Jimmy McMillan illustrates more than any other fringe candidate how, to the degree fringe campaigns attract attention, they are amplifying voices otherwise largely, if not entirely, unheard. When he ran for president in 2012, McMillan was not a newcomer. In 1994 he began what would become repeated candidacies by entering that year’s race for New York’s governor. Though attention to him was largely confined to that state, McMillan demonstrated his flair for publicity right from the start. And, from the start, that attention revealed elements residing beneath the surface of the political landscape.
“He’s a good bet to add some spice to this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary,” the Syracuse (NY) Herald-American suggested, providing a sample of McMillan’s campaign and cajones by relating an incident when FBI agents approached him on the steps of the state capital and, for reasons unreported, questioned whether he intended to hurt the governor. “What do you mean hurt?” the report quoted him replying. “He’s the main man. He’s knocked the businesses out with taxes and regulations. He’s punched the poor into the unemployment line. I’m going to hurt him. I’m going after him. In the end, there’s going to be two people left standing in that ring. Me and him. And there’s going to be one champion, and that will be me.”1
Apparently that calmed the G-men (no arrest was reported), though the article did say he now faced more imposing obstacles, starting with the fact that “nobody outside his Brooklyn neighborhood . . . knows McMillan.” It also noted that “the clenched fist drawn on his head band may scare away as many voters as it attracts.” One obstacle the article didn’t mention (or did it?—or did it not think it was an obstacle?) was McMillan’s race. For most readers the “clenched fist drawn on his head band” said it clearly enough: angry black man.
Throughout the two decades of McMillan’s fringe campaigns, his being African American went almost entirely unmentioned. This despite the fact that his soon-to-be-adopted catch-phrase, “The rent is too damn high,” was closely associated with urban gentrification, whereby housing gets renovated in order to sell or rent it at higher prices many African Americans could not afford. Through McMillan’s fringe campaigns, we can see with considerable clarity whether the nation was moving beyond racial preconceptions—or, more succinctly, whether the clenched fist was still needed.
“Harlem’s Jimmy McMillan stole the show at the N.Y. governor’s debate Tuesday as the candidate of the Rent is Too Damn High Party,” syndicated columnist Agus Hamilton wrote in 2010. “The audience loved him. Everybody wants him to move to L.A. and run for mayor as the candidate of the Lindsay Lohan is Too Damn High party.”2 Others may not find this joke as amusing as I did, but that’s not the point. Harlem is. Or more to the point isn’t where McMillan lived, which was Brooklyn. But Harlem conveyed “African American” without having to say it. And raises the question: Why did he have to convey his race? Which, since he didn’t need it to make the joke, begins to reveal the answer as to whether or not the nation was beyond racial preconceptions.
Not Agus Hamilton. Or at least, in his view, some number of his readers.
Returning to 1994, McMillan soon faded from attention in the gubernatorial race, and likewise in 2009 when a piece in the New York Times began, “Jimmy McMillan is running for mayor of New York City. The fact that few in the city are aware of his existence, much less his candidacy, did not deter him as he swaggered down Utica Avenue in East Flatbush.”3 New Yorkers in 2009 would correctly suspect that this largely unknown man (according to the article) who “swaggered down Utica Avenue in East Flatbush” was African American.
But shh. Categorizing candidates by race is not the policy of the New York Times. Or rather, openly categorizing them by race. This dirty little secret resonated with McMillan’s fringe candidacy and was amplified by the nature of the attention it received in the press.
McMillan’s big break came the following year, when he again ran for governor. Much in the way that post-1968 changes in presidential primary rules opened the gates more widely for alternative candidates, a similar effort in New York gave candidates such as McMillan an opportunity to debate on the same stage as that year’s major party candidates. It was this debate to which Hamilton was referring when he wrote of McMillan’s stealing the show. Clips from that debate soon appeared on the internet, bringing so much national attention to McMillan that his celebrity soon garnered him the prize of being parodied on Saturday Night Live.4 Clips of which, in turn, went viral on the internet. One company began manufacturing a talking doll of McMillan which—you guessed it—said only, “The rent is too damn high!”5
The talking doll, however, may prove an antiquated example of popularity and potential impact. Media arts professor Richard L. Edwards cited a music video by the Gregory Brothers released at this time, which used video mashups along with computer technology that altered recordings of McMillan declaring “The rent is too damn high” into melodic attunements to present him as their lead singer. Edwards recognized that the music video was “clearly humorous in intent” and “may seem to be an unlikely conveyer of activism.” But he speculated (possibly accurately, God help us), “What began as alternative media logics are now regularly encountered by an electorate that has embraced mashup culture. The profundity of the shift may be seen in the acceptance of ‘Auto-Tune the News,’” a hugely successful internet-based series of music videos released by the band.6
Needless to say, with all this attention the nation’s pundits weighed in as well. Writing about the gubernatorial debate, the columnist Mark Bennett said, “The New York forum was more circus than debate; McMillan’s candidacy reflects the current atmosphere.” Bennett described that atmosphere as “I vent, therefore I am.”7
Bennett hit the nail on the head. Long-suppressed rage was beginning to vent. Its presence was sounded in the 2008 fringe candidacy of Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey and further amplified in the far greater attention Jimmy McMillan received in 2010.
Setting up the next nail and hitting it on the head with uncanny prescience, the syndicated New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote, “On the rage-o-meter, this week’s gubernatorial debate in New York . . . looked less like a debate than a tryout for some particularly embarrassing reality show.” Collins then zoomed in: “The person who got the most post-debate attention was Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High Party. . . . He was very, very, very angry.” Displaying further insight, she noted, “We are talking here about undifferentiated anger.” Indeed using “The rent is too damn high” as a metaphorical blank to be filled, McMillan’s campaign captured the attention of a wide span of Americans with a variety of angers and other discontents. But particularly for those pouring anger into that blank, Collins pointed out that it “creates nothing but a feeling of moral superiority on the part of the irate.”8 A highly combustible brew.
Collins’s insights did not stop there. Based in no small part on McMillan’s campaign, she began this article by stating, “Rage is not working out,” followed by examples of voters electing rage-inducing candidates in primaries who went on to lose the election. She was not wrong, though the political landscape was beginning to quake. Rage soon reached its tipping point in the 2016 election. Still, Collins was not wrong. The nation would discover that even when it wins elections, rage does not work out.
McMillan’s 2012 presidential bid did not work out either. Right out of the gate he baffled the news media by combining a serious message with clowning. After McMillan declared his candidacy, a reporter asked him if he had anyone in mind as a running mate. “Mitt Romney,” he answered, “or Newt Gingrich.” Setting aside the in your dreams reasons, the clowning commenced when he explained, “Newt Gingrich has been there before. He is a good liar. People look at him and laugh.” As for Romney: “Good looking guy. It’ll keep the ladies from looking at me.”9
With his candidacy subsequently fading from public attention, McMillan got back in the news with another announcement: he would be dispensing with the Rent Is Too Damn High Party and seeking the presidency as a Republican.
Not surprisingly, Fox News, sometimes referred to as the official organ of the Republican Party, quickly put McMillan in front of the cameras on Sean Hannity’s widely watched commentary and interview show. Hannity, however—as when he interviewed Roseanne Barr—again proved himself fully capable of conducting an incisive interview:
Hannity: So [as a Republican], what is the new slogan?
McMillan: The Deficit is Too Damn High.
Hannity: That’s your slogan.
McMillan: The same thing I brought with me to the governor’s race I’m bringing the same thing to the presidential race, but I just modified it a little bit.
After sparring over the fact that New York has rent control, Hannity turned to the candidate’s new slogan:
Hannity: All right, the deficit is too damn high. How are you going to lower the deficit?
McMillan: You lower the deficit by telling the people we are going to pardon all debt—American citizens of all debt.
Hannity: What?
McMillan: Because of what we did with the $800 billion bailouts [of corporations following the 2008 financial crisis].
Hannity: What about people like me that don’t have debt?
McMillan: Then it doesn’t concern you. But those who have debt—one hundred per cent of people living in poverty because the American government put the people in this hole we’re in.
Hannity: Wait a minute. So from the day—if you win the election—the day you are inaugurated, I’m going to accumulate a ton of debt.
McMillan: If you have a debt, your debt would be pardoned. The government put the people in this debt we are in. Someone has to step up and do the right thing for the people. We owe this to the people. Rent is too damn high and the deficit is too damn high and Hannity is too damn smart.10
Hannity’s shredding of McMillan’s campaign platform was not confined to conservatives. A New York Times review of a documentary film about McMillan, released during the campaign, noted, “By the end of this smart, subtle film by Aaron Fisher-Cohen, you realize that it’s actually a deft look at flash-in-the-pan fame and the emptiness of it. . . . Mr. Fisher-Cohen captures Mr. McMillan’s transformation from a guy with a funny look and line into someone who believes his own hype.”11
McMillan was not the only presidential aspirant in 2012 who could be accused of believing his own hype. “Trump Trumps GOP Hopefuls” a headline read in the Los Angeles Times on February 11, 2011, dropping the other shoe in its subhead, “The Developer Shocks Conservatives by Suggesting He May Run for President in 2012.” Not, it should be noted, front-page news in that election, the article appeared twenty-two pages into the paper. Though McMillan and Trump were worlds apart on the issue of rent, they were both filled with rage and shared the same belief in their own hype. Vying to return to the spotlight, McMillan soon announced that, should he be nominated by the Republicans, his pick for vice president would be Donald Trump.12
In that election Trump never officially declared himself a candidate, and McMillan’s campaign finally faded. The fact that the public interest waned for both aspirants indicates that what Collins called “undifferentiated anger” had not yet spread to its fullest extent.