Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (7 page)

After a savage, fire-sucking campaign we lost by only six (6) votes, out of 1,200. Actually we lost by one (1) vote, but five of our absentee ballots didn’t get here in time—primarily because they were mailed (to places like Mexico and Nepal and Guatemala) five days before the election.

We came very close to winning control of the town, and that was the crucial difference between our action in Aspen and, say, Norman Mailer’s campaign in New York—which was clearly doomed from the start. At the time of Edwards’ campaign, we were not conscious of any precedent ... and even now, in calm retrospect, the only similar effort that comes to mind is Bob Scheer’s 1966 run for a U.S. Congress seat in Berkeley/Oakland—when he challenged liberal Jeffrey Cohelan and lost by something like 2 percent of the vote. Other than that, most radical attempts to get into electoral politics have been colorful, fore-doomed efforts in the style of the Mailer-Breslin gig.

This same essential difference is already evident in 1970, with the sudden rash of assaults on various sheriff’s fiefs. Stew Albert got 65,000 votes in Berkeley, running on a neo-hippie platform, but there was never any question of his winning. Another notable exception was David Pierce, a thirty-year-old lawyer who was actually elected mayor of Richmond, California (population 100,000 plus), in 1964. Pierce mustered a huge black ghetto vote—mainly on the basis of his lifestyle and his
promise to “bust Standard Oil.” He served, and in fact ran, the city for three years—but in 1967 he suddenly abandoned everything to move to a monastery in Nepal. He is now in Turkey, en route to Aspen and then California, where he plans to run for governor.

Another was Oscar Acosta, a Brown Power candidate for sheriff of Los Angeles County, who pulled 110,000 votes out of something like two million.

Meanwhile in Lawrence, Kansas, George Kimball (defense minister for the local White Panther party) has already won the Democratic primary—running unopposed—but he expects to lose the general election by at least ten to one.

On the strength of the Edwards showing, I had decided to surpass my pledge and run for sheriff, and when both Kimball and Acosta visited Aspen recently, they were amazed to find that I actually expect to
win
my race. A preliminary canvass shows me running well ahead of the Democratic incumbent, and only slightly behind the Republican challenger.

The root point is that Aspen’s political situation is so volatile—as a result of the Joe Edwards campaign—that
any
Freak Power candidate is now a possible winner.

In my case, for instance, I will have to work very hard—and spew out some really heinous ideas during my campaign—to get
less
than 30 percent of the vote in a three-way race. And an underground candidate who really wanted to win could assume, from the start, a working nut of about 40 percent of the electorate—with his chances of victory riding almost entirely on his Backlash Potential; or how much active fear and loathing his candidacy might provoke among the burghers who have controlled local candidates for so long.

The possibility of victory can be a heavy millstone around the neck of any political candidate who might prefer, in his heart, to spend his main energies on a series of terrifying, whiplash assaults on everything the voters hold dear. There are harsh echoes of the Magic Christian in this technique: the candidate first creates an impossible psychic maze, then he drags the voters into it and flails them constantly with gibberish and rude shocks. This was Mailer’s technique, and it got him fifty-five thousand votes in a city of ten million people—but in truth it is more a form of vengeance than electoral politics. Which is not to say that it
can’t be effective, in Aspen or anywhere else, but as a political strategy it is tainted by a series of disastrous defeats.

In any event, the Magic Christian conceit is one side of the “new politics” coin. It doesn’t work, but it’s fun ... unlike that coin’s other face that emerged in the presidential campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. In both cases, we saw establishment candidates
claiming conversion
to some newer and younger state of mind (or political reality) that would make them more in tune with a newer, younger, and weirder electorate that had previously called them both useless.

And it worked. Both conversions were hugely successful, for a while ... and if the tactic itself seemed cynical, it is still hard to know, in either case, whether the tactic was father to the conversion, or vice-versa. Which hardly matters, for now. We are talking about political-action formats: if the Magic Christian concept is one, then the Kennedy-McCarthy format has to qualify as another ... particularly as the national Democratic Party is already working desperately to make it work again in 1972, when the Demos’ only hope of unseating Nixon will again be some shrewd establishment candidate on the brink of menopause who will suddenly start dropping acid in late ’71 and then hit the rock-festival trail in the summer of ’72. He will doff his shirt at every opportunity and his wife will burn her bra ... and millions of the young will vote for him, against Nixon.

Or will they? There is still another format, and this is the one we stumbled on in Aspen. Why not challenge the establishment with a candidate they’ve never heard of? Who has never been primed or prepped or greased for public office? And whose lifestyle is already so weird that the idea of “conversion” would never occur to him?

In other words, why not run an honest freak and turn him loose, on
their
turf, to show up all the “normal” candidates for the worthless losers they are and always have been? Why defer to the bastards? Why assume they’re intelligent? Why believe they won’t crack and fold in a crunch? (When the Japs went into Olympic volleyball they ran a blitz on everybody using strange but maddeningly legal techniques like the “Jap roll,” the “dink spike,” and the “lightning belly pass” that reduced their taller opponents to screaming jelly.)

This is the essence of what some people call “the Aspen technique”
in politics: neither opting out of the system, nor working within it ... but calling its bluff, by using its strength to turn it back on itself ... and by always assuming that the people in power are not smart. By the end of the Edwards campaign, I was convinced, despite my lifelong bias to the contrary, that the Law was actually on our side. Not the cops, or the judges or the politicians—but the actual Law, itself, as printed in the dull and musty lawbooks that we constantly had to consult because we had no other choice.

By noon on Election Day, the only real question was How Many Liberals Had Hung On. A few had come over, as it were, but those few were not enough to form the other half of the nervous power base we had counted on from the start. The original idea had been to lash together a one-shot coalition and demoralize the local money/politics establishment by winning a major election before the enemy knew what was happening. Aspen’s liberals are a permanent minority who have never won
anything
, despite their constant struggles ... and Aspen’s fabled “underground” is a far larger minority that has never even
tried
to win anything.

So
power
was our first priority. The platform—or at least our public version of it—was too intentionally vague to be anything but a flexible, secondary tool for wooing the liberals and holding our coalition. On the other hand, not even the handful of people in the powernexus of Joe Edwards’ campaign could guarantee that he would start sodding the streets and flaying the sheriff just as soon as he got elected. He was, after all, a lawyer—an evil trade, at best—and I think we all knew, although nobody ever said it, that we really had no idea what the bastard might do if he got elected. For all we knew he could turn into a vicious monster and have us all jailed for sedition.

None of us even
knew
Joe Edwards. For weeks we had joked about our “ghost candidate” who emerged from time to time to insist that he was the helpless creature of some mysterious Political Machine that had caused his phone to ring one Saturday at midnight, and told him he was running for mayor.

Which was more or less true. I had called him in a frenzy, full of booze and resentment at a rumor that a gaggle of local powermongers had already met and decided who Aspen’s next mayor would be—a
giddy old lady would run unopposed behind some kind of lunatic obscenity they called a “united front,” or “progressive solidarity”—endorsed by Leon Uris, who is Aspen’s leading stag movie fan, and who writes books, like
Exodus
, to pay his bills. I was sitting in Peggy Clifford’s living room when I heard about it, and, as I recall, we both agreed that the fuckers had gone too far this time.

Someone suggested Ross Griffin, a retired ski bum and lifelong mountain beatnik who was going half straight at the time and talking about running for the city council ... but a dozen or so trial-balloon calls convinced us that Ross wasn’t quite weird enough to galvanize the street vote, which we felt would be absolutely necessary. (As it turned out, we were wrong: Griffin ran for the council and won by a huge margin in a ward full of Heads.)

But at the time it seemed necessary to come up with a candidate whose Strange Tastes and Para-Legal Behavior were absolutely beyond question ... a man whose candidacy would torture the outer limits of political gall, whose name would strike fear and shock in the heart of every burgher, and whose massive unsuitability for the job would cause even the most apolitical drug-child in the town’s most degenerate commune to shout, “Yes! I must
vote
for that man!”

Joe Edwards didn’t quite fill that bill. He was a bit too straight for the acid-people, and a little too strange for the liberals—but he was the only candidate even marginally acceptable on both ends of our untried coalition spectrum. And twenty-four hours after our first jangled phone talk about “running for mayor,” he said, “Fuck it, why not?”

The next day was Sunday, and
The Battle of Algiers
was playing at the Wheeler Opera House. We agreed to meet afterward, on the street, but the hookup was difficult, because I didn’t know what he looked like. So we ended up milling around for a while, casting sidelong glances at each other, and I remember thinking, Jesus, could that be
him
over there? That scurvy-looking geek with the shifty eyes? Shit, he’ll never win anything . . .

Finally, after awkward introductions, we walked down to the old Jerome Hotel and ordered some beers sent out to the lobby, where we could talk privately. Our campaign juggernaut, that night, consisted of me, Jim Salter, and Mike Solheim—but we all assured Edwards that we were only the tip of the iceberg that was going to float him straight
into the sea-lanes of big-time power politics. In fact, I sensed that both Solheim and Salter were embarrassed to find themselves there—assuring some total stranger that all he had to do was say the word and we would make him mayor of Aspen.

None of us had even a beginner’s knowledge of how to run a political campaign. Salter writes screenplays (
Downhill Racer
) and books (
A Sport and a Pastime
). Solheim used to own an elegant bar called Leadville, in Ketchum, Idaho, and his Aspen gig is housepainting. For my part, I had lived about ten miles out of town for two years, doing everything possible to avoid Aspen’s feverish reality. My lifestyle, I felt, was not entirely suited for doing battle with any small-town political establishment. They had left me alone, not hassled my friends (with two unavoidable exceptions—both lawyers), and consistently ignored all rumors of madness and violence in my area. In return, I had consciously avoided writing about Aspen ... and in my very limited congress with the local authorities I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine, a thing best left alone as long as possible.

So the ’69 campaign was perhaps a longer step for me than it was for Joe Edwards. He had already tasted political conflict and he seemed to dig it. But my own involvement amounted to the willful shattering of what had been, until then, a very comfortable truce ... and looking back, I’m still not sure what launched me. Probably it was Chicago—that brain-raping week in August of ’68. I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast.