“I’d rather be right than president”

Jesse Walker at reason recently touched on the death the Prohibition Party’s presidential candidate Earl Dodge (”presumably of whatever the opposite is of cirrhosis of the liver.”) Dodge lived near me here in the Denver area and ran for every office imaginable. Though I wrote a an entire chapter in my book about teetotaling do-gooders and neo-prohibitionists, I admired Dodge as a decent person and a man with a sense of humor about himself.

Today, in my Denver Post column, I track down his daughter to talk.

For Earl Dodge, persistence never paid off. Ever.

Then again, constantly losing never upset the man, either. And as Dodge was sober his entire life, that’s an accomplishment worth remembering.

An old-school Baptist, imbued with unfaltering moral certitude, Dodge possessed a trait most moralizing politicians lack: a personality.

Dodge, who claimed to have never swallowed a drop of alcohol, died last week after collapsing at Denver International Airport at the age of 74.

He was on his way to sell political memorabilia - a pursuit that put him in his glory, according to family members.

That’s good. Because there wasn’t much glory in politics.

The Massachusetts native had run for the presidency six times on the Prohibition Party ticket. He also campaigned for governor of Colorado a couple of times and ran for the Senate in two states, among many other offices.

How did he typically fare? Let’s just say that the Prohibition Party’s theme song begins “I’d rather be right than president” for a very good reason.

“He ran for office every time he could,” Karen, one of Dodge’s seven children, tells me from the family’s Lakewood home, “until they made election laws such that it became too difficult for him to get on the ballot. And the truth is, most of the people in the party died off and left, and he stopped drawing a salary. So really he kept at it because he believed that alcohol was the root of a lot of society’s troubles.”

Dodge wasn’t an unsympathetic (or unhinged) puritanical Bible-thumper in a Carrie Nation/Pat Robertson sort of way.

The rest.