A Little Respect for the Deceased…

The tiny Prohibition Party, once a significant third party in American politics, nominated little-known Jack Fellure, a retired engineer and Baptist minister from West Virginia, for the nation’s highest office earlier today at its sparsely-attended national convention in Cullman, Alabama.

A newcomer to the dry party, Fellure was nominated on the second ballot, defeating longtime party activist James Hedges of Pennsylvania by a vote of 5-4.

Hedges, who became the first Prohibitionist elected to public office in more than forty years when he was elected tax assessor in tiny Thompson Township in rural Fulton County ten years ago, will serve as the party’s executive secretary.

Party chairman Toby Davis, a pastor who lives in Mississippi, was chosen as Fellure’s vice-presidential running mate.

In addition to listening to guest speakers Steve Gordon, a witty, longtime Libertarian activist and veteran of Bob Barr’s 2008 presidential campaign, and ballot access expert Richard Winger of San Francisco, delegates to the Prohibition Party — the nation’s oldest third-party and third oldest political party — also adopted a platform during their two-day convention.

Having waged several previous campaigns for the Republican nomination, the 79-year-old Fellure, who has long advocated the criminalization of homosexuality, is no stranger to presidential politics.

In 1992, Fellure appeared on the ballot in three states, garnering a woeful 36 votes in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary against President George H. W. Bush and conservative columnist Pat Buchanan, who was then waging a spirited challenge to a sitting president of his own party.

Site of the 2011 Prohibition Party National Convention, the Holiday Inn Express in Cullman, Alabama

Fellure polled 164 votes in the Kansas primary a few months later before garnering a somewhat respectable 6,023 votes in the May 12 Republican presidential primary in his native West Virginia.

When he declared his candidacy earlier that year, Fellure sent the Federal Election Commission a leather-bound Bible with his 17-page platform so they could check his biblical references.

The Bible-thumping minister made similar attempts at the elusive brass ring in 1996 and 2000. The highlight of his frequent campaigns for the presidency probably occurred in 1996 when the late Molly Ivins, tongue planted firmly in cheek, wrote in her nationally-syndicated column that she was “considering a tempting offer” from the Rev. Fellure to manage his presidential campaign in Texas.

Ivins turned the gig down, saying she had yet to detect the “socialistic, Marxist New World Order,” described so vividly by Fellure. “Personally,“ wrote Ivins, “I wish I could get a grip on the New World Order, or even a glimpse of it.  Seems to me we’re heading from a democratic constitutional republic toward a corporate oligarchy.

“But that’s only because I spend so much time watching Congress,” mused Ivins. “I could be missing the Big Picture.”

Fellure had to look for somebody else to manage his campaign in the Lone Star State.

Claiming that the United States was being “destroyed by atheists, Marxists, liberals, queers, liars, draft-dodgers, flag-burners, dope addicts, sex perverts, and anti-Christians,” Fellure faulted the first President Bush for fanning the flames of “international, Satanic, Marxist socialism” and accused his successor, Bill Clinton, of shifting that movement into overdrive.

“You and Hillary are indicative of two serpents coiled around the throne of the nation,” he wrote in a fiery letter to President Clinton, “spitting venom and striking at all that made us one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all, guided by the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

The born again fundamentalist ran for president again in 2004, unsuccessfully challenging President George W. Bush’s bid for a second term.  Skipping the New Hampshire primary that year, Fellure’s name appeared as Bush’s only opposition in the frigid February 3 North Dakota caucus, held a week after voters in the Granite State went to the polls.  He actually received some votes, too.

The Prohibition Party, which twice played the role of spoiler in presidential elections — costing James G. Blaine the White House in 1884 and contributing enormously to Charles Evans Hughes’ narrow Electoral College loss to Woodrow Wilson in 1916 — has competed in every presidential campaign dating back to its founding in 1869.

With Fellure at the top of the ticket, the only thing they’ll be spoiling this time around is their time-honored name.