Stern message: radio's bad boy holds a funhouse mirror up to politics - Howard Stern

Reason, July, 1994 by Nick Gillespie

"FOR ANY OF YOU WHO HAD doubts about me," Manhattan-based radio personality Howard Stern assured an unsettled convention crowd as he accepted the New York Libertarian Party's nomination for governor, "I am dead serious about running. I'm in this to win." As if to underscore the point, two scantily clad women--one of whom has claimed on Stern's radio show to have had sex with space aliens--danced on the dais in triumph.

Stern's three-plank platform--reinstating the death penalty, staggering tolls to reduce traffic congestion, and doing all road repairs at night--and his promise to step down immediately upon achieving those goals had carried the day.

"As I look out on this shining crowd and see all your beautiful faces," continued Candidate Stern, basking in the glow of his landslide victory, "I have only one thing to say: It's amazing they let you people vote."

Some longtime party members, however, were not amused by Stern's high-profile high jinks, claiming that the self-proclaimed "King of All Media" was disrupting a serious undertaking. It is unlikely, however, that the public perception of the Libertarian Party--often limited to such spectacles as the California branch's decision to run a former prostitute for lieutenant governor--can be profoundly hurt by the association with Stern.

Disgruntled party members, along with nay-sayers in the general public, are failing to appreciate the ironic genius of Stern's campaign. He is not in any way sullying a pristine process. He is merely injecting intentional parody into an electoral process that has gotten progressively more ridiculous over the years. In a country where the president's underwear is a focus of national discussion and cartoon characters prompt congressional hearings, Stern, who has suggested filling potholes with the corpses of executed murderers, seems a paragon of reason.

IT IS PRECISELY STERN'S FLAIR FOR UNDERcutting pomposity and satirizing over-seriousness that drives his immense popularity: His morning radio show is broadcast nationwide to somewhere between 4 million and 16 million listeners of 15 stations; his "memoir," Private Parts, has sold well over a million copies in hard-cover; and his New Year's Eve special was the most successful event ever aired on pay-per-view, generating more than $15 million in revenue.

The best bits of his shtick match an uncanny sense of the absurd with an unbending dedication to irreverence. Highlights of a career known for outrageousness include having his all-too-aptly-named roving correspondent Stuttering John Melendez ask Gennifer Flowers whether Bill Clinton practiced safe sex, appearing at the MTV Music Awards as the flatulent superhero "Fartman" (and managing to disgust a rock-and-roll crowd that prides itself on its own impiety), and hosting the cable-televised Miss Howard Stern Beauty Pageant, a dead-on parody of beauty contests featuring a "talent" segment in which semi-nude contestants ate live bugs, impersonated Al Pacino, and performed "breast-puppet theater" (don't ask). True, Stern is not for all tastes. But then, neither are anchovies.

The parodic elements of Stern's gubernatorial campaign could be fully appreciated at the L.P. convention. Instead of trusting his nominating speech to a silver-tongued orator type, he gave the nod to a profoundly speech-impeded guest on his radio show, Fred "The Elephant Boy" Schreiber, whose mush-mouthed proclamations were unintelligible to the audience. Seconding the nomination fell to Kenneth Keith Kallenbach, best known for once attempting to blow smoke through his eyes on Stern's lamentably short-lived late-night TV show and vomiting instead. Kallenbach seemed less interested in the nominating process per se than in sharing personal thoughts with the crowd. After nominating Stern, he produced a large rubber phallus and repeatedly asked the incredulous audience, "Hey, who wants to see my dildo, who wants to see my dildo?"

The victory celebration was sealed by a rousing rendition of Stern's perfectly tuneless campaign song, "Howard Stern For Governor," which goes something like this: "Howard Stern for Governor, Howard Stern for Governor, for Governor of New York/He wants justice, he's a Libertarian, he is a great American/Howard Stern can win the election from the Democrats or from the Republicans." Would that this scene could have taken place at a major party convention.

OTHER ELEMENTS OF STERN'S ONGOING campaign are perhaps subtler, but no less funny. His campaign slogan, "A Volt for Every Vote," is as catchy as "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" and as winning as "I Like Ike." After the convention on his radio show, Stern called up his hand-picked candidate for lieutenant governor, former Rockland County legislator Stan Dworkin, to discuss a much-needed makeover. In particular, Stern worried that Dworkin's ill-fitting suit and "helmet of hair" were not particularly photogenic. Besides increasing the political chances of the ticket, Stern figured the makeover would help Dworkin get laid, if only by his wife of 20-plus years.