Talk show host Jerry Springer eyes U.S. Senate
Says he'll look out for 'real people'
Friday, July 11, 2003 Posted: 5:36 PM EDT (2136 GMT)
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Talk show host Jerry Springer Story Tools
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CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- Self-styled populist Jerry Springer, whose TV talk show features adulterous, brawling guests, took a step closer Friday to becoming a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio.
Springer, a 59-year-old former mayor of Cincinnati whose show is filmed in Chicago, filed candidacy papers for the 2004 race with the secretary of the Senate in Washington, but will wait until later this month to make a formal announcement about whether he will run, spokesman Dale Butland said.
Friday's filing will allow Springer to avoid legal challenges to his raising money through a half-hour infomercial he began airing this week on television in several U.S. cities and on his Web site, http://www.runjerryrun.com, Butland said.
For months, the millionaire TV host has been acting like a candidate ready to challenge Republican Sen. George Voinovich, making appearances on nationally televised news shows, currying favor with Ohio party leaders at fund-raising events and hawking T-shirts bearing a critic's barb he will attract new voters who are "slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs and whatnot."
An Ohio poll in March showed Springer with high name recognition among voters but little support.
On his Web site, Springer exhorts the same politically disaffected audience that catapulted former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura into the Minnesota governor's mansion five years ago and that actor Arnold Schwarzenegger presumably would tap if he ran for governor in California.
"I believe that most Americans are being left behind in the political debate and that an unusually powerful elitism is running amok in the media and political elites in Washington -- and don't forget the moneyed special interests and lobbyists. There is a vast political & cultural separation between the elites and reality -- real people," his Web site says.
The London-born, New York-raised Springer was elected as a Democrat to Cincinnati's City Council at age 27 but was driven from office by a sex scandal involving a prostitute. Re-elected just two years later, he became a liberal-minded mayor at 33 of the southern Ohio city, known for its conservative politics.
After a failed bid for Ohio governor in 1982, he became a television reporter and commentator in Cincinnati.
His rambunctious talk show went on the air in 1991 in which a chanting, fist-waving audience and Springer goad chair-throwing, hair-pulling guests to do battle in such entries as "Battlin' Babes!" and "Wives vs. Mistresses."
The syndicated program, at one time the most popular daytime talk show on television and syndicated overseas, toned down the brawling and added bouncers to keep guests separated after complaints about on-air violence.
Its halcyon days have been memorialized in "Jerry Springer The Opera," currently on stage in London.
