We were in for a very long night—waiting for the ballots to be counted by hand—but even before the polls closed we knew we had changed the whole structure of Aspen’s politics. The Old Guard was doomed, the liberals were terrorized, and the Underground had emerged, with terrible suddenness, on a very serious power trip. Throughout the campaign I’d been promising, on the streets and in the bars, that if Edwards won this mayor’s race I would run for sheriff next year (November 1970) ... but it never occurred to me that I would actually have to run; no more than I’d ever seriously believed we could mount a “takeover bid” in Aspen.
But now it was happening. Even Edwards, a skeptic from the start, had said on election eve that he thought we were going to “win big.” When he said it, we were in his office, sorting out xerox copies of the Colorado election laws for our poll-watching teams, and I recall being stunned at his optimism.
“Never in hell,” I said. “If we win at all it’s going to be damn close—like twenty-five votes.” But his comment had jangled me badly. Goddamn! I thought. Maybe we will win . . . and what then?
Finally, at around six thirty, I felt so useless and self-conscious just hanging around the action that I said what the hell, and left. I felt like Dagwood Bumstead pacing back and forth in some comic-strip version of a maternity-ward waiting room. Fuck this, I thought. I’d been awake and moving around like a cannonball for the last fifty hours, and now—with nothing else to confront—I felt the adrenaline sinking. Go home, I thought, eat this mescaline and put on the earphones, get away from this public agony . . .
At the bottom of the long wooden stairway from Craig’s office to the street I paused for a quick look into the Elks Club bar. It was crowded and loud and happy ... a bar full of winners, like always. They had never backed a loser. They were the backbone of Aspen: shop owners, cowboys, firemen, cops, construction workers ... and their leader was the most popular mayor in the town’s history, a two-term winner now backing his own handpicked successor, a half-bright young lawyer. I flashed the Elks a big smile and a quick V-fingered “victory” sign. Nobody smiled ... but it was hard to know if they realized that their man was already croaked; in a sudden three-way race he had bombed early, when the local Contractors’ Association and all their real estate allies had made the painful decision to abandon Oates, their natural gut-choice, and devote all their weight and leverage to stopping the “hippie candidate,” Joe Edwards. By the weekend before Election Day, it was no longer a three-way campaign ... and by Monday the only question left was how many mean-spirited, Right-bent shitheads could be mustered to vote against Joe Edwards.
Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the town and, in fact, to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls where everybody, even freaks, could do whatever’s right. The cops would become trash collectors and maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles, for anybody to use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the view, from any downtown street, of anybody who might want to look up and see the mountains. No more land rapes, no more busts for “flute-playing” or “blocking the sidewalk” ... fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.
After a savage, fire-sucking campaign we lost by only six (6) votes, out of 1,200. Actually we lost by one (1) vote, but five of our absentee ballots didn’t get here in time—primarily because they were mailed (to places like Mexico and Nepal and Guatemala) five days before the election.
We came very close to winning control of the town, and that was the crucial difference between our action in Aspen and, say, Norman Mailer’s campaign in New York—which was clearly doomed from the start. At the time of Edwards’ campaign, we were not conscious of any precedent ... and even now, in calm retrospect, the only similar effort that comes to mind is Bob Scheer’s 1966 run for a U.S. Congress seat in Berkeley/Oakland—when he challenged liberal Jeffrey Cohelan and lost by something like 2 percent of the vote. Other than that, most radical attempts to get into electoral politics have been colorful, fore-doomed efforts in the style of the Mailer-Breslin gig.
This same essential difference is already evident in 1970, with the sudden rash of assaults on various sheriff’s fiefs. Stew Albert got 65,000 votes in Berkeley, running on a neo-hippie platform, but there was never any question of his winning. Another notable exception was David Pierce, a thirty-year-old lawyer who was actually elected mayor of Richmond, California (population 100,000 plus), in 1964. Pierce mustered a huge black ghetto vote—mainly on the basis of his lifestyle and his promise to “bust Standard Oil.” He served, and in fact ran, the city for three years—but in 1967 he suddenly abandoned everything to move to a monastery in Nepal. He is now in Turkey, en route to Aspen and then California, where he plans to run for governor.