It was a bad week in mid-August. Donald was imploding and Hillary should have been, but Donald kept grabbing the microphone. Nobody was thinking about e-mails because Donald kept spinning out one-liners. The Democrats were simultaneously frightened that he might win, and exulting in the poll numbers that said he never could. The Republicans were furious at lost opportunities, and tearing their hair out over the poll numbers.

On Sunday, August 14th, Billy Joe Barker sat down in front of his computer to compose his weekly commentary for the Tulsa World. The column was called Thank God Its Monday, but this night he simply couldn’t find anything to be thankful for. He had had such high hopes for Trump, but that was only a bitter memory now.

Then inspiration took him by the throat. His fingers flew across the keyboard and he hummed happily as he typed out the doom of a poor schmuck who had never done him any harm.

Please Mr. Custer

If you are old enough, you may remember a novelty song from 1960 called Please Mr. Custer. A trooper was complaining to commanding officer, who happened to be George Armstrong Custer, that he really didn’t want to go with him on his ride out to see what the Indians at the Little Big Horn were up to.

I don’t blame him. Nobody blamed him. It was a good laugh and nobody thought the trooper was unpatriotic for yelling, “I don’t want to go.”

I thought of that trooper today as I remembered my column of August first. It was about Leap Alan Hed, the boy who was born on leap day. Kids teased him so much when he was young about his name, Leap A. Hed, that he got back by counting his age by leap-year birthdays. He told me himself, when I interviewed him over the phone, that it was a piece of silliness he regrets to this day.

I invited him to run for President as a humor candidate, and offered to carry his campaign in this column. He turned me down flat, and I called him the sanest man in America because he really doesn’t want to be President. He doesn’t even want to pretend he wants to be President.

The trooper in the old song said, “I don’t want to go,” and Leap said, “I don’t want to be President.” Fifty-six years apart –- the last two sane men in America.

I wanted to vote for Trump, I really did, but I can’t. Hillary –- never mind. And the outliers, not them either.

On November 8, I am going to write in Leap Alan Hed, the last sane man in America. If you find Donald and Hillary as unpalatable as I do, I invite you to join me.

The piece was picked up by AP and UPI. All across the nation, every anchor with two minutes to spare read part of it on his broadcast. It became a phenomenon.

The reason was clear to those who paid attention. For a year, Donald Trump had given the talking heads something to cover. He was fun; he was colorful. He was safe. Nobody in his or her right mind thought he would ever win anything, and the rest of the Republican candidates were a dreary lot.

Then he won the nomination. The talking heads felt panic, and a massive sense of guilt at the idea of “What have we done?”

By the time relief arrived through Donald’s spiraling self-destruction, they were really tired of him. And they had always been tired of Hillary. Leap was a breath of fresh air. Leap was something different they could talk about, and he was safe. No one could ever take seriously the candidacy of a man who refused to run.

It seemed as safe as betting against Donald had seemed.

How quickly we forget. more Monday

In 2016, after a month and a half of extremely serious writing about race in America. I decided to celebrate with a bit of total nonsense. It didn’t work out the way I had anticipated. For a longer version of that story, look at today’s AWL post.

This is the story of Leap Alan Hed and his unintended write-in bid for the presidency. Think of this as a presidential campaign in an alternate universe.

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Once upon a time – 1952, I think it was — there was a kid who was born on Leap Day.

His Dad was named Alan Hed, and he wanted to give his son the same name, but his wife had a quirky sense of humor. She told the nurse to call the boy Leap, as in Leap Alan Hed. When he was really young, his dad called him Alan and his mother called him Leap, but when he got old enough for school, his kindergarten teacher — who was a mean bastard, anyway  — called him Leap A. Hed. That brought about a sudden parent conference and after that the dad got his way, and the boy tried to forget that his first name was Leap.

People wouldn’t let him forget, and finally he gave in and refused to answer to a Alan any more. He went further. He decided that if he was going to be the boy with all those nicknames:

Leap Boy
Leap Frog
Leap for Cover
Leap Forward
Leap Back
.  .  .  and of course, still, interminably, Leap Ahead  .  .  .

.  .  .  if he was going to have to put up with all those stupid names, he was going to go all the way. I refused to celebrate his birthday on the twenty-eighth of February or the first of March. He only celebrated it on February twenty-ninth.

Worse, he counted his age by birthdays. When he was sixteen, he started putting his age down as four. He spent a lot of time talking to the principal about that, but they finally got tired of the whole business. You might say he out-stubborned them.

He couldn’t out-stubborn the draft board. When they said he was eighteen and he said he was four, they didn’t buy it. He claimed discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. He might have made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but when the 1969 draft lottery was held, February twenty-ninth drew number 285, so the draft board dropped the case.

After that his life calmed down. He never married (he claimed he was too young) and the IRS was indulgent. They figured he would regret his claims when he wasn’t eligible for Social Security until he was 260 years old.

Unfortunately for Leap – or Leap Boy, as the media eventually called him – some joker heard about his claims and put him up for President in 2016. This is the story of that event. more tomorrow

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