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'The People Have Spoken, the Fools'

The View From The Bottom Of The Ballot

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.

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"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...

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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...

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