WI-Sen. I'm on the ballot

After calling the Wisconsin State Elections Board, I’ve learned that no challenge was filed to my 2198 ballot access signatures by the 5:00 friday deadline, so it’s official.

Everyone knows Sen. Kohl doesn’t do debates, so I’ve challenged the Republican in the race, smalltown lawyer Bob Lorge, to a series “Lincoln/Douglas style,” lunchtime, on the steps of Wisconsin’s historic County Courthouses. No amplification, no moderator, no time limits.

Lorge is also an outsider, got the nomination by default when all the insiders passed, afraid of Kohl’s money.

8 Comments

ben masel on July 17, 2006 at 3:47 pm

but would prefer ideas.

BooMan on July 17, 2006 at 4:00 pm

Ben- can you give us an idea of what you have to work with? Staffers, headquarters, cash? What are your goals?

ben masel on July 17, 2006 at 4:19 pm

No paid staff, no hq. Website up by Friday, at benmasel.com

Campaign contributions to date: $726, all in singles.
Expenditures to date: $106.26

Herb Kohl’s already spent $2.2 million out of pocket, but I’m dominating the narrative. He’s only reporting 3 campaign contributors, so I’ve 240 times as many donors.

This is the seat Senator Proxmire used to win on $75 and $125.

I enter with decent name recognition, both from marijuana law reform activism, and races for Governor, Sheriff, and the House in the ’90s. Got a big media boost a couple weeks back when University Police maced and arrested me for collecting ballot access signatures.
- BooMan on July 17, 2006 at 4:40 pm
  
  One of the biggest impacts on Thompson’s life occurred on November 22, 1963 when Kennedy was shot. He felt it signaled a turn in society. In a letter to Semonin, he wrote: “This savage unbelievable killing, this monstrous stupidity, has guaranteed that my children and yours will be born in a shitrain.”
  
  In another letter to William Kennedy, who was back in New York, he used the phrase “fear and loathing” to describe the way he felt after the murder…
  
  It was the fall of 1969 and the Aspen Mayoral election was coming up. Thompson was so disgusted by the candidates that he and a group of local friends ran their own candidate for mayor: a 29-year-old hippie bike-racer named Joe Edwards. Their campaign began three weeks before the election and nearly caused the upheaval of the small Western town.
  
  This wasn’t a whim or joke. Thompson noticed that there was a very low voter turnout in previous elections and determined that for the most part, it was the 18 to 25 year olds who were missing. So the theory he perpetuated was that if any candidate could garner the young vote, they would have the power to not necessarily win, but at least change the outcome of the election.
  
  But the Freak Party got more than it bargained for. With only three weeks to organize, Joe Edwards lost the mayoral race by one vote. In reality, Edwards won the actual vote by six — but lost the absentee ballot by seven. As Thompson wrote, “we scared the living shit out of the Aspen Power Structure.”
  
  In analysis, the group that really cost the Freaks the election wasn’t the conservatives but the old-school liberals who supported the Democratic candidate. They were so scared of the possibility of a Freak Power mayor that they cannibalized their own candidate and voted Republican.
  
  The close loss whetted Thompson’s appetite and the next year the Freak Power Party entered the political arena with a vengeance. And not only in Aspen. Freak Power blossomed in Kansas, Berkeley and Los Angeles, where Acosta tallied 110,000 votes out of 2 million cast in the L.A. County sheriff race.
  
  Thompson himself ran for sheriff and his platform was pretty direct: an end to the selling-off of Aspen. What follows is an excerpt from an advertisement Thompson took out in the Aspen Times: “And now we are reaping the whirlwind-big-city problems too malignant for small-town solutions, Chicago-style traffic in a town without stoplights, Oakland-style drug busts continually bungled by simple cowboy cops who see nothing wrong with kicking handcuffed prisoners in the ribs while the sheriff stands by watching, seeing nothing wrong with it either.”
  
  The Freak Party campaign was unique to say the least. The Party posters bore a red fist clutching a peyote button. Thompson shaved his head clean. The Freak Power Party proposed changing the city name to “Fat City” to scare off investors. It’s hard to gauge if people actually believed this. On the question of drugs, as Thompson wrote, “We ran straight at the bastards with an out-front mescaline platform … marijuana got lost in the scramble.” Thompson relented a bit before the election, saying he would refrain from taking mescaline while on duty.
  
  In the end Thompson lost the race 1500 to 1065. He did delight in the fact that he won the city vote, where the Freaks made up 30% of the electorate. But he was trounced in the county vote — even losing 300 to 90 in his own precinct of Woody Creek.
  
  Perhaps the most clear description of Freak Power came from one of the many campaign posters written by Thompson: “This is the real point: that we are not really freaks at all — not in the literal sense — but the twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition — but nothing changes.”
  - ben masel on July 17, 2006 at 4:59 pm
    
    Maps my ’94 Sheriff race ok, I took 48% in Madison, 33% rural, 20% suburban.
    
    I’m trying to break out of the 1-trick-pony thing this time.

Opie on July 17, 2006 at 7:34 pm

Too fucking wierd that, 30 years after the commotion at Dane County airport, we cross paths again online, here at Booman.

ben masel on July 17, 2006 at 9:03 pm

You were the photographer?
Secret Service Agent?
- Opie on July 19, 2006 at 5:20 pm
  
  Neither. Fellow traveler. Tophat. Peanut Festival. etc.

WI-Sen. I’m on the ballot

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