Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [49]
As the campaign progressed, I followed the speeches and press conference of the other candidates to probe for their weakness. I finally found an opening. Whenever journalists asked Bush or Dukakis about the deficit, both candidates responded with long-range plans they claimed would balance the national budget in eight to ten years. Yet I knew how to erase the shortfall in less than a day. Since the government owned the printing presses and currency plates, we merely had to print more money in large denominations. Bye-bye deficit. Seeing as how neither of my opponents could figure out a solution as easy as that, both men were obviously too dense to be president. If I could just entice them into a nationally televised debate, the American people would recognize that.
Too bad our party had no means of publicizing my message or getting out the vote. Two months into the campaign we still had no funding. No brochures. No posters. No advertising of any kind. We could not finance any petition drives, so my name would not appear on the ballot in a single state. I ran the race as the ultimate stealth candidate.
We also still lacked an in-the-flesh vice presidential candidate. Hunter Thompson had eluded every attempt to reach him. One of my volunteers pressed me almost daily to find another running mate.
“You can’t have a vice president who doesn’t show up,” he insisted.
“Oh, yeah? Have you looked at the job description for VP? Seems to me someone who doesn’t show up is perfect for the position.”
“But Dukakis has Bentsen, Bush has Quayle . . .”
“You’re making my point.”
Charlie Mackenzie called in late September. He had worked the phones every day trying to wangle an endorsement for my candidacy from some major political figure. Now he thought we had one. The man was a well-known political and social activist who had founded a counterculture political party of his own during the sixties, one of the leaders of the American antiwar movement during the Vietnam era, the author of a best-selling anarchistic manifesto, the dissident prankster who once led a peace demonstration in which over fifty thousand people tried to levitate the Pentagon using psychic energy, a recent fugitive from justice who only the year before had been arrested for the forty-second time after leading a demonstration against CIA recruitment on the University of Massachusetts campus, an alumnus of the Chicago Seven.
Abbie Hoffman wanted to meet me.
My hero.
The two of us sat down at a table in a bar just outside of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Abbie was shorter than I expected. He had arrived dressed in T-shirt and jeans. His dark hair was tangled and longish, receding at the crown and streaked with gray. He looked ill. His face was drawn, his body frail. Yellow tinged his eyes. But I could see the flames dancing in them.
We shook hands. He asked if I still played baseball and seemed pleased when I told him about my career on the semipro circuit. Turned out the revolutionary grew up a Red Sox fan. We talked about the Rhinoceros Party, and he agreed to give me his blessing. He broke into a belly laugh when he read our lunatic platform.
Suddenly, though, Abbie’s mood turned somber. He told me fighting the establishment, even as part of a fringe organization, nurtured the soul but that the corporate culture in the United States had become so deeply rooted, so institutionalized, little we did would ever make a real difference nationally.
The Vietnam vets who had accompanied me to New Hope didn’t want to hear that kind of talk. They formed a dissenting Greek chorus at the next table and mumbled how we could still “beat those bastards, just wait and see.” Abbie wanly smiled at the background noise. He still worked as an activist, opposing injustice and supporting environmental causes on the grassroots level. He also saw life realistically. Abbie told me he admired my associates’ passion but that our shot had come in the sixties with Berkeley, the civil rights marches, and the antiwar demonstrations. That had been our