Bob CollinsYou can hardly tell by the free-for-all, take-all-the-money-you-can-get nature of presidential campaigns, but there actually still is a Federal Election Commision to oversee the rules of campaigning and it’s apparently not happy with all the less-than-serious candidates who have filed in the last week or so.
That sudden outpouring of civic involvement would pretty much track the release of a poll by Public Policy Polling in which a farm boy from Iowa — Deez Nuts — got a 6 percent favorable rating and polled about 9 percent in head-to-head matches with current candidates of the over-35 variety.
How did the kid end up running for president? Simple. He just filed the necessary paperwork with the FEC.
The Center for Public Integrity says all of the candidates are straining resources at the agency, which many people have described for years as “dysfunctional.”
No matter how outrageous or asinine, the FEC must, by law, pay some measure of attention to these White House wannabes and cannot simply ignore them or reject their filings, which may be submitted with relative ease through the agency’s website.
In addition to processing and tracking their initial paperwork, FEC staffers are tasked with sending follow-up letters to registered candidates who submit “missing or inaccurate information,” asking them to correct their mistakes.
“The agency has no authority over and makes no judgement on an individual’s qualifications or eligibility to run for office or obtain ballot access,” FEC spokeswoman Judith Ingram wrote in a statement to the Center for Public Integrity.
How many candidates have filed? As of this afternoon: 828. Here are the ones just since Friday:
There’s good side to the crisis: Seeing otherwise earnest TV reporters say Limberbutt McCubbins.
