By Bill Shein
July 11, 2015
Soft-spoken, an energetic volunteer at her church, and able to whip up the tastiest batch of butter cookies you ever let melt on your tongue, Lorna P. McClatchen is a mother of six, doting grandmother to 23, and a dear friend to many.
And with yesterday’s news that McClatchen, a 78-year-old resident of Partridge Haven, Kansas, would enter the race for the Republican nomination for president, an historic milestone was reached: For the first time, every Republican in the United States is simultaneously running for the White House.
“It’s going to be a fractured field,” said ABC News and National Public Radio analyst Cokie Roberts, sharing commentary that could certainly never come from just any man or woman or single-celled organism on the street. “With millions of Republicans in the race, it will be hard for voters to learn all the candidates’ positions, that’s for sure,” she said while laughing, some might say, all the way to a building that stores money for people.
From Louisiana Gov. Bobby “Nothing to See Here, Don’t Look at My State Budget Mess” Jindal, to self-styled self-styler Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, to John “The Reaper” Stepanich, a pest-control expert from Canby, Oregon, GOP voters certainly have diverse choices for their party’s 2016 standard-bearer.
Stepanich said in a Facebook video announcing his candidacy that he has “the skills to clear the vermin out of the Washington with a combination of spending cuts, tough new ethics laws, glue traps, and judicious use of chemical spraying.”
In a race where every Republican in America is on the ballot, each state’s Republican primary will come down to one of three things: Voter error, machine tampering, or candidates with very low self-esteem casting their vote for someone else.
One candidate sure to vote for himself is a shy and reserved financier from New York named Donald Trump, who launched his campaign by signing the “I Have Stratospherically High Self-Esteem” pledge. Still, some may pull the lever for others, particularly in later contests.
Robert Jumenal, a libertarian-minded homebuilder from Yuba City, California, likes Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, but decided to get into the race anyway. “I read somewhere that our nominee might be chosen by voter error, and like the old lottery ads said, you gotta be in it to win it, right?” he told New Hampshire’s WMUR-TV.
How might things turn out? “Ultimately, elections are decided by how many people vote for each candidate,” noted Cokie Roberts during her weekly “Hey, It’s Obvious!” segment on NPR. “In our system, these votes are ‘tallied’ to determine who has the largest number, and that candidate is then declared the ‘winner,’” Roberts said, leafing through a fifth-grade civics textbook.
Because U.S. elections are administered at the state and local level, it’s difficult to assemble a single list of the millions of 2016 GOP presidential candidates. While the Federal Election Commission requires those who spend more than $5,000 to file regular reports, its enforcement of campaign-finance law is “spotty at best,” according to one Berkshire County columnist who requested anonymity as he is not authorized to comment in a faux-news-story format.
“And by ‘spotty at best,’ I mean the FEC’s wholesale abdication of any and all responsibility, with no desire or ability to do a damn thing about anything, and certainly not in a timely manner,” he typed, er, said.
Indeed, in its most recent action, the FEC formally sanctioned the campaign of Simon Bolivar Buckner for failing to file several required reports. Buckner, a former Kentucky governor who ran for vice president in 1896, died in 1914.
What issues might decide the GOP race? “I’m sure each of the presidential candidates has a favorite color, but so far we don’t know what they are,” said Roberts, who reportedly receives $50,000 for speeches filled with such insights. “In my conversations with voters – specifically, my driver and several personal assistants – none could name a single candidate’s favorite color, or even their second-favorite color. What does this mean? We just don’t know yet.”
McClatchen, the sweet Kansas grandmother making her first run for the White House, said she’s enjoying the campaign despite the rifts it has opened in her family. “My children and grandchildren are also Republican presidential candidates, so we’ve agreed to avoid political talk until after the election,” she said, offering a reporter some delicious cookies.
Her award-winning butter-cookie recipe is posted prominently on McClatchen’s campaign website, alongside her vow to “single handedly gut and fillet every Democrat in America and leave their innards strewn about for the vultures.”
Voting begins next January in Iowa.
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Bill Shein hopes to keep his innards where there are for as long as possible.
This column first appeared in the Berkshire Record newspaper on July 3, 2015.