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Saturday, April 02, 2016

The True Story Of A Fake Presidential Candidate

Meet Yetta Bronstein, candidate for president.

At least, she was a presidential candidate — kind of. In the 1960s, a pair of professional pranksters, husband and wife Alan and Jeanne Abel, orchestrated an election-year hoax with Bronstein, a politician as much as she was a fiction.

"Yetta Bronstein lives in the Bronx. She has a boy named Marvin. He plays the drums, badly," recalls Jeanne. "And one day she decides to run for president!"

Bronstein ran as an independent write-in candidate in 1964 and '68, leading a political party known as the Best Party. Her platform included national bingo.

It was Jeanne Abel who would act as Bronstein in interviews with reporters, while Alan stood in as her campaign manager.

"I got a lot of press," Jeanne says. "I only appeared on radio because I was then only in my 20s and I was blond and not a Jewish mother."

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My vote goes to Pat Paulson.