Word: pressler
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...empty chairs do not faze Larry Pressler, 37, the smiling Senator from Humboldt, S. Dak. He launches into his pitch as if the room were overflowing. He is running for the Republican presidential nomination, he says, because the other candidates have not been offering specific solutions to the nation's problems. One of his own solutions is the increased use of alcohol as a gasoline supplement...
...Pressler has brought along an inventor named Alexander Hamilton and his homemade "gasohol" still, an odd assemblage of galvanized buckets and tubs and funnels. Hamilton (no kin to the patriot) is a pleasant man with wire-rimmed glasses, mutton-chop whiskers, and the dirty fingernails of a chronic tinkerer. As Pressler watches proudly, Hamilton pours fermented corn mash into his contraption, plugs in an electric cord, and begins adjusting valves. A tiny stream of alcohol squirts into a plastic bucket. The odor of the alcohol mingles in the room with the disquieting scent of dementia...
...Pressler, of course, has absolutely no chance of becoming the next President of the U.S. Yet he at least dresses for the part. He is wearing a nicely cut black pin stripe suit and a black tie with small white polka dots. "It's a very big thing to run for the presidency," says Pressler. "It's a very big country, with all the different states. You need a whole staff just to figure out the rules in the different prima-ries." Pressler has a campaign staff...
Every two years Pressler has been running for public office and winning. Now he is going for the big brass ring of American politics. Says fellow South Dakotan George McGovern: "People will think there is something in the water out there that makes us all want to run for President all the time...
...When Pressler was beginning his candidacy, a reporter asked South Dakota Republican Chairman Dan Parish what he thought. Said Parish: "I can sum it up in three words-ha, ha, ha." But the junior Senator from South Dakota does not think his candidacy is a joke. "When I ran for Congress in 1974,1 started with one volunteer. But I ran an idealistic campaign and stayed with the issues. Some day, and maybe it won't be me, someone will run an idealistic presidential campaign based on the issues...