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'The People Have Spoken, the Fools'

The View From The Bottom Of The Ballot

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.

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"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...

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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.

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