'The People Have Spoken, the Fools'

Amid all the boredom that New Hampshire and the major presidential candidates generated Tuesday, there were generous moments of reprieve, and most of those moments were generated by a tantalizing slate of absurdist candidates.

In the voting booths in the cities, on the paper ballots in the hamlets and in any conspicuous public place where they could buttonhole the populace, the unknown vote-seekers were working their mischief and, basically, exorcising monotony.

* *

"Now, remember our slogan," Mrs. Stanley Arnold, wife of the Pick-N-Pay supermarket czar who is running for President, said as she preened herself in the reflection of the marble slab next to the elevator of the Hotel Carpenter in Manchester.

"Vote alphabetically."

Stanley Arnold is a businessman and active civic do-gooder from New York City who sought the Democratic nomination for Vice President in 1972, but who feels that, with the country's credit rating slipping as it is, there's no use being modest this time around. What America needs now, Arnold's campaign literature seems to be saying, is a good, deficit-dashing businessman.

So Arnold has set his sights higher in 1976, entering primaries in New Hampshire (where he garnered 290 votes), Oregon and Wisconsin.

"My husband thinks it is critical that we get a brilliant man to convince the people of this country of the ways to solve our problems," Barbara Laing Arnold said steadfastly. "He's a brilliant speaker--never had a note in front of him...He worked for Adlai and for HHH. In 1968, he was chairman of three of Humphrey's committees. It's an incredible story of a brilliant man who has stood up. There're a lot of brilliant men around--Nader, Galbraith, Gardner--but they didn't want to take the abuse. Stanley's been a brilliant thinker for industry--he invented the Reader's Digest insert of the flag decal that you can tear out and put on car windows. He has a brilliant, inventive and practical mind, with an ability to articulate brilliant ideas very simply."

The elevator door opened and, with one last preening, Mrs. Arnold stepped in and disappeared, presumably heading for her husband's "brilliantly" located headquarters in an obscure room on the fourth floor.

* * *

Up in the Stark Room of the New Hampshire Highway Hotel in Concord, cloistered away from the hordes of straw-hat-waving Reagan supporters and robot-like Secret Servicemen below, a prayer meeting was in progress.

Some fifty followers of the Rev. Arthur Blessit, a high priest of the Jesus Movement formerly known as the "Chaplain of Sunset Strip" in Hollywood, Ca., wore crosses instead of hats, and knelt silently on the carpet of the sterile conference room.

There were no Secret Service men at the door, either, since Blessit has not sought matching funds or aid of any kind from the Federal Election Commission in Washington. "I don't believe in accepting federal money," the evangelist explained, saying that the $27,000 he has spent on his campaign over the last year and a half has come out of his own pocket.

Two reporters, searching for the luxurious facilities Ronald Reagan was providing the press with on election night, wandered by in the hall outside and stopped for a gander at the devout assembly.

A pair of attractive 24-year-old, six-feet-tall twins from Lawrence, Mass., clad in long, flowered dresses, stood up, took the reporters by the arms, introduced themselves ("Hi, I'm Jan and this is Josey") and insisted that the two reporters have some fruit punch and "meet Arthur."

The problem for the Blessit presidential bandwagon, it seems, has been inattention from the press. Jan and Josey, who said they are gospel singers who hope to go on tour soon and "get on TV," were trying to rectify the situation.

After a few minutes, Blessitt, clutching a Bible and sunglasses in one hand, welcomed the reporters warmly, and with his other hand extricated them from the huge and affectionate kisses of Jan and Josey. One of the journalists, a European with an "exotic" foreign accent, had promised the twins somewhat self-servingly that he would write something about their candidate.

"There's been no tabulation of my votes, and this is supposed to be a democracy," Blessitt said with a thick, Florida swampland accent. "The A.P. and the networks won't tell the people how we're doing. We had a quarter-mile long march in Manchester last week, and 800 people at a rally here in Concord Saturday, and not one news reporter showed up. William Loeb hasn't written one word about us. Just like Concord was blacked out last night [from an electric power failure], we've been blacked out by the media."

Still, Blessitt ended up receiving 886, or one per cent, of the Democratic votes cast in New Hampshire. That meant that he lead all the unknowns except for anti-abortion candidate Ellen McCormack, who, it could be argued, with the spate of news articles about her lately, is hardly unknown. McCormack received 1001 votes.

The hip evangelist will carry his campaign for theocracy to Florida primary voters next week, he said, in much the same way that he carried a 20-foot wooden cross across America, Europe and Subsaharan Africa--on foot.

* * *

"Elect the Last President," Robert L. Kelleher told his audiences in New Hampshire. Kelleher, a Montana lawyer, was not running as a doomsday prophet, but rather, as the man who would restore parliamentary government in America and abolish the presidency.

"What we have in America is monarchy under the guise of democracy," Kelleher told a Boston audience Sunday afternoon. "In Canada, the reverse is true. There is a democracy under the guise of a monarchy."

Kelleher's campaign promise is singularly simple--if elected, he would propose a constitutional amendment that would allow the people to elect the Cabinet and federal agency heads on a party slate.

"Unchecked, the bureaucracies spend money endlessly, causing double-digit inflation," Kelleher, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress from Montana's second district in 1968, says in his campaign pamphlets, some of which, not surprisingly, are in French. "Why not vote out the men who run them?"

Kelleher received 113 votes in Tuesday's Democratic primary in the Granite State. Two hundred years have apparently worn the Tory ranks thin...

* * *

Eleven-year-old Nancy Bona stepped out of her hotel room in Manchester into a swarm of fast-talking, briskly-walking giants--campaign aides to Sen. Birch Bayh (D.-Ind.) and ABC cameramen.

One of them recognized her (her family had been living out of the hotel for a week), and asked, "Have you picked out your room in the White House yet?"

"Yes," Nancy said shyly, but without a trace of embarassment.

Laughter from all sides.

"What's your father running on, anyway?" another of the giants asked.

"Lots of coffee."

More laughter.

"No, I mean, what's his platform?" the giant persisted.

"You'll have to ask him," she said, and the men moved on down the hall.

Nancy's father, Frank J. "Beginning of a New America" Bona, is a Buffalo, N. Y., lawyer who is running for President by touting himself as "the non-political candidate of this presidential year." That description is an apt one--Bona was only able to politick his way to 134 votes Tuesday in his quest for the Democratic nomination. Bona's liberal platform consists of cutting the defense budget by 30 per cent, restoring full employment with public improvement programs such as construction of rapid transit, keeping control on oil prices and extending them to profits and turning foreign affairs back over to the State Department. Bona opposes busing, but favors national health insurance and higher taxes for high-income groups and corporations.

If that sounds like the stuff the other liberal Democrats were proffering up to New Hampshire voters, it was. And Bona's lack of an issue or personal quirk to distinguish himself from the Udalls and the Shrivers may go a long way toward explaining why his family alone contributed five per cent of the support he had in New Hampshire...

* * *

Billy Joe Clegg and Auburn Lee Packwood, preacher and teacher, respectively, from Springfield, Mo., hitched up together as the anti-Communist ticket in New Hampshire.

Each of them invested the $500 it takes to pay the state Secretary of State's election fee, and came up with the 500 signatures it takes to get on the ballot in each of New Hampshire's two primary districts. The meager 188 votes that Clegg and Packwood earned as a dividend would indicate that American capitalism has sunk even lower than they think.

"We're the only candidates who are against Communists," Packwood said Tuesday as he stood outside the aging Franklin Street Elementary School in downtown Manchester talking to voters on their way to the polls. He said it was the Supreme Court's decision banning mandatory prayer in public schools that opened the floodgates in America to surging, atheistic Communism.

"We've got to put God back into education," Packwood said, jingling the Clegg-Packwood sign hanging from a string around his neck as he pointed repeatedly to the schoolhouse behind him.

A soft-spoken, polite man, Packwood smiled at passersby from his niche on a small plot of frozen lawn, but showed no aggressiveness in nabbing the potential voters in their number--all of which left one reporter wondering whether God had a chance in His battle against Communism with soporific soldiers like this...

* * *

Richard H. Englefield, write-in challenger on the Republican side of things in New Hampshire, called The Crimson yesterday from a telephone booth in Boston to make sure that Crimson reporters, who picked up some of his campaign literature Tuesday in Manchester, had their facts straight. This wasn't out of character, since one of the promises the 38-year-old liquor salesman and former reporter from Springfield, Illinois, has made in his campaign runs thus:

"I'd propose a constitutional amendment saying that no press should fail to print an allegation of unlawful incarceration. Every time someone claims he's been arrested illegally, the newspapers would have to print it. Otherwise, the lawyers and doctors could be paid, and people could get put away (nervous laugh)."

Englefield has proposed, he says, four other constitutional amendments. "One to end busing. Another to declare the supremacy of a father's rights in domestic affairs. Under this one, no court shall interfere without probable cause of dereliction of duty." Englefield couldn't remember the other two, but promised to call back when he remembered what they were.

The returns on his write-in votes are not in yet, Englefield said, adding, "We were looking for 15,000 to 20,000 votes. Our polls--I've studied political science--showed 80 per cent disenchantment among New Hampshire Republicans and independents. It looks like clear concealment of my votes."

* * *

Also under concealment of some sort in New Hampshire Tuesday were three other candidates in the absurdist category: Carmen C. Chimento (votes not counted), Bernard B. Schechter (145 votes) and Rick Loewenherz (31 votes). Despite attempts by Crimson reporters to locate them, they remained out of sight and apparently out of the minds of the voters. They should, however, be in town this weekend in preparation for Tuesday's Massachusetts primary. You may see them before we do, but if you do, don't call.