You're WAY ahead of me :)
He was a Republican who entered the 1980 Presidential race late. The Republicans had a couple of candidates. You may have heard of one: Ronald Reagan (I'm just kidding).
Anderson supported a number of Jimmy Carter's positions and was waaaaaaaay to the left of Reagan. "Run as an independent!" the media said. He ran as an independent. The darling of the press and college students who couldn't articulate a single one of his positions. He was fairly successful as a third-party candidate and a media darling.
I didn't give my actual quote above.
I had two friends who were still undergrads from a southern school visiting me in Boston, where I attended a Well-Known Eastern Business School.
I was giving them a tour of Boston and when we hit Quincy Market there were cameras and lights everywhere, and a national news guy whose name escapes me (ack!). Lots of young people in styrofoam 'straw' hats with Anderson's name on the band, and Anderson t-shirts.
He actually started to interview the young lady out the of three of us about Anderson. She (now Mrs. Scoutmaster; and she says she still has an Anderson button somewhere, because I just asked her) had a southern accent and he asked her she was in Boston. She said she was visiting me (pointing at me) and that I attended a Well-Known Eastern Business School. The interviewer stepped to me, the cameras turned to me, and the interviewer asked me if I had heard John Anderson speak on the undergraduate campus the night before.
I said "John Anderson? I've never heard of him."
About a week later, there was a national special on Anderson, with a segment on how he had to battle name recognition. The evidence? The clip with me. (I caught abuse the next day, trust me.)
For the rest of the campaign, whenever any news station talked about Anderson's problem with name recognition, they pulled the clip with me. I saw myself more times on TV during that campaign than I did in a mirror.
