Vermin Supreme has run for president in every election from 1992 to, as of this writing, 2016. Despite the repetition, public attention to his clown candidacy has yet to diminish—rather it has skyrocketed. This fact alone suggests that his fringe campaigns for president contain considerable significance.
Some of those elements surface simply by sampling his media coverage in 1992 with that of 2016. In 1992 National Public Radio (NPR) dispatched correspondent Linda Wertheimer and guest humorist Dave Barry to the New Hampshire primary. During a conversation with Barry on that network’s All Things Considered, Wertheimer turned to “the non-major candidates,” as she called them. “I hate to characterize them,” she said, “but there are some candidates—we had—we had a man in here today who—who told us his name was Vermin.” Scooping up her fumbling with this oddball, humorist Barry stepped in to field it: “Vermin Supreme. . . . I ran into him at a shopping mall yesterday, which is really where you run into all of them. But Vermin Supreme came up and he was wearing—I don’t know if—what—he was wearing it when he . . .” Now Wertheimer handled the bobble, “Yeah, he was wearing it.” Back to Barry, “Wearing a boot on his head. . . . And it was making a statement, I think. . . . He said it was—he said, ‘Why not the worst?’ That was his—the campaign theme he was on when I was there.” “How do we get out of this?” Wertheimer asked moments later, to which Barry said, “You mean the—how do we—how do we reform the entire campaign process and make it decent and responsive and focus on the issues instead of sleazeball tabloid stuff?” “Well, no,” she replied, “actually, I was thinking how do we end this interview?”1
Newcomer Vermin Supreme’s campaign for president was attention-getting but incomprehensible in 1992. By 1992 “tabloid stuff” was not a problem, even for the highly regarded newscasts of NPR, let alone other news outlets that reported his candidacy—though only, as on NPR, as part of a larger story, never in the headline or opening.
By comparison, here’s a sampling of headlines from 2016:
Notable in this selection is not only Vermin Supreme’s now being a headliner among fringe candidates but that each of these news reports appeared online. “I’m probably a thousand times more well-known than I was previously,” he told an interviewer in 2012, succinctly stating the reason as “this whole viral thing,” referring to the explosion of publicity he’d acquired through the internet.2 In 1992 Americans were just beginning to gain access to the internet. By the end of the decade that access had expanded exponentially. This new form of communication proved a boon to fringe presidential candidates.
It also radically altered the landscape on which America’s political discourse takes place.
While the 2016 headlines for Vermin Supreme remained tongue-in-cheek, they raised the question: Who is Vermin Supreme? Partial answer, again regarding the internet: Who Is Vermin Supreme? is the title of a 2014 documentary film, which received production funding online via a Kickstarter campaign.3
Vermin Supreme’s actual name is Vermin Supreme. At some point in his fringe candidate career he took steps to make it his legal name, most likely to add a barrier to his noncandidate life, which he has consistently kept private. Of the little that is known of his background is that his reputation for comic protest dates back to high school, circa the late 1970s (circa because he’s kept his age private too via conflicting claims). After some fellow students were arrested for possession of marijuana, the young prankster silkscreened and sold T-shirts emblazoned with “Big Pig Is Watching You” and a pig in police uniform wearing a badge embossed with “Keep Off the Grass.”4
While attending or having dropped out of art school in Baltimore (he has made both claims, but in either case he’s likely referring to that city’s prestigious Peabody Institute, given the talent he demonstrated in high school), he had a life-changing experience when a 1986 cross-country march for nuclear disarmament arrived in Baltimore en route from Los Angeles to Washington.5 It was, he later recalled, a “glorious mobile city,” tied down by nothing and collectively governed. “As soon as I saw that, I went to a thrift store, I bought a cheap sleeping bag, I bought a change of clothes, and I joined this march.” And became devoted to “non-hierarchical organizations.”6
From that springboard Vermin Supreme made his first splash as a fringe candidate the following year in Baltimore’s mayoral election. “The Name Is Mr. Vermin and Politics Is His Game” was a headline in the Baltimore Sun.7 Already he had grown his signature full beard but had not yet taken to wearing a boot on his head; rather he wore a tam-o’-shanter and kilt. Unlike his later campaigns, his fringe bid for mayor addressed the same issues raised by the mainstream candidates: housing, education, transportation, taxes. In each instance his platform’s view was “No comment.” Still, we can spot a bit of his presidential campaigns to come in his platform also raising the issues of “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, truth, justice, and the American Way,” on which his position was, likewise, “No comment.”8
The key element in this initial campaign, however, was his declaring, as he would continue to do for the next two decades, “All politicians are vermin. And I am the Vermin Supreme. Therefore, I am without question the most qualified.” In keeping with this view he declared, “I would, of course, buy your votes if I could afford it. . . . I am not above graft.” In addition, and also during the decades that followed, he made impossible promises, as politicians often do, but his were absurdly impossible, such as his vow to “do something about the weather.” He offered satirical solutions too, also as he would continue to do, such as his plan to solve the problem of weather in Baltimore by placing a dome over the city.9
And there’s this tidbit: Vermin Supreme’s first foray into fringe candidacy resulted in the Baltimore Sun reporter Sandy Banisky writing, “Look, he sounds like a fun guy. And honest. And a good dresser. But he lost. Maybe in the presidential campaign . . .” she semi-concluded, letting the sentence trail where it may.10
At this early stage Vermin Supreme can be seen as following in the footsteps of Wavy Gravy. Both began by promoting the image of a pig as representing the authorities but soon moved away from such insults and, in both cases, commenced presenting themselves as clowns. Wavy Gravy adopted the costume to avoid police beatings; Vermin Supreme “watched as too many peace marches devolved into violence,” in the words of the journalist and author Pagan Kennedy. “So he decided that he would show up at some demonstrations as a clown . . . helping to keep the peace.”11 Early on, for example, a wire service report from Los Angles began, “More than 3,500 bellowing, marching protesters jammed downtown streets Sunday, putting police on edge.” Near the end of the article it mentioned, “A man decked out in glittering red, white, and blue, with a rainbow wig . . . drew a grinning crowd of admirers from the march as he harangued the helmeted officers through a bullhorn. ‘Attention Los Angeles Police Department,’ said the man, who claims his legal name is Vermin Supreme, ‘Everything is under control. Your services are no longer needed. Please return to your homes now.’”12 Laughs erupted; violence did not. Nor were there any arrests.
But Vermin Supreme’s clowning extended beyond throwing pies in the face of potential violence. “He has spent years figuring out how to transform a group-thinking throng back into a bunch of individuals,” Kennedy observed. At a 2004 rally for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, the crowd awaiting him began chanting, “Ker-REEE, Ker-REEE,” acquiring (in Kennedy’s aptly chosen words) “that mob-zombie expression on their faces.” Vermin Supreme raised a megaphone and interrupted, “Where does John Kerry stand on mandatory tooth brushing? Is he soft on plaque?” Covering his 2004 campaign for the Boston Globe, Kennedy witnessed an increasing number in the crowd stopping to listen to this peculiar man, noting, “Suddenly they’re no longer members of the Kerry gang; they’re just their ordinary selves again.”13
Vermin Supreme followed in the footsteps of Wavy Gravy in another respect, but in this instance their paths diverged. Both promoted, in effect, Nobody for President. While Wavy Gravy did so directly as campaign chairman for Nobody, Vermin Supreme did so as a proxy for Nobody, much as Mickey Mouse or John Donkey served as “Nobody for President” proxies. “A vote for Vermin Supreme,” he often proclaimed when bringing a speech to a close, “is a vote completely thrown away.”14 Wavy Gravy’s campaign for Nobody, however, veered elsewhere over the years. As previously seen, his speeches during Nobody’s final campaign in 1988 often ended with the slogan “If Nobody Votes, Nobody Wins.”
While the message conveyed in Wavy Gravy’s campaigns for Nobody changed, it always remained comprehensible. Not so, for many, the issues raised by Vermin Supreme. From a distance, however, connections can be seen that indicate the direction in which he was pointing—albeit not an explicitly stated point. Vermin Supreme repeatedly campaigned for mandatory tooth brushing, the issue he brandished at Kerry’s supporters when they began going “zombie.” Indeed zombies were also a key element in his repeated campaign proposal to convert the nation to renewable energy. The plan called for giant turbines that, like hamster wheels, turned when zombies inside the turbines chased brains being dangled in front of them. Continuing his satiric tradition of impossible promises, Vermin Supreme’s most frequent campaign promise was a free pony for every American, part of his larger proposal to provide “a stable economy.”15
“He wants to topple the politicians from their pedestals,” Kennedy observed.16 His clown campaigns have aimed to do that through what one might call performative anarchy—performances that use certain absurdities to loosen our connections to political leaders. While, early on, Vermin Supreme occasionally called himself an anarchist, he soon turned to describing himself as a “friendly tyrant.” Tyranny and friendship, being mutually exclusive, make a good fit for performative anarchy. So too did his mimicking modern presidential aspirants authoring books, which he himself did in 2016, when he published I Pony: Blueprint for a New America. Rather than presenting a factual vision for the candidate’s presidency, it presented a fictional one of his presidency. (And, by the way, some very fine artwork.) Most accurate, however, was Vermin Supreme’s saying in 2012, “I still don’t have an ultimate goal.”17 His campaigns are more about process than project.
“I should spend our time on Vermin Supreme?” the network news correspondent and coanchor Sam Donaldson once asked angrily. “Not a chance.”18 Donaldson, however, was of the generation spawned by the patriarch of television news, the esteemed journalist Edward R. Murrow. The very fact that the question of covering Vermin Supreme was put to Donaldson reflects changes that had commenced in network news in the 1970s, when its executives saw the need to compete with the growing availability of cable television. For example, in 1977 at Donaldson’s network, ABC, executives expanded the role of Roone Arledge, their innovative and successful producer of sports broadcasts, to include producing the news. Fast-forward to 2016. During that year’s presidential election, a series of segments on ABC News, “Your Voice / Your Vote,” each of which opened with dramatic music and power-flashing graphics, devoted one of those broadcasts to Vermin Supreme.19
Notably—perhaps significantly (time will tell)—many in the news media are very aware of the ways in which style and content in journalism has changed. During the protests in Los Angeles, for instance, the Pittsburgh Post reporter Gene Collier interviewed Vermin Supreme. “He had just begun to de-mystify himself when the heckling started,” Collier wrote. “It wasn’t the police being heckled. It wasn’t Vermin. It was me. ‘The real story’s over there!’ a young woman was squawking. ‘Excuse me! The news? The real story’s over there!’ . . . ‘I’ll decide what the story is, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see this man has a Nerf ball where his nose should be?’” Why would Collier call attention to his journalistic choices in a not very flattering way? We can see by jumping further into his interview, where Collier comments on Vermin Supreme’s views, “Uh-huh. Maybe I should have listened to the media critic.”20 Clearly Collier was conflicted as to which story to report to what extent—particularly given the need to compete in a media market that now included news (or what passed for it) on cable networks and the internet.
Not only journalists were aware of this competition; so too was Vermin Supreme. “The media is my willing partner in subversion,” he told interviewers, regarding which Kennedy observed, “Journalists will follow a guy with a boot [on his head] the way a trout will go after a shiny plastic worm. The boot promises a good story. Vermin Supreme knows this. He has packaged himself as a made-to-order wacky sidebar for newspapers to run during campaign season. . . . In the past few years, our country has turned a corner. The political sideshow has moved to center stage.”21 But hold on. Have the likes of Vermin Supreme actually impacted our political process?
“I think he’s brought a lot of light to the stupidity that we put up with in a lot of presidents we’ve elected,” Joe Savarino, from the band Avadhootz, told a university newspaper reporter. “He’s about reworking the system in a way that we all know needs to happen.”22
Okay, but this is (1) from a college newspaper, quoting (2) a musician, who plays in a band called (3) Avadhootz.
Let’s head to the solid South. “I’ve heard from many registered voters that they don’t like the presumptive nominee of either party,” Marla McKenna, managing editor of Charlottesville, Virginia’s Daily Progress, wrote during the 2016 election. “I’m here to tell you there’s hope, my friends. . . . Look no further than Vermin Supreme, the man with the boot on his head.” In keeping with the notion that Nobody (or a proxy for Nobody) is a blank to be filled by all forms of dissatisfaction, McKenna went on to say, “You’re probably wondering if it’s a right boot or a left boot. . . . Whatever it is, it appears to be perfect for tromping through the political muck. Mr. Supreme stands for nothing, so you don’t need to worry about whether his views align with your own.”23
She was clearly kidding. Not kidding, however, was columnist Mike Argento in York, Pennsylvania’s Daily Record. During the 2016 run-up to the New Hampshire primary, he was dead earnest when comparing Donald Trump to Vermin Supreme:
Let’s take a look at two presidential candidates. One has . . . rhetoric [which] has escalated from the merely outrageous to stupefying insanity. . . . He has made outrageous promises about restoring America to greatness, although his proposals seem a little light in the fact-based realm. . . . The other candidate has also made outrageous promises. . . . He has pledged to give every American a pony and pass a law making tooth-brushing mandatory. . . . This candidate has described himself as “a friendly fascist” and “a tyrant you can trust.”24
In that primary Vermin Supreme received nearly twice as many votes as former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore.
The degree to which Vermin Supreme’s campaigns have attracted interest—and votes when on the ballot, as he was in New Hampshire—is an indication of the degree to which the urge to pull out the tent stakes of the whole political show exists in the hearts and, alas, the minds of Americans at that time.