Read Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone for Free Online Page B

and their leader was the most popular mayor in the town’s history, a two-term winner now backing his own handpicked successor, a half-bright young lawyer. I flashed the Elks a big smile and a quick V-fingered “victory” sign. Nobody smiled ... but it was hard to know if they realized that their man was already croaked; in a sudden three-way race he had bombed early, when the local Contractors’ Association and all their real estate allies had made the painful decision to abandon Oates, their natural gut-choice, and devote all their weight and leverage to stopping the “hippie candidate,” Joe Edwards. By the weekend before Election Day, it was no longer a three-way campaign ... and by Monday the only question left was how many mean-spirited, Right-bent shitheads could be mustered to vote
against
Joe Edwards.
    Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the town and, in fact,
to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street
. Turn them all into grassy malls where everybody, even freaks, could do whatever’s right. The cops would become trash collectors and maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles, for anybody to use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the view, from any downtown street, of anybody who might want to look up and see the mountains. No more land rapes, no more busts for “flute-playing” or “blocking the sidewalk” ... fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.

    After a savage, fire-sucking campaign we lost by only six (6) votes, out of 1,200. Actually we lost by one (1) vote, but five of our absentee ballots didn’t get here in time—primarily because they were mailed (to places like Mexico and Nepal and Guatemala) five days before the election.
    We came very close to winning control of the town, and that was the crucial difference between our action in Aspen and, say, Norman Mailer’s campaign in New York—which was clearly doomed from the start. At the time of Edwards’ campaign, we were not conscious of any precedent ... and even now, in calm retrospect, the only similar effort that comes to mind is Bob Scheer’s 1966 run for a U.S. Congress seat in Berkeley/Oakland—when he challenged liberal Jeffrey Cohelan and lost by something like 2 percent of the vote. Other than that, most radical attempts to get into electoral politics have been colorful, fore-doomed efforts in the style of the Mailer-Breslin gig.
    This same essential difference is already evident in 1970, with the sudden rash of assaults on various sheriff’s fiefs. Stew Albert got 65,000 votes in Berkeley, running on a neo-hippie platform, but there was never any question of his winning. Another notable exception was David Pierce, a thirty-year-old lawyer who was actually elected mayor of Richmond, California (population 100,000 plus), in 1964. Pierce mustered a huge black ghetto vote—mainly on the basis of his lifestyle and hispromise to “bust Standard Oil.” He served, and in fact ran, the city for three years—but in 1967 he suddenly abandoned everything to move to a monastery in Nepal. He is now in Turkey, en route to Aspen and then California, where he plans to run for governor.
    Another was Oscar Acosta, a Brown Power candidate for sheriff of Los Angeles County, who pulled 110,000 votes out of something like two million.
    Meanwhile in Lawrence, Kansas, George Kimball (defense minister for the local White Panther party) has already won the Democratic primary—running unopposed—but he expects to lose the general election by at least ten to one.
    On the strength of the Edwards showing, I had decided to surpass my pledge and run for sheriff, and when both Kimball and Acosta visited