A representative of the Boston Tea Party filed paperwork with the Flordia Secretary of State yesterday, formally declaring the BTP to be an officially organized party in the Sunshine State. Now the nascent libertarian-alternative party just has to provide a list of 27 presidential electors by August 29 for its presidential candidate Charles Jay to appear on the Florida ballot.
Florida would be the second state in which the Boston Tea Party has formally achieved ballot status. The first was Colorado.
Florida “favorite son” John Wayne Smith, instead of national VP nominee Thomas Knapp, will appear on the Florida ballot as Charles Jay’s running mate. Charles Jay is also from Florida — a constitutional faux-pas in the extremely unlikely event that the ticket were to win Florida’s 27 electoral votes.
Knapp says he expects “favorite sons or daughters” to appear on most state ballots.
GE,
Interesting you should bring up Revolutionary Language — I was thinking about it, and planning to go dig my copy out for a re-read, the other day.
The author is a guy named David Calderwood. If I’m not mistaken, he lives in Illinois.
Regards,
Tom
Jim – Have you read/heard of “Revolutionary Language,” a libertarian novel about encryption tech written by an LRC writer?
The rumor I hear is that Chris is thinking about it. In any event, there is no offense taken, since I won’t run for chair of the Boston Tea Party, and if I were drafted/elected, I would not serve. I got into this thing because my friend Tom Knapp asked me to help. I do not believe in political solutions to human problems, and in the scope of political solutions, I include elections, political parties, democracies, republics, rebellion, revolution, and war.
I think the evidence is that what progress we’ve had comes from economics and technology. Trade and commerce do more to prevent misery and end violence than any other things. Technology solves problems in real, often trivial ways, and people with trivial tech fixes often reap huge economic rewards. (Read about Vincent Price’s family for example, a fortune made on a baking powder formula involving cream of tartar.) Encryption tech is the next big thing for freedom.
Okay, Darcy has me convinced that this is a brilliant strategy.
I can’t wait until Others Volume 25 or whatever, when these later campaigns will be covered!!!
“Ford graciously donated $50,000 to the McCarthy campaign and quickly exited the race.”
More evidence of how campaign finance laws only serve to hurt minor parties and insurgent candidates.
“William Clay Ford, owner of the Detroit Lions and an heir to the Ford Motor Co. fortune, briefly served as McCarthy’s national vice-presidential running mate that year, but just long enough to make a substantial financial contribution to the campaign under the restrictive provisions of the newly-enacted 1974 Federal Campaign Act,”
Wow, I didn’t know that.
Now I guess I think Ford should merely be exiled, rather than subjected to waterboarding and other Abu Gharib degradations.
William Clay Ford is like the Sean Haugh of the NFL. We just can’t get rid of him!
and I enjoy your outspoken LOLZ!
LOL! I enjoy your comments, Mike.
My half-assed comments would be alot easier if there wasn’t a third party historian on this site.
“It all sounds a little goofy to me, Tom.”
Well, actually it’s not as “goofy” as it might seem. I think Tom Knapp and the Boston Tea Party are actually on to something here. The idea of “favorite son” and “favorite daughter” candidacies makes a lot of sense, especially for minor parties starved for campaign cash and media attention.
In 1976, independent presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, the former Minnesota senator whose courageous antiwar candidacy had unseated a sitting President of his own party eight years earlier, had no fewer than twenty-nine different vice-presidential running mates, essentially a different one in every state where his name appeared on the ballot.
William Clay Ford, owner of the Detroit Lions and an heir to the Ford Motor Co. fortune, briefly served as McCarthy’s national vice-presidential running mate that year, but just long enough to make a substantial financial contribution to the campaign under the restrictive provisions of the newly-enacted 1974 Federal Campaign Act, which limited individual contributions to $1,000 while allowing wealthy candidates to donate larger sums to their own campaigns. Ford graciously donated $50,000 to the McCarthy campaign and quickly exited the race.
Later, there was considerable speculation that celebrated civil rights activist Julian Bond, the 35-year-old Georgia state legislator and first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, would be named as McCarthy’s national running mate prior to the convening of the Electoral College — a selection that became moot when “Clean Gene” failed to carry any states against Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
While Julian Bond was certainly no Tom Knapp, I think McCarthy nevertheless had the right idea. Among other things, the idea of “favorite-son” and “favorite-daughter” running mates saved the financially-strapped McCarthy campaign — which only raised and spent a meager $441,000 that year — a great deal of expense and energy in shuttling a vice presidential candidate back and forth across the country that fall.
By the same token, McCarthy’s relatively obscure vice-presidential running mates, representing all walks of life, generated considerable local media interest in the former Minnesota senator’s seemingly quixotic bid for the White House in 1976, a campaign that successfully challenged discriminatory and burdensome election laws in no fewer than eighteen states.
McCarthy’s running mates included a sanitary engineer from Paducah, Kentucky, a retired Air Force colonel from Michigan, an English instructor from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, a psychologist from Knoxville, Tennessee, and a little-known Catholic social worker from San Francisco, where McCarthy had waged a vigorous write-in campaign for California’s 45 electoral votes.
They also included John E. Clay of Chicago, a veteran of Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign; industrialist Karl Gruhn of Minnesota, a man tapped to be in McCarthy’s “Shadow Cabinet”; syndicated columnist William Morris of Connecticut; and Carl Maxey, an African-American criminal defense attorney from Spokane who tried unsuccessfully to unseat the hawkish Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington — the Senator from Boeing — in a Democratic primary six years earlier. Sharon Lee Stone Kilpatrick, a newspaper reporter and daughter-in-law of conservative pundit James J. Kilpatrick, was also one of McCarthy’s running mates that year.
A dozen years later, while waging a very limited and forlorn third-party campaign for the Oval Office, McCarthy, then a spry 72, again named several different running mates in the handful of states where he actively competed. Among them was Florence Rice, a consumer advocate from Harlem, Alpha Smaby, a cancer-stricken former state legislator from Minnesota, and Maureen Smith, the amiable chair of California’s left-wing Peace & Freedom Party. McCarthy’s running mates were amused — well, sort of amused — later that autumn when the erudite and witty former Minnesota lawmaker called for abolishing the vice presidency altogether.
Unless Tom Knapp intends to make a similar proposal — an idea that would undoubtedly bring a smile to the face of IPR’s own Peter Orvetti — the Boston Tea Party’s strategy of running favorite sons and daughters for VP is a fairly sound one.
While this will mostly be a “front porch” and “internet” campaign, it will be plenty active. Jay and Knapp have already done many radio appearances. We plan to have a rally for their write-in campaign including either Jay or Knapp here in Indiana.
I hope to see Jay or Knapp visit every state with an affiliate at least once to promote their campaign and support the local candidates. I would bet that they need some donations to make that possible.
MD,
Yes, I believe that a letter is on its way to Guam right now. They don’t get any electors, so they moved their election up to September so as to get their say in to the rest of the country in advance.
Mike,
Goofy and politics go together. The Boston Tea Party is by no means the first party to run different VP candidates in different states.
In 1896, the Democrats and Populists both nominated Williams Jennings Bryan for president, but nominated different candidates for vice-president. In some states there were two different ballot lines (Bryan/X and Bryan/Y).
Eugene McCarthy and Walt Brown also ran with various VP candidates in one or more of their third party campaigns.
It seems to me that there’s a tendency with third parties — or at least that that’s been the case with the Libertarian Party — to increasingly move toward “conventional wisdom” thinking on how to campaign.
The BTP being new, young, small and inexperienced, it can afford to experiment now, before cargo cultism starts to creep into its thinking. We’re not going to win in November — so why not try some new approaches and see how they pan out? The worst that can happen is that we don’t do well. The best that can happen is that we’ll find out that some strange ideas worked and that we did better than we expected to.
Regards,
Tom Knapp
No, you’re right. The way it is now works just fine. Dick Cheney just moves from Texas to Wyoming. Makes perfect sense!
No, it’s totally pointless.
It made a lot more sense when you had two votes for President and Virginia had the power
Richard – If Jay/Smith were to win Florida, then clearly the electors from Florida would also be from Florida. Obviously, this is academic, but I thought it was mildly interesting.
What a stupid provision of the Constitution, by the way.
The US Constitution doesn’t say that presidential electors can’t vote for a presidential candidate and a vice-presidential candidate from the same state. It just says that electors can’t vote for that kind of ticket if the elector is also from that same state. And, as noted above, residence only counts as of December of the presidential election year, so either the pres or v-p candidate can move if necessary, sometime before mid-December 2008.
It all sounds a little goofy to me, Tom.
Any plans to try and get the BTP on the ballot in Guam? I hear that all they need to do is write a letter to the Guam Election Commission and show that they’re on the ballot somewhere else.
Although Guam may move their ‘Presidential straw poll’ to September this year.
Sorry about forgetting to close the italic tag.
Yes, the “favorite sons and daughters” thing is technically constitutionally defective, since electors are allegedly not allowed to vote for a presidential and vice-presidential candidate from the same state.
My theory on this is two-fold (on this particular sub-issue):
1) We aren’t going to carry any states this year;
2) If we did carry any particular state, the “favorite son” there could just pretend to be from another state — long-time Texas resident Dick Cheney got away with it in 2000 and 2004.
3) If we carried enough states for it to matter, the national committee could ask the electors from all the “favorite sons and daughters” states to go “faithless” and cast their vote for the nationally selected VP nominee.
Now, to the other part:
“I think Chris Bennett would have been a stronger campaigner than a bunch of favorite sons. ”
I have to disagree.
– There are only 24 hours in anyone’s day, including Chris Bennett’s (or mine). If we are on the ballot in ten states and have one VP candidate campaigning, that’s a potential 24 hours per day of campaigning. If we are on the ballot in ten states and have eleven VP candidates campaigning (ten “favorite sons/daughters” and one national nominee), that’s 264 hours per day of potential campaigning.
– The “favorite son/daughter” angle is mediagenic both in itself and with respect to the specific individuals involved. The fact that we’re doing it this way can be pitched as a story, and each “favorite son/daughter” can hopefully get a few interviews/articles in local/state media from the novelty of it.
I don’t know if John Wayne Smith would be a stronger campaigner than Chris Bennet or myself nationally — but I do know that neither I nor Chris Bennett have polled 16,000 votes for governor of Florida or 24+% in a Florida state legislative race, and I do know that John Wayne Smith has done those things. Any guess as to whom more Floridians have heard of or are likely to pay some attention to?
As for myself, I think I’ll probably be on the ballot in at least one place — Guam. If there are states where we can’t find a “favorite son/daughter,” I’ll be glad to see my name on the ballot in those states. But as a startup party, we can use as many more active campaigners, and as much more publicity — even if it’s of the novelty variety — as we can get.
Regards,
Tom Knapp
I doubt Mr. Davidson would take offense since he has made his intentions to leave the office of chair in October known.
I can’t speak for Tom, but I believe originally, the plan was to be on the ballot in all the states the BTP got on. However after the fact, there have been some logistical issues.
I dunno, I would tend to agree with you. Infact, I would like to see Chris take an even more active role with the BTP. No disrespect meant to Jim Davidson, who has been nothing but nice to me personally, but I would like to see Chris run for BTP National Chairman in October.
I was suspect of the BTP at first. But, I’m starting to take a more active role.
I don’t imagine the BTP ticket is going to do much “on-the-ground” campaigning. It is an Internet-based political party and will probably do most its campaigning via the Net. It only makes sense.
Well, in respect to Bennett (as I did vote for him), I really wouldn’t want to interrupt his current campaigns. To campaign around the country, he’d have to drop most of the campaigns he’s managing.
Well, I did make a public oath to cast my vote for Barr should he win the state. But I’ll still take the free beers, and if my write-in is going to be counted, Charles Jay has my real vote.
As for the “favorite sons” thing. Did Knapp say this was what he was going to do? I think Chris Bennett would have been a stronger campaigner than a bunch of favorite sons. No offense to Knapp.
In Missouri…as a congressional candidate.
I like what the BTP is doing. John Wayne Smith can forever say he was once a Vice Presidential candidate now.
By the way, we need electors in Michigan on the off chance that Charles Jay some how wins as a write in.
Perhaps I can buy my boy GE a couple of beers and if Bob Barr some how won Michigan, perhaps I could convince him to cast his vote for Jay.
Is Knapp on the ballot in any states?