MICHIGAN: DECISION 2008

As part of our guest blogger series, IBP is honored to present Claude Augern, for years the host of NBC's popular Sunday Morning show, "Augern's America". As he did for over twenty years on his talk show, Augern will be seeking the amusing, unsual and eccentric characters that flit around the edges of important American events.



Here in the airport which serves the former trading outpost of Detroit, travelers scatter like the beavers and otters around Lake Michigan. As I traverse the short distance from the baggage claim towards a waiting cab, I notice a weary fellow traveler, who signals me with an upward jerk of his head and a connivial, "S'up."

Sitting on a rumpled dufflebag by the exit, cadging change in a plastic cup, is Hugh Farlin. His one moment of glory came twenty-two years earlier at the Democratic Convention in New York City, when he was shown holding aloft a sign proclaiming, "Grits and Fritz Give Me The Sh**s", Hugh Farlin has traveled to Michigan, following candidate, Mitt Romney. Hugh Farlin believes that the ease with which "Mitt" can be rhymed with a common barnyard expression for feces, gives him his best opportunity to replicate his crowning moment of 1976.

Today, Hugh Farlin informs me that he believes the Romney campaign will breath its last this evening in the Michigan primary and he will forever be denied a second chance at fame. Thus, like many of us, desperate for a final grasp at the brass ring, Hugh Farlin has decided to take a shortcut. He will no longer support Romney. Instead he will try to catch the attention of the nation's media by holding aloft an anti-Romney sign, which reads simply, "S** on Mitt".

I leave Hugh Farlin to his coin cadging and wish him luck.