PITTSBURGH (Special to the Dispatch.) — Spiro T. Agnew, who ran for vice president on the Fringe ticket last fall, has reacted angrily to media reports of his practice of breaking thumbs to encourage campaign contributions and endorsements.

“The fact is, it worked,” Mr. Agnew told reporters at a press conference in his home at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens. “It was very persuasive. The Fringe Party got endorsements and contributions, sometimes in the form of large wads of cash, from people who never would have supported us otherwise.”

Mr. Agnew called for print and electrical media to publish reports that, he claims, would show the effectiveness of his “enhanced campaign techniques.”

“I find it very disturbing that there seems to be no balance at all from these mumbling media mavens,” Mr. Agnew said. “We hear from all the wailing wobbling wimps who say that thumb-breaking is ‘unethical’ or ‘illegal,’ but nothing from the experts who know how effective it is.”

Warren G. Harding, whose Fringe campaign for president has never been officially suspended, did not release a statement on Mr. Agnew’s remarks. The editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, who was singled out by Mr. Agnew for especial criticism as “that puerile panderer of the press,” released a six-word statement: “It takes one to know one.”

Mr. Agnew says that, in the end, the public should have the chance to weigh the evidence for and against thumb-breaking.

“That’s what democracy is. It’s about making choices. I chose to break thumbs, and I believe history will bear me out when I say that it got me the results I wanted.”

As the polls open this morning, I look out over America (figuratively speaking, as from my mausoleum I can see only an exceedingly small portion of America) and see a land filled with promise. This is the nation whose founders fought for the principle that all men are created equal. This is the land that, a mere 144 years after that glorious foundation, realized that women might be people, too. This is the land that, nearly two centuries after that foundation, began to suspect that skin color might be no barrier to legal equality.

This glorious history fills me with hope.

America will show the world today that she has completed her glorious evolution. She has learned at last that fundamental equality is not overruled by a mere physical difference. She will break down the last barrier, and the living and the dead will be joined in brotherhood.

This is my prophecy and my prayer.

Get out and vote, you lethargic layabouts.

In my first campaign, I promised a return to normalcy, a word of which I was very fond, and which accurately described what I considered to be the great desideratum of American governance at the time.

However, it is obvious that today’s extraordinary challenges demand an extraordinary response. To face the problems besetting us at this time will require, not a return to normalcy, but a full-on campaign of extraordinarity. This is our pledge to America: that Mr. Agnew and I will meet the extraordinary problems of the day with all the extraordinarity required to face them. I think I like that word even better than “normalcy.”