Robert Kaufman doesn?t expect to win the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, but he hopes to survive it.
Kaufman, the perennial socialist candidate who?s run for office more than a dozen times, told an audience at a Congregation Kol Ami in Annapolis on Sunday that “I need a couple of kidneys” and said he hoped that people would remember him in their wills.
Kaufman, 75, was beaten and stabbed by one of his tenants last June and went into a coma, during which he contracted blood poisoning, sending his kidneys into failure.
“Nobody, including my surgeons, thought I?d pull through,” Kaufman said. He spent 5 1/2 months in four different hospitals, and is now out on the campaign trail.
He gets dialysis three times a week. “It?s a real drag on my life,” Kaufman said.
“People should put their organs in their wills,” he said, but he?s asking people to specifically remember him in their own wills.
Kaufman got 32,000 votes when he ran against Sen. Barbara Mikulski in 2004, and he has previously run for Senate, governor, mayor of Baltimore and the Baltimore City Council.
