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Posted
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 4:50 PM
| By
Chadwick Matlin
Our inaugural candidate is Dr. Jack Shepard, a dentist from Minnesota—no, not that Jack Shephard.
He has lived in Rome for the past 25 years but still thinks he's the
Republican who can protect America and bring peace to the Middle East.
Oh, I almost forgot, he's a convicted felon who is wanted on arson
charges back home.
Shepard left the country
in 1982, after serving eight months in jail for possessing narcotics—he
says he was permitted to have them because of a license obtained for
his dentistry practice*—and
after Minnesota authorities claimed he burned down his house and
dentistry office. Since moving to Italy, he says he routinely speaks
with high-level Syrian, Iranian, and Hamas officials to assist
America's foreign-policy efforts. He believes he is still serving in
the armed forces at the age of 60 because his ID card
doesn't have an expiration date. He claims he can't come home because
he's still serving his country abroad. When I asked for specifics, he
said that was all he was allowed to tell me.
If Shepard's
platform has a fulcrum, it's full diplomacy with leaders in the Middle
East, especially Iran. When I asked him about Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad's aggressive anti-Israel comments, he blamed them on a
mistranslation. He would section off Palestine within Israel (he
offered no specifics) and veto any pro-Israel bill that came across his
desk. He also offered this: "The votes that I get will be votes from
peace people," he said, "I'm curious how many people are actually after
a person who really has dialogue with the evil of axis, as it's
called." That was not a typo.
If Shepard sounds like he's a
peace-loving Democrat, that's because he used to be. He became a
"born-again Republican" in 2000 after a convoluted episode involving racial bias. Nevertheless, he wants the Rev. Jesse Jackson to be his ambassador to the United Nations.
He
wouldn't tell me much about his domestic policy despite specific
questions on health care, abortion, and gay rights. But he did say he
wanted to reform the prison system, using personal examples from his
own incarceration as evidence of its shortcomings.
To run for
president, all Shepard had to do was send $1,000 check to New
Hampshire's secretary of state and sign some papers saying he wanted to
run. In South Carolina, you have to pony up $2,500 or 3,000 signatures
to get on the primary ballot. Nobody does a background check, and he
can't get pulled off the ballot in New Hampshire unless somebody files
a complaint. This means Shepard will almost certainly remain a
diplomatic vigilante.
Even if he were to garner a delegate, it's
doubtful he'd be able to attend the GOP national convention in
Minnesota, since that's the state where he's wanted for arson. Ever the
optimist, Shepard ended an e-mail he sent me with this: "It would be
the greatest and happiness moment of my life to return to St. Paul,
Minnesota the city of my birth to get the Republican Nomination for
President there." After all, aren't all politicians just talkative
people looking for a little redemption?
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