DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: One Who Lost

...They were typical of our volunteer campaign, which featured primarily graduate students and recent alumni of the University...

...But parades were my favorite...

...Democratic primaries in these districts often determine whether the nominee will try to ingratiate himself with the Congressional Establishment or put peace over porkbarrel...

...But rather than leaving me with lasting insights on the nature of the anti-busing phenomenon, the campaign never gave me a chance for rational debate on the issue, even in Livonia...

...As these results, compiled from frantic phone calls all over the district, began to sink in, the phone rang...

...At the campaign’s outset we were planning to stress my lack of partisan political connections...

...Throughout my congressional campaign, I fantasized that my left-wing support would evaporate on that inevitable day when a campaign worker would discover a cache of old copies of None Dare Call It Treason under a loose floorboard...

...Inasmuch as the campaign was fought on issues, it was these twin issues of abortion and busing which were at the heart of the primary...

...But Ann Arbor is almost tailor-made for leafletting...

...Running a campaign on a $7,000 shoe-string budget and bucking the UAW and virtually every other union in the district, I came within about 1,300 votes of winning the six-way primary...

...But meeting even these few voters was better than enduring the languid pace of a small shopping center on a weekday morning...

...Races like these have an aura of glamour-a corps of volunteers that would make the owner of a singles’ bar drool, candidates willing to spend .grueling hours tramping from subway stations to the top of fetid tenements, and, of course, appropriate rhetoric about “forging new populist coalitions...

...This approach convinced no one...

...Publicly dispensing vast amounts of campaign literature detailing issue stands, however, is the hallmark of a successful Ann Arbor campaign...

...It was about two in the morning when the results became clear...

...For a ’ candidate, especially an insurgent with a limited local organization, suburbs like Livonia are virtually impregnable...

...People at parades are especially friendly, but I still don’t know how many of the 160 votes I received in Plymouth were because of my strenuous efforts during the Fourth of July parade...

...Abortion was another issue which couldn’t be avoided...

...More than anything else, the sixway race for the seemingly attractive Democratic congressional nomination became a regional contest between Ann Arbor and Livonia...

...To add a little frosting of activism, I stressed the summer I had spent probing the American Automobile Association for Ralph Nader...

...Preoccupied with the idea that personal contact produces votes, one is often unable to communicate with a voter when they ask for something more substantial than a handshake...

...Most of the minor candidates were regional too...

...For every Bella Abzug created by the metropolitan media, there are a dozen congressional races blacked-out by the intense competition to fill urban copy-holes...

...Although in the Second District only Livonia was covered by the Roth decision, busing also had an impact on those areas of Monroe County just south of Detroit...

...Of all these lobbies, the one most dedicated to thwarting the public interest is the American Medical Association...

...Although my support of abortion legislation and my insistance that abortion be covered by any national health insurance bill which passes Congress won me strong support in Ann Arbor, my chances of attracting the Right to Life vote vanished early in the campaign...

...So my first and last radio interview of the campaign consisted of my patiently explaining that our calculations had me losing by a little better than a thousand votes...

...The Court drastically limited the rights of political access to privatelyowned shopping centers and closed for me whatever small chance existed of reaching the suburbanites while they consumed...

...And it is an ability to exploit these Democratic differences that just reelected moderate Republican Congressman Marvin Esch to his fourth term with a margin of over 20,000 votes...

...DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: One Who Lost by Walter Shapiro As campaign headquarters went it was far from plush or even spacious...

...Eventually the campaign was saved by the legitimacy of my roots in the student community...

...Busing dominated the primary, which was held only a few months after the Roth decision had mandated cross-district busing throughout the Detroit metropolitan area...

...Consequently, I was left with the enjoyable, but less than politically effective, situation of preaching to the converted in the land of the heathen...

...But the problem is most acute in suburban districts, often lacking cohesive community ties, where the local papers are more advertising fliers than news sources...

...But one of the advantages of being ignored by the media was the feeling that “who in Washington would ever know” what we said about Nader...

...By the campaign’s end I had become adept at the firm handshake and incessant repetition of “I’m Walter Shapiro, running for Congress in the Democratic primary,” as I walked down the gutter of a main street, desperately trying to keep ahead of a local dmm-and-bugle corps...

...With the phone call went my last chance to become a media hero...

...As a good example of this, Fellmuth cites the way the Sacramento Bee covers John MOSS, the area’s Democratic congressman...

...It taught me that there are really only two types of congressional races-those with television cameras and those without...

...Some debts...

...Of course, both Kerry and Lowenstein were national figures before their campaigns started...

...Looking back, I’m almost glad the magic didn’t work, because there was something too mechanical, too bloodless, about the whole transaction...

...While it didn’t seem to have a major effect on voters, it certainly didn’t attract the working-class youth vote we had hoped...

...We were left with a solid campaign issue which we were totally unable to exploit...

...Although I had personal ties with some of the HRP leaders, dating from my days as a campus editor, the only way I could be certain that they would not run a candidate in November and fragment the student vote was to remain uncompromisingly pure on the issues...

...But, beyond the Ann Arbor purist vote, we needed something of a more general, almost nonpartisan, tone...

...With everyone driving to work, there are no commuter railroad stations or bus terminals to leaflet in the morning...

...If this is the level of coverage of incumbent congressmen and generalelection campaigns, the media attention which primaries receive is even less...

...I even half-believed that I could bring together many of the disparate elements in this crazy-quilt district...

...Passions were at a fever pitch, with anti-busing marches held almost daily in Livonia...

...Willing to write off anti-busing militants, I confined my campaigning to allegedly more liberal sections of Livonia and skipped the many houses which genteelly displayed little blackandwhite window signs reading, “This Family Will Not Be Bused...

...Although Ann Arbor maintains a list of active Democrats, elsewhere in the district there were few clues as to which voters were likely to be among the 15 per cent of the electorate who would vote in the Democratic primary...

...Any “Ralph and me” imagery is rather fraudulent since in a summer of working for his Public Interest Research Group I spoke with him once...

...Perhaps the best coverage is in districts urban enough to support a major paper, but small enough so the paper only circulates in two or three congressional districts...

...It taught me about the symbiotic relationship which must exist between unorthodox candidates and the political reporters who infuse their races with drama...

...And that was on the telephone...

...I explained that Michigan’s Second District was an ideal arena to test the youth vote, with ’high registration among the 50,000 college students in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in neighboring Ypsilanti...

...I was told that their Detroit bureau kicked around the idea of doing a youth vote article on my campaign, but then shelved it to see if I won the primary...

...In fact, I can’t really remember seeing any sidewalks...

...Campaigning in Ann Arbor is different than anywhere else in the district...

...Obviously primaries are pivotal in the one-party districts whose representatives make up at least two thirds of the House...

...I was far from reticent...

...My Pal Ralph ~ Leaflets make it difficult to communicate anything other than “code words” which identify you on an ideological spectrum but don’t convince...

...Ziegler thinks, however, that the votes we received in Erie were from those who didn’t open the letter, but remembered my name from the signature envelope...

...It had been less than a model mid-July morning...

...I would even try to attract conservative votes by emphasizing my concern with the size and the unresponsiveness of the federal bureaucracy...

...I would be a youth candidate, bringing together college students and young factory workers by stressing that voters under 30 are the most underrepresented minority in America...

...At the houses where I stopped, the response was generally guardedly friendly - until they had a chance to read my campaign literature...

...Saturday night movies brought out the riverboat cardsharp in me, as I often dealt as much as a ream of campaign literature to patrons waiting to see The Godfather...

...Perhaps like all first-time congressional candidates I had a dream of the kind of campaign it would be...

...The Monroe Evening News printed nothing but biographies of each candidate and the Ypsilanti Press ran only occasional press releases...

...Suddenly the other phone rang, and within seconds our small cubbyhole office was electric from the whispered announcement, “It’s CBS News calling from New York...

...It could have been worse...

...Without the media to distinguish between candidates or develop campaign issues, leaflets and mailings became almost the only way of communicating with the voters...

...It taught me that it is often the newspaper clips which make congressional campaigns seem exciting and meaningful...

...The boy looked up, pointed to the balloon and asked, “Is that yours...

...A visit to the Detroit News and repeated calls to the Detroit Free Press resulted in two small articles on the race the weekend before the primary...

...Primary day was damp...

...CBS wasn’t alone-The Wall Street Journal didn’t come either...

...Up Against the Screen Door There is no real center to it, only shopping centers...

...Briefly describing each of the candidates, the article went on to say that “among the issues Shapiro is stressing in his campaign are amnesty for draft dodgers...

...The only time amnesty was mentioned in the entire campaign was when the same Ann Arbor News reporter asked me about it during an hour-long candidates’ discussion aired by Detroit’s UHF educational channel...

...In contrast, I had been idly leafing through the morning paper, trying, along with my press secretary, to develop an exciting new gimmick for a press release...

...Traditionally the district has been dominated by Ann Arbor, the home of Esch and Wes Vivian, his Democratic predecessor elected in the 1964 Johnson landslide...

...The campaign taught me a great deal about politics I hadn’t learned at Congressional Quarterly, sitting at a typewriter in Washington and trying to keep up with 435 congressional districts from newspaper clips...

...Our getoutthe-vote effort in Ann Arbor was hampered by the difficulty of getting students without cars to brave the rain and go to the polls...

...Broadcast twice, but not widely publicized, the wellintentioned program was little watched, partially because the weak signal does not reach the entire Second District...

...There is no content to “pressing the flesh” outside of a factory gate, just the hope that the contact might ring a bell when the worker enters the voting booth...

...The Snake-Charmer Vote My speech to the assembled chiropractors neatly ducked the minor problem that they were militantly opposed to drugs and abortion-the legalization of which were major planks in my program...

...But, far more confusing than the general election, they need media coverage because they are often the races where the voter has to grapple with a multiplicity of relatively unknown candidates, without the comforting crutch of a party lever...

...But redistricting changed the locus of power within the district, counterbalancing the Ann Arbor academic enclave with Livonia, which is keenly attuned to the labordominated and ethnic-oriented politics of the Detroit metropolitan area...

...Yet in many ways there has little else I could do...

...Rather than testing the power of local political organizations, most primaries reinforce David Broder’s dictum that “the party’s over.’’ Part of the problem is simply that “nobody covers the House...

...Developing with the rise of student registration in Ann Arbor, the radical Human Rights Party had elected two student activists to the city council in the April local elections...

...Parades and factory gates call for an entirely different kind of personal campaigning than trying to talk substantively with voters on their front stoops and in front of their local supermarkets...

...Together with a friendly advertising agency we decided to play my Nader ties to the hilt...

...Although the Ann Arbor News ran parts of most of our press releases, it generated only one of its own articles on the campaign...

...In Monroe County perhaps our proudest achievement was carrying the tiny Ohio border town of Erie...

...At the Monroe County Fair I encountered a mother and her fouryearold son, happily holding aloft a red “Stempien To Congress” balloon...

...A camera crew would be arriving in Ann Arbor before the August 8 primary, but first they wanted some background...

...With a concentrated student population, brochure distribution is relatively easy, and working from street lists of Democrats prepared by the local party, we were also able to reach the bulk of the off-campus Ann Arbor vote...

...I had my leaflets and Stempien had red balloons which said, “No Busing/No Abortions/Stempien To Congress...

...Angry homeowners would neither listen to, nor believe, learned discourses on how the doctrine of separation of powers mandates that the busing decision must be left to the courts...

...Bob Fellmuth, director of Ralph Nader’s Congress Project, estimates that in more than half the House districts the only news about an incumbent congressman comes from the legislator himself in the form of newspaper columns and television tapes...

...Starting less than 10 miles west of the Detroit city limits in Livonia, it extends 25 miles further west to Ann Arbor and then spreads south into Monroe County, bordering on Lake Erie and Ohio in the southeast corner of Michigan...

...Standing in a drizzle outside a polling place on primary morning, I handed one of the first voters our printed card which read, “Walter Shapiro/A Nader Raider Can Make A Difference in Congress...

...The woman took the attractively designed blue card, glanced at it, and asked, “What am I supposed to do with this, anyway...

...A moment later I became embarrassed, realizing that nothing I could say in a sentence or two would be likely to affect the woman’s vote...

...Discreetly ignoring the balloon, I introduced myself as a candidate for Congress...

...Ninety minutes of door-to-door campaigning had found five registered voters at home...

...But my support of the Roth decision should not be entirely regarded as a kamikaze gesture, designed to place principle far ahead of practical politics...

...In contrast to Livonia, the city of Monroe, a small Lake Erie port dominated by memorabilia of its only local hero, General Custer, is almost ideal for personal campaigning...

...But election statistics obscure the vast political differences between left-wing college students and antibusing suburbanites...

...And the lingering question-what would it have been like if CBS had shown up...

...I pledged to stand firm against any dilution of national health insurance, and my audience believed that I had vowed to fight for justice for chiropractic medicine...

...On the 11 o’clock news the Saturday before the primary, one of Detroit’s major stations telecast a report on how members of the state legislature were using state printing facilities to produce campaign literature...

...handbill, despite and relentlesslv our unpaid balance, trying to milk four volunteers for B midnight mailing of a well-thumbed address file...

...Canvassing in primaries is as difficult as in general elections, since Michigan is one of those states without party registration...

...A CBS promise to call again before the camera crew arrived ended the conversation...

...In fact, the standard response was, “If you’re not a politician then why are you running for Congress...

...Three of them were women who listened impatiently through locked screen doors...

...Stempien, under attack for being only a moderate on the busing question, vowed that he’d sooner go to jail than obey the Roth decision...

...Facing the Issue Without trying to overplay my martyrdom, I probably picked up more crumpled leaflets from the sidewalk than the Livonia Sanitation Department and reached the sad conclusion that busing is not one of those issues which can be defended in a front yard when the irate homeowner has given you 15 seconds to leave his property...

...The Star System Neither John Kerry, spending more than $100,000 to win a 10-way primary in Boston’s northern suburbs, nor Allard Lowenstein, in his twin primaries against John Rooney in Brooklyn, suffered from a dearth of press coverage...

...It’s hard to tell what impact these leaflets had on voters...

...Catering to my own convictions and my Ann Arbor constituency, I supported busing as “an awkward, but necessary, tool...

...He needn’t have worried-only the highly partisan Michigan Daily ran a follow-up story...

...To counter the image of a Young Democrat toadying up to every area politician, our initial student literature called me the “unpolitician...

...I also feel that the tone of the House is as much determined by the outcome of primaries as it is by the number of seats which switch party every other November...

...Or anyway, that was the theory of my local campaign manager, for personal campaigning had already led me to such unlikely gatherings as a “Jesus freak” rally for high school students...

...Livonia typifies many of the difficulties of politics in the new suburbs...

...This, and the dutiful printing of about one press release per issue was the Livonia Observer’s entire coverage of the campaign...

...Both have populations of slightly more than 100,000...

...We waited until primary day, but the CBS cameras never came...

...I carried Ann Arbor five-to-one, Stempien carried Livonia ten-to-one, He also bested me in UAW-dominated Monroe County by better than three-to-two...

...Television almost played a major role in the campaign...

...Stempien, realizing the explosive potential of a film of his aides covertly running off campaign brochures, closed his campaign office for two days to avoid answering questions before the primary...

...After an encouraging talk to a class of high-school seniors in a Catholic girls’ school in Monroe, a nun active in the local Democratic Party asked me after class, “How do you feel about abortion...

...One side of the leaflet read: “What Difference Would A Nader Raider Make In Congress?/What Difference Did Nader Make In Cars?/ ShapiroeFor Congress...

...It certainly couldn’t lower the standards of health care in this country...

...For Ann Arbor, all that was needed was to produce literature which pinpointed issues that demonstrated that I was the most left-wing of the six candidates...

...On a rainy Sunday, two days before the primary, both Marv Stempien and myself were in Monroe for a county fair parade...

...There is a mindlessness to these parade appearances which is almost maniacally appealing...

...Starting with a base in the student community, and developing a politically more potent following during three months of intensively courting Ann Arbor Democrats, 1 carried the colors of academia in the race...

...No regrets...

...Jill Berkeley, my 22-year-old campaign manager, had been on the phone all morning-setting up coffees, cajoling the printer into one more Walter Shapiro, former political writer for Congressional Quarterly, was a Democratic candidate for Congress in the Michigan primary in August...

...My semantic niceties about “awkward, but necessary, tools” did little to help...

...The first line of escape from Detroit, Livonia developed around the automobile, not the pedestrian...

...The increased student registration and redistricting which replaced rural Republicans with the slightly Democratic Detroit suburb of Livonia have created a district which is close to 55-percent Democratic-on paper...

...On the Tightrope The spectre of a student-oriented, Ann Arbor-based, left-wing third party running their own candidate against me in the general election made it politically unwise, as well as personally distasteful, for me to waffle on any issue-be it busing, abortion, or drugs...

...The difficulties of campaigning in Livonia were significantly increased by a Supreme Court ruling this summer...

...In contrast, most congressional primaries have all the glamour of a Fuller Brush route and are discreetly ignored by both the local media and the majority of the voters...

...Surfacing far too late in the campaign for a press release to be printed, the Saturday-night expos6 may have influenced the baby-sitter vote, but little else...

...I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the girls...

...Student areas had their own peculiar hazards...

...I would be a populist candidate, challenging the powers of the giant corporations, as well as railing against “tax loopholes...

...For weeks we had sensed that this almost-daily ritual didn’t matter, that few voters are swayed by press releases, and that even fewer papers on our press list would print them anyway...

...On such circumstantial ironies, politics is based...

...In another 40 per cent of the districts, coverage is “routine,” generally based on press releases, speeches, and announcements of federal projects...

...And since I lost Livonia by landslide proportions, the Nader imagery apparently didn’t soften the impact of my support of busing...

...Then came the confrontation...

...When you sort out each candidate’s entourage, candidates running for other offices, and organizers of the forum with whom you have already talked repeatedly, you are left with six candidates, spending three hours trying to woo four uncommitted voters...

...With strong antipathy to liberal Democrats and political compromise, they saw a third party as the only route toward rapid political change in the country...

...It was a local radio station-they had just declared me the winner and wanted a victory statement...

...But in marginal districts, for example, there are often sharper differences over the issues between contenders in the Democratic primary than there are between the eventual nominees of the two national parties...

...And when your opponents are making the militancy of their opposition to “forced busing” the touchstone of their campaign, discreetly avoiding the subject in your own campaign literature doesn’t win converts, it merely undermines your credibility...

...Bob Bier, my press secretary, was former editor of the Michigan Daily...

...In many rural districts the congressional race is admittedly the area’s biggest political news, but the local weeklies are generally too small to cover it...

...Livonia v. The Kids On paper, Michigan’s Second District is one of the most evenly split in the country...

...The Detroit papers didn’t come either...

...Consequently, I wasn’t very surprised when he suggested a visit to “Doc” Panza’s Chiropractic Life Institute and hinted that chiropractors were a “hidden power bloc” in Monroe County...

...Anything overtly political, like standing on a streetcorner shaking hands, somehow undermines the cynicism which is the cement that holds campus and community together in a city like Ann Arbor...

...I stood there, almost tongue-tied, having expected the card to serve as a talisman and produce votes...

...We could have used the slogan, “Nader Trusted Him...

...The woman researcher from CBS briskly explained how I, as a 25-yearold congressional candidate, fitted into their plans for a documentary on the youth vote...

...As I shook my head “no,” the little boy let go of the string of his red, helium-filled balloon and said, “I like you better...

...Actually there was a broad spectrum of differences between the candidates...

...Mailings had to be limited, because the cost of postage to reach every voter in the district once was about $8,000-or more than the cost of my entire campaign...

...A fourth was a retired United Auto Workers member who insisted on telling me his incoherent theory about how Leonard Woodcock had arranged the murder of Walter Reuther...

...I found myself telling how I had gone from editing the campus newspaper to working in Washington as a political writer for Congressional Quarterly...

...We carried the absentee voters by better than a ten-to-one margin, but only 30 per cent of the students who requested ballots actually returned them...

...Actually “DOC” Panza was one of the few opponents of busing I won over...

...Cardsharp Campaigning Admittedly there were better moments...

...Midway between suburban and exurban, the Second District forms a misshapen arc around Detroit...

...But races like these form our standard images of what it’s like to run for the House...

...The leaflets also attracted at least a dozen complaints about faulty appliances, which I promised to relay to Nader in Washington...

...This scant coverage is often justified because primaries are theoretically only halfway houses on the road to Congress...

...Lacking even the earthy populism of a storefront, it was two rooms on the second floor of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, office building which had once housed the local John Birch Society...

...Ron Ziegler, a 27-year-old junior high-school teacher who ran our Monroe County campaign, is convinced that my support of the legalization of marijuana cost us votes...

...Actually, the size of that audience was deceptively inflated...

...It was great...

...I am convinced that at the peak of the controversy there was no way for a candidate running for any office -from county commissioner on upto sidestep the issue...

...We had followed this up with a mailing to the 600 people who had voted in the 1970 primary...

...And Lowenstein, like fellow BrooMynite Liz Holtzman, was using the primary to challenge an entrenched, and controversial, incumbent...

...Then we discovered that his reason for coming was to buy several ounces of marijuana...

...Rather than a debate on the issues, they are generally three-legged races among virtual unknowns trying to achieve some district-wide recognition...

...But rather than becoming the spellbinder of the union halls, rather than transfixing PTA meetings with my eloquence, I found that the only new group I could attract to my “emerging populist majority” was a few Monroe County chiropractors...

...I’ve been to Washington,” I told them, “and I’ve seen the powerful lobbies at work...

...Since the best attended of these was held in Livonia and attracted an audience of 45, one could say that other issues did not figure prominently in the campaign...

...And to the feminists, Marvin Stempien was close to “public enemy number one” in the legislature, due to his opposition to abortion legalization and his sorry record on related women’s issues...

...Those that did usually cut them to ribbons and relegated them to something called “Candidate’s Corner...

...My principal opponent was UAW-backed Marvin Stempien, the 38-year-old floor leader of the state House, who played a major role in having Livonia added to the Second District...

...We had to go to them...

...My appearances there were arranged by a small but enthusiastic New Democratic Coalition chapter, perhaps the last one still functioning in Michigan...

...Since there are more than 100,000 dwelling units in the Second District, the logistical problems caused by a real devotion to door-to-door campaigning are vast...

...There is the current political motif of the lonely candidate (fill in Lawton Chiles or Dan Walker) trudging down street after street, going door to door, in an endless quest for votes, vaguely reminiscent of a scene from Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner...

...It was a regional primary...

...What cohesion the community has lies in the shared asphalt of interchangeable parking lots and Burger Chefs...

...After the speech, “Doc” Panza himself came over, fingered my campaign literature, and said, “I disagree with you 100 per cent on drugs, abortion, and busing, but do you need any help on election day...

...What residential campaigning I was able to do in Livonia did not endear me to face-to-face handshaking as a way of confronting controversial issues...

...Jill Berkeley, my campaign manager, was running the operation en route to Northwestern Law School...

...With an active absentee ballot drive designed to maximize the student vote, we were optimistic about an upset victory in the six-way primary, despite its being held in the midst of the sleepy summer term...

...The Livonia forum was the only one actually covered by the press...

...A young reporter from the biweekly Livonia Observer wrote an account so lacking in nuance that it summarized the debate by saying, “There was only a hairsbreadth of difference between Shapiro and Stempien on most issues...

...Power of the Press There are four daily newspapers within the Second District, counting the campus paper, the Michigan Daily...

...The campaign used to illustrate the point was that of Marvin Stempien...

...And I pledge, if elected, to never succumb to pressure from the selfish interests of the AMA...

...It wasn’t total hypocrisy, because given a personal penchant for diversity, I’d be willing to give chiropractors-and snake-charmers and shamans of all breeds-the right to call themselves doctors...

...Yet to discover these other issues, far more relevant to one’s performance in Congress than busing and abortion, you almost had to attend one of the campaign’s six candidate forums...

...This is a marked contrast to the level of coverage in most districts...

...In fact, the closest we came to turning into a national-or even an area-media event was when we heard that a leading political reporter was making a side-trip to Ann Arbor during a visit to Detroit...

...It was in Erie where I had shaken virtually every hand at a parade honoring “Erie’s own,” who had just been elected “Miss Michigan...

...Our volunteer efforts at the polls were counterbalanced by paid UAW workers for Stempien...

...Two came from feuding wings of the Ypsilanti Township party-a pocket of transplanted Southerners who brought their politics with them from Kentucky-and a third was promoted by a small rightwing faction centered in Monroe County...

...Ann Arbor is one of the few communities in the country where there is a strong feminist vote...

...Campaigning outside the gates of a Ford plant, I got some obscene answers to the rhetorical question, “What difference did Nader make in cars...

...What all these visions of the perpetually active candidate neglect to mention is the small percentage of residents who are home during the day in communities like Livonia where families often invest more money in their cars than in their homes...

...I got 28 per cent of the 30,000 votes cast, to the winner’s 32 per cent...

...Largely due to an unrelated internal faction fight, HRP did not run a congressional candidate against Stempien, although he opposed them on almost every major issue...