Originally published Sunday, April 13, 1986

Big-time national politics has all but lost its Weirdness Quotient. More and more, high-level political races tend to be between identical slim men in identical slim suits. Rational men, cool men, men who know the voting market, men who never say the wrong thing, men who are good on TV. Candidates who don't fit this mold -- the blatant hacks, the geeks, the loons, the people with bad teeth -- tend to get filtered out at the state- legislature level. At the Senate level, you wind up with Ted Koppel vs. Ted Koppel, both speaking in perfect sound bites.

These people are boring. I ask you: What is the point of watching a politician talk, if he doesn't make an ass of himself? Where are the weird candidates? Who, on the national level, will pick up the torch dropped, with a typical lack of manual dexterity, by Richard M. Nixon? Where are the fat candidates? Where are the ugly candidates? Where are the stupid candidates? Where are the candidates who go to formal dinners and pass out in the shrimp? Who set fire to themselves with cigars? I believe that if we are to keep the tradition of participatory democracy going in this country, if we are to revive voter interest, we need more weird people running for high office, and we need them right now.

And so I say: Thank God for Florida, whose very license plates should read, "FLORIDA: NOT A NORMAL PLACE." Because in a state like this, a state whose naturally humid climate has permitted a tremendous diversity of human and reptile life to flourish and mutate, we should not be surprised to find that this year, we are being treated to a Senate race between two politicians who are clearly not Standard Issue. I've spent some time watching both of them, and I can honestly state that regardless of which one is elected, we will all, as Floridians, have reason to be vastly amused. Here's a full report on the campaign to date.

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We are in Gov. Bob Graham's rental campaign plane, which is stout and bouncy, not unlike the governor himself, and we are going to someplace called "Bartow." Rumor has it that there is agriculture in Bartow. Graham is going there to show his concern for it.

On the plane with the governor is the press corps, including a couple of political reporters from Big Time out-of- state papers that are very interested in this race because (a) it is considered crucial to the Republicans' hopes of retaining control in the Senate and (b) it is nice and warm in Florida. The press corps is not crazy about landing in Bartow. The press corps frankly does not care about agriculture except insofar as it results in lunch. The press corps would rather hear Graham talk about his opponent, incumbent Sen. Paula Hawkins, and her hot new campaign issue, The Pipeline That Will Leak And Explode.

This is an issue that materialized out of the air, literally, in the form of two Hawkins campaign commercials suggesting that Graham is willing to let this pipeline spew oil and flame all over the state. Graham, who has long portrayed himself as a friend of nature, the Everglades, bunny rabbits, etc., fought back with a counter-commercial -- featuring a photograph of Hawkins that makes her look like she lost the Miss Room Freshener Pageant because the judges thought she was too vacuous -- in which prominent ecology nuts say that they favor the pipeline and like Bob Graham and think Hawkins' commercial is basically alligator poop.