What Would Thomas Jefferson Have Said?
The National League of Nude Voters said yesterday that it has abandoned efforts to organize an event in which all the presidential candidates would gather in a room and expose their naked rear ends en masse.
“Today is a dark day for the Jeffersonian ideal that an informed citizenry is the bulwark of democracy,” said Gertrude Pimpernel, the NLNV’s executive director.
“We came close, very close, to getting all the campaigns to agree. But in the end, the intransigence of a single candidate brought an end not only to our dream, but to the possibility that American voters would have been given an important new metric to use in the voting booth.”
Pimpernel, who appeared at a news conference fully clothed, refused to identify the “single candidate” who blocked the nude derrière exposure. “They know who they are and that’s all I’m going to say.”
Speculation centered on the Clinton and McCain campaigns.
“It would have to be either Hillary or McCain, since they would probably have the ugliest rear ends in terms of fat, wrinkles, cellulite and other unpleasantries,” said Morton Salcedo, who runs the Internet Web site Political Blather Extreme. “You can be sure it wasn’t Obama, who most likely has a lean, muscular and generally handsome rear end.”
When it announced a plan last summer to organize a naked rear end smackdown, the NLNV said that “if you could line up all the presidential candidates from both parties and display their naked rear ends side by side, voters would be provided with an important tool to help make informed decisions.”
The group envisioned all the candidates with their backs to the audience and fully clothed, except for the exposed rear ends.
Would each candidate have had a sign on his or her back identifying the owner of the derrière?
“We never got that far in our planning,” Pimpernel said. “Probably, they would have been identified, since to keep the rear ends anonymous wouldn’t haven’t been in keeping with Jeffersonian ideals of a fully informed electorate. Anonymous rear ends would have created an orgy of media speculation about ownership.”