In a stunning political collapse, New York State Democratic candidate for governor, State Comptroller Carl McCall, has withdrawn from the race. He sited recent revelations of letters to companies to which he wrote on government stationery, recommending relatives for jobs with the companies while pointing out the extent of state pension fund shareholdings in those companies.
An emergency session of the New York State Democratic Committee promptly nominated the late governor Alfred E. Smith as its candidate, assuring election officials that scientists at the Cornell Medical School had successfully cloned Smith from DNA extracted from his remains, which were exhumed from his gravesite.
His familiar bulbous nose glowing and his gravely voice intact, Smith told a boisterous crowd in front of City Hall in New York that he was in the race to win. Waving his bowler hat and holding a cigar, Smith shouted:
“What is a u2018Pataki?’ It sounds like some kind of dish, like Veal Pataki!”
He beamed at the cheers of the crowed, booming:
“Let’s look at the record. I have done more dead than George Pataki has done alive.”
“We luv ya’, Al,” a fat, red-faced woman yelled.
“And I love you too, All of you,” Smith said. “March with me all the way to Albany.”
As Smith finished his remarks to wild cheering, the band struck up his famous theme song, “The Sidewalks of New York.” Overwhelmed with nostalgia, Rudolph Giuliani ran up to Smith and embraced him. “Sorry, George,” he apologized, “I’ve gotta go with Al.”
Meanwhile, a news alert reported that in a debate with GOP candidate for United States Senator for New Jersey, Donald R. Forrester, Senator Robert Torricelli’s replacement, 78-year old former senator, Frank R. Lautenberg, who was nominated to replace Torricelli, who quit the race as corruption charges dogged him, collapsed and died while denouncing Forrester as a “nonentity and a tool of the warmongering Bush administration.”
Minutes after Lautenberg’s body was whisked from the t.v. studio, the New Jersey Democratic Committee announced his replacement, Woodrow Wilson. A resident of New Jersey, the late former president also served as the state’s most illustrious governor. Wilson was reported to have remarked when he was assured of the nomination, “We must make the world safe for democracy,”
When asked his opinion of President George W. Bush’s plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein, Wilson quipped, “Better him than me.”
Richard Cummings [send him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author The Pied Piper — Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell, and the forthcoming novel, The Immortalists.
