Drew Curtis, founder and owner of the popular humorous news-aggregation website FARK.com, has announced that he will run for Governor of Kentucky as an independent in the 2015 election. From his interview with bizlex.com:
Curtis said he filed his campaign papers Friday and planned to make a formal announcement Monday on his website. His wife, Heather, will serve as his running mate.
“I have no idea what I’m in for,” said Curtis. “But that’s kind of the thing about being an entrepreneur, is you jump off a cliff and you build the plane on the way down.”
Curtis said he hopes to win but also to produce a “blueprint” for independent candidates. He offered, “No experiments. Leave people alone. And don’t spend money that you don’t have,” as the bumper-sticker for his campaign. The fiscal issues and concerns about influence buying are central to many of his concerns.
“As an unaligned executive, you’re in a really good spot because, if they can’t buy influence from you, who do they buy it from?” he said. “I mean, they can go ahead and spend money on the legislature all day but it doesn’t matter if they can’t reach me.”
– See more at: http://bizlex.com/2015/01/exclusive-interview-fark-coms-drew-curtis-enters-kentucky-governor-race/#sthash.EXQiFRcu.dpuf
Also hopefully without turning IPR comments into pastebin…
“Good morning everyone, my name is Andrew and I am Drew’s campaign manager. I just wanted to give you the campaign information that Drew was unable to give.
If you would like to visit the campaign’s website, it is at http://www.drewcurtis.com. Our issues page will be up soon and the website is growing with information and features every day.”
http://www.fark.com/comments/8573702/95111340#c95111340
From the annoucement URL Ziggler gave above “A friend of mine inspired me to take the shot. After having deeply negative interactions with a local elected official, and finding out she wasn’t alone in that experience, she decided that the only solution was to run for office. She had no political aspirations, no prior experience, and no idea how to even pull it off. But someone had to step up and do something about it, and she did. And this past November, she won the election.”
I am curious as to who “friend” is not that it is terribly relevant.
Gatewood was a good guy. RIP.
His campaign sounds like a good follow up to the independent campaigns of Gatewood Galbraith who ran for Governor of Kentucky several times on a platform of legalizing marijuana and industrial hemp.
His announcement at fark.com: http://www.fark.com/comments/8573702
He does seem to have a healthy level of disgust with the way government operates.
I would describe him as being, broadly, libertarian or a libertarian-leaning centrist. He donated to Ron Paul and has spoken positively of Gary Johnson. I think he also said elsewhere that he voted for David Patterson (the Libertarian nominee in last year’s Senate election). “Socially liberal and fiscally conservative” would seem to be accurate, at least.
If I were in LP-Kentucky, I’d be reaching out to him about possibly being their nominee, but it seems he’s already decided to go no-party independent over having the Libertarian label. Being strongly anti-Citizens United, etc. might have something to do with that, or it might be that he just prefers to run as an independent.
His positions sound appealing.
Sounds like a libertarian to me, or at least in that general ballpark direction.