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Darcy Richardson |
See Darcy’s comments.
“For the record, I am no longer seeking the Reform Party’s presidential nomination.
As a witty observer once noted — a close friend of mine, as it turns out — a person can only drag a corpse around for so long before the smell becomes unbearable.
Eventually, it starts attracting flies and other necrop hilous insects.
My running mate, former State Senator and Public Service Commission chairwoman Nancy Argenziano, a longtime environmentalist and consumer advocate, and I tried to revive the Reform Party last year during my campaign for governor here in Florida — a candidacy in which we logged thousands of miles while taking a considerable amount of abuse from both major parties because of the razor-thin outcome.
While we were the only third-party campaign in the country to poll the difference between our major-party opponents in a gubernatorial or U.S. Senate race in 2018 (deep-pocketed independents Oz Griebel in Connecticut and Greg Orman in Kansas also polled the difference in their gubernatorial campaigns last year), thereby forcing an automatic statewide recount, support from the national Reform Party leadership, made up of a handful of inept keyboard warriors on Facebook with little or no practical political experience, was virtually non-existent.
If I’m not mistaken, members of the Reform Party’s national leadership provided a total of $5 toward our $70,000 budget. That was a donation from party secretary Nicholas Hensley. The party’s rank-and-file outside of the Sunshine State contributed even less.
I wish the Reform Party well, but it’s really time to give up the ghost.
If folks are looking for an alternative to the increasingly corrupt, Wall Street-controlled duopoly next year, the nationally-organized Libertarian, Green and Constitution parties — not necessarily in that order — would be a good place to start.
Or perhaps to some new entity emerging, say, next March, a month known best for college basketball madness, but also universally recognized as “Deaf History Month.” If we’re really lucky next year, it’ll also be known as a month when the politically hard of hearing and impaired — the vast majority of the American electorate, that is — finally had the ability to hear and to listen to a message not crafted by the financial oligarchy that has controlled our politics for the past century or longer.
The Ides of March… “