Candidates With Color

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 20, 2010

The news is replete these days with examinations of the political stances of various candidates whose public views seem at first glance to be, well, let us say out of the ordinary.

There is the fellow from Kentucky who, as I recall, suggested that letting people who own lunch counters decide who to welcome into their businesses and who to make creep around to the back door for a chicken salad sandwich might not be such a bad idea. I think he also was quoted as saying that since nothing could be done to prevent at least some people from dying in coal mines, why get all upset when it happens.

I've also heard tell about the woman in New Mexico, I think it is, who apparently thinks a glass of red wine with dinner is something that maybe the government should rethink allowing Americans to have. Something also about coming up with a few "Second Amendment remedies" if the government thinks it can use your money to fund that Social Security scheme also strikes a bell when I think of her.

We don't know much of how to take the fellow down in South Carolina who won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate because, well, he really hasn't said much of anything, before, during, or after the election — except making an alleged attempt to introduce a college student to the wonderful world of pictures of naked people. We are certain, however, that things will work themselves out in the wash, or the courtroom, for this fellow.

But I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that exciting candidacies like these never happen in Chester County, and what a shame. With the recent exception of the school board election in which the guy who hinted that sticking people's faces in a tub of water was pretty much good clean fun, political candidates in Chester County are usually pretty boring.

Even the guy who ran for township supervisor on the Hot Air Balloon ticket had only an odd predilection for sleeping someplace other than his actual home, and compared to suggesting armed insurrection in Sin City, that hardly ranks.

We're left mostly with Andy Dinniman and his dog when it comes to providing local color in election campaigns. (I once saw state Sen. Dinniman walking said dog on the front lawn of the Chester County Historic Courthouse and wondered if he included the traditional plastic shopping bag in with his legislative briefs, but, alas, things never reached that stage. Another missed opportunity for the front page.)

Let me assure you, however, that we have had our own set of oddball candidates in the past whose stories would rival those of the candidates in Kentucky, New Mexico and South Carolina. For starters, there was the guy who ran for county commissioner on the platformthat he wanted to put a heliport on the top of the courthouse.

I forget his name, but he was ubiquitous at commissioners' meetings for a spell in the early and mid-1980s. He used to march up and down the sidewalk on North High Street in front of the Old Glory statue with a hand-drawn picture of what the heliport would look like after it was constructed next to the clock tower on Thomas U. Walter's architectural masterpiece.

He was adamant about it. It wasn't a joke. He truly believed that what the county needed was a central heliport in downtown West Chester. Taxes had something to do with it, I imagine. He would get righteously riled up at the commissioners' meeting when the trio in power didn't take him seriously enough, and once I remember he brought his one-man protest to the parking lot of the Daily Local News because we wouldn't include him in the candidate profiles we ran in the commissioners' race.

Occasionally I wonder what life would be like today if he'd been successful at convincing the public that a heliport was just what our county needed. It couldn't be worse than having an MTV reality TV star parade through downtown West Chester dressed as a rabbit, could it?

Another of my favorite campaigners was the former mayor of Parkesburg, who told me in a pre-election interview that one of his goals if re-elected was to erect a sign at the borough's edge proclaiming Parkesburg as "The Beverly Hills of Chester County." He had a hard time getting me to understand exactly how that 1.2 square mile municipality could compare with the land of palm trees and millionaire mansions, but that could be my fault. Maybe it was the presence of backyard "cee-ment ponds" that they had in common.

I think he won, though. Which may or may not give you pause if you live in Kentucky, New Mexico or South Carolina.