born on The Fourth of July picked up 36 votes while wheeling around on the fringe in New Hampshire. And former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who knocked Lyndon Johnson out of the race with his strong New Hampshire showing in 1968, picked up a mere 211 votes and scant attention this time around.

Fringe candidates are lurking in Massachusetts as well. Socialist Party candidate. J. Quinn Brisben wants to "socialize" health care and banking. And get rid of the CIA while he's at it.

Erik Thompson, a Minnesota native and Stanford grad who served for there months in a Federal prison camp for trespassing on nuclear site says he is "focusing on peace and justice" in his campaign. But he is afraid that the American population might be a "greedy, ethnocentric, bunch of barbarians."

The mainstream press can't cover the Thompson and the Brisbens. It would be too complicated, and voters would pay even less attention to politics than they do now.

That's where we step in. If voters are unhappy with the mainstream candidate, they can look for alternatives on the fringe. And find out about the candidates in the alternative press.

So take a took at the candidates inside-Lenora, Larry, Howard and Michael. For their sake. After all, it's awfully lonely out there on the fringe.

NEW IN IS MINUTES

Movies, it seems, fade in and out of popularity about as anything else does. So in this era, when today's new film is tomorrow's video, movies lack that certain vibrancy which accompanies the knowledge that it can only be seen then and there--in the theater. So we've succumbed to the times and have decided to print encapsulated movie reviews from pervious issues of 15 Minutes. We have, however, declined using the rating symbol so popular with many publications, be it a star, a turkey, or dead frog for that matter. Let's hoe that most films are complex enough and interesting enough to rise above such confining definitions.