Presidential candidates Vermin Supreme, left, and Randall Terry

I know that there are a handful of Republican candidates who are getting all the attention these days as we gear up for the 2012 presidential election — folks like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. President Obama doesn’t have any big name Democratic opposition in his bid for re-election, so he’s keeping kind of quiet so far.

But there are some other candidates out there, both Republican and Democratic, who are running for our nation’s highest elected office who haven’t gotten much play in the media. And they showed up in Manchester, N.H., on Monday, Dec. 19, to participate in the New Hampshire Institute of Politics’ “forum for lesser known presidential candidates.” You can read all about it here at ConcordMonitor.com.

Here is what was, for me, the big surprise of the evening: Randall Terry is running for president — as a Democrat!

You remember Randall Terry, right? He founded what was, at one time, the biggest anti-abortion group around, Operation Rescue. He’s the one that suggested in 2009 that the murder of Doctor George Tiller, who performed abortions, was justified. He is also virulently anti-gay and when his adopted son Jamiel came out in 2004, Terry basically disowned him. (Jamiel was killed in a car wreck in Georgia on Nov. 30.)

Well, Terry, who now lives in Purgitsville, W. Va., announced early this year that he would be running for president, as a Democrat believe it or not, and he was one of the candidates at the NHIOP forum last night. His two main campaign issues are, of course, ending abortion and ending gay marriage. “We will never restore the greatness of this nation as long as we are killing our own offspring,” he said at the forum, adding that the “states’ rights” argument is not valid in either case. “There’s some things that are fundamentally evil, like slavery and there is no state right to hold another human being, there is no state right to kill your offspring, there is no state right to have homosexual marriage,” he said.

But Terry is not the only “fringe” candidate who was at the forum. They were all pretty much fringe candidates in one way or another. But the fringiest of them all was probably perpetual candidate Vermin Supreme of Rockport, Mass., who has, according to ConcordMonitor.com, “made a name for himself since 2004 running on a platform of giving a pony to every American and mandatory oral hygiene — ‘strong teeth for a strong America.'”

(Oh, and check out his website, where he lists his campaign priorities as “Dental Hygiene Law,” “Flying Monkey Public Safety Assurance Program” and “Time Travel Research Funding.”

At the Monday night forum, he declared, “I am a tyrant that you should trust, and you should let me run your life because I, too, know what is best for you.”

OK, who wouldn’t want a pony? And who can be against good oral hygiene? And to make it even better, Vermin Supreme goes around wearing a rubber boot on his head like a wizard’s hat, and one of those green toy Hulk fists over his crotch, kind of like a codpiece, I guess. And if THAT’s not enough for you, at the Monday night forum, Vermin threw glitter all over Randall Terry while yelling, “He’s turning gay, he’s turning gay, whoooooo!”

What’s not to love? I mean, when you have serious Republican candidates pledging to do away with judges if they do something they don’t like, voting for a guy who promises everybody a pony doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch, after all.