Stephanie Kennedy Sailor is running against Jesse Jackson Jr. for the Second District congressional seat, but she won’t be making any speeches, shaking any hands, or kissing a single baby. She’s running her campaign almost entirely on the Internet from her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Sailor’s also in favor of school choice. She promises to use zero dollars on her run and asks that any donations be made instead to the Jessica Fund, a scholarship program she’s set up and named after her opponent’s daughter. “Stephanie Kennedy Sailor created The Jessica Fund to help kids bypass failed government-run schools so they can have access to a private, competitive education, just like Jessica,” her Web site says. When the election’s over Sailor plans to hold an essay contest in which applicants will explain why they’d like to go to private school, then distribute any money raised to the winners.
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But Sailor’s problems don’t stop there. “I have many medical conditions,” she says. “I have severe osteoarthritis in both of my feet and a little bit in my right ankle, my right hip. I also have osteoarthritis in my lower back and degenerative disk disease.” These aren’t helped by her asthma, the torn ligaments in her right hip, or other tears in her hip socket. “It’s painful for me to walk even a block,” she says. “I feel like an 80-year-old in a 31-year-old body.” She visits doctors at least every other week, and has plans for more surgeries down the road.
Sailor didn’t know much about the Libertarian Party when she signed up for a free course in gun safety hosted by John Birch from the pro-gun organization Concealed Carry and Matt Beauchamp, then the chair of the Libertarian Party of Chicago, at a shooting range in Elmhurst. But she wound up on the party’s mailing list as a result. In the year following her first course, in the summer of 1999, Sailor got divorced, hosted a cable-access show called Guns, Drugs, and Chicks, and spoke at a gun-rights conference in Arlington, Virginia. Since then she’s become a regular at the Boomershoot, an annual event in Idaho where gun nuts shoot at targets wired with explosives. “It’s very satisfying, like combining fireworks with guns,” she says. “Fun!”
