As satire on how stinky he says politics has become, the current Libertarian Party nominee for vice president, Jeremy “Spike” Cohen, had run earlier this year with a candidate named Vermin Supreme — who wears a boot as a hat and calls for zombie apocalypse awareness.
Cohen, who was campaigning in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, said he and Vermin tried to reach voters with humor and satire to show that they “get it, that this political discourse that the ‘Republicrats’ [Republicans and Democrats] have created has risen to the level of a joke.”
Vermin — who also promised a free pony for every American and called for time travel research — lost the Libertarian nomination to psychologist Jo Jorgensen. However, the party still chose Vermin running-mate Cohen as Jorgensen’s new vice presidential nominee.
FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, file photo, satirical Democratic presidential candidate Vermin Supreme smiles while holding a giant toothbrush with a boot on his head during a campaign stop at a polling station on primary election day in Londonderry, N.H. The performance artist said he is mounting a write-in campaign as a Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in the Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020, primary election. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
Cohen says their ticket now seeks to stop the joke that politics has become.
“Jo Jorgensen and I are running to change it so that the political discourse in this country isn’t a cynical joke, and that the people are being served and represented by their government,” he said.
Cohen is on a national bus tour that began in Cincinnati and will end in Seattle. He made a stop Tuesday in Salt Lake City.
“I’ll be talking to everyday Utahns about the problems they are facing and how the commonsense Libertarian solutions will fix many of the problems that have been created or made worse by the Republicans or Democrats,” he said.
He says he chose the bus tour “at a time when our opponents are hiding in their bunkers from the American people after imposing their bad policy on them. We’re going out, meeting with those folks, listening to what they have to say, and letting them know that they have another choice from the same two terrible Republicrats that show up every election cycle.”
Cohen says Utahns should vote for Libertarians because Republicans and Democrats have used their long hold on the government “to take our power, our money, our freedom, our ability to make decisions for ourselves. They’ve taken that and given it to themselves and the well-heeled, politically connected billionaire cronies who have bought and paid for them to be in office.”
The Libertarian candidates “seek to dismantle those bad Republicrat policies and put the power and the money and the freedom back in the hands of the American people where it always belonged,” he said.
Cohen, who was raised as a Messianic Jew in Baltimore and later became a web designer, give high praise to Jorgensen.
“Jo is an absolutely brilliant, self-made entrepreneur. She’s a senior lecturer on psychology. She is one of the smartest women I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. “She is someone who is ready to lead from day one — not by taking away control from people, but by giving it back to them.”
Cohen said Jorgensen believes that the American people know better what they want and need than do politicians.
“The best thing that we can do for the American people is to give them their freedom back, give them their money back, give them their power back. And Jo Jorgensen will be the one able to do that.”
He also urges Utahns, as he says, not to waste their votes on the same old promises and policies.
“Wasting your vote is voting for the same candidates, the same politicians, the same parties who have created the problem that we are facing and made them worse every single election cycle,” he said.
Four years ago, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, finished third in the presidential race nationally with 3.3% of the vote. In Utah, Johnson finished fourth with 3.5%.
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