Vermin Supreme is a meme, according to his music video for his song “I Am a Meme”, which I am watching on my office computer while talking on the phone to Vermin Supreme, who says he is in a “secure, undisclosed location.”

“Where did you get that pony?” I ask.

“That pony belongs to a friend,” Supreme replies. “He let me use it.”

“You have a friend who will lend you a pony? That is totally awesome.”

“Get that lyric?” Supreme asks, repeating it for emphasis: “I will be gone like yesterday’s trash, but here I am—in the pan I flash.” He laughs.

The Democratic candidate for president of the United States has an honest, hearty laugh. He amuses himself with his own absurdity, which is refreshing during this particular campaign season. In 2012, Republicans are seriously asking whether former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who collects $57,000 every day of the year for doing no work at all, might be too rich for the presidency. As such, they are actively contemplating electing a man so hilariously megalomaniacal and demonstrably venal that sincere attempts at parody seem merely to prefigure his actual views. Supreme has long advocated waterboarding schoolchildren as part of his platform. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, by contrast, speaking at Harvard in November, declared this nation’s child labor laws “truly stupid” and proposed that unionized school janitors be dismissed wholesale and replaced by poor children in order to instill in them a proper work ethic. He later reassured voters that he was not advocating that children work in coal mines.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Supreme continued to promise that his longtime push for mandatory tooth-brushing laws has nothing to do with “secret dental police kicking down your door at 3 a.m. to make sure you’ve brushed” and is, furthermore, absolutely “not about DNA gene splicing to create a race of winged monkeys to act as tooth fairies.”

Thing is, Supreme has been saying these things for decades. Far from a flash in the pan, he has been a fringe political mainstay since 1992, when he first hit the road campaigning to become mayor of the United States of America. His campaign paraphernalia was left over from an early run for mayor of Baltimore.

Even if you don’t remember him from his days here, you may have heard mention of Vermin Supreme around election time. He is the “friendly fascist” promising to “do something about the weather,” to harness “the awesome power of zombies” to create clean energy, and to award every American a free pony. Like you, Supreme is weary of these incompetent would-be tyrants; he commands that you upgrade to a professional before it’s too late.

He’s the guy who campaigns in the New Hampshire presidential primary every four years wearing a boot on his head. Vote for him or he will hunt you down.

In the past 25 years, Supreme’s satire has occupied the ever narrowing cultural (and physical) space between the police and the candidates. If you go to New Hampshire during election season you can see it up close: the throngs of ordinary flag-wavers on one side of a rope or barricade, the line of dark-suited, square-jawed men with earpieces, and then the Major Candidate—Bill Clinton, say, or Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, whose security goons jostled Vermin Supreme four years ago as he offered the candidate the Supreme compliment of a free clown nose. As the authorities have become less tolerant of freelance improvisational mockery, the candidates—particularly, though not exclusively, those on the Republican side—have taken positions that are ever more difficult to parody.

“I was a little bit ahead of my time,” Supreme says. “The PATRIOT Act caught up to the mandatory tooth-brushing law.”

Supreme’s breakout move this election cycle was “glitter bombing” Operation Rescue founder and fellow Democratic presidential contender Randall Terry at the “lesser-known” candidates’ debate at New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College on Dec. 19, 2011. “One more thing—Jesus told me to turn Randall Terry gay,” Supreme announces in a C-SPAN video of the event that went viral. He leaves his seat and wafts handfuls of glitter on the resolutely anti-gay, anti-abortion activist, who sits dispassionately while Supreme whoops with glee and the panel’s moderators vocally disapprove.

As Supreme’s antics have gotten ever wider distribution via the internet this time around, this year marked a sort of watershed for his political profile. Supreme’s own campaign posts on YouTube (see: “I Am a Meme”) were re-edited and mashed up by the Songify people with some classic Newt Gingrichisms, resulting in “Get Money, Turn Gay”, which, as of Jan. 30, had been viewed more than 1,143,130 times.

“The whole meme thing took me by surprise,” Supreme says. “I was not able to take full advantage of it.”

Very much in on his own joke, Supreme is anything but indifferent to his public image, as well as the marketing opportunities it represents.

“They released their video three days after I released mine,” Supreme fumes. “They steamrolled me with my own fucking material. Fuckers!”

> Email Edward Ericson Jr.