COLCHESTER, Vt. (AP) – Enough about Hillary and Barack and Rudy and Mitt. What about Dal LaMagna and Michael Skok and Vern Wuensche?

Why doesn’t anyone publicize their campaigns?

That’s what a group of students at St. Michael’s College wants to know. And they’ve established a Web site devoted to the presidential candidates that many voters have never heard of. The site, which went online last week, contains student-written profiles of 27 people who are on the ballot for the Jan. 8 New Hampshire primary, as well as photos and links to their Web sites.

“If the people don’t know everyone who is running, they’re not making an educated vote,” said Mollie Brault-Binaghi, a 21-year-old junior journalism major from Barre. “To keep our democracy strong, everyone should be included.”

The project is the brainchild of St. Michael’s professor David Mindich, who covered the 1992 campaign of Democratic long shot Larry Agran and remains intrigued by White House also-rans.

Twenty-two students in his “Media and American Politics” class participated – each given the name of a candidate in the New Hampshire primary and told to interview them, talk to a family member or friend of the candidate’s and get an independent perspective from a third party.

Altogether, 27 were profiled, in addition to three vice presidential candidates.

“A lot of the students were nervous about calling,” said Mindich. “Many found that it was hard to get them off the phone. In some cases, this was the only press the candidates were going to get.”

The resulting profiles, posted at http://minorcandidates.com, give a glimpse into the campaigns, lives and brains of aspiring presidents. Among them:

• Jack Shepard, a Minnesota sex offender who’s running as a Republican – albeit from Italy, because he can’t return to the United States without risking arrest on a warrant stemming from an unsolved 1979 arson fire at his Minneapolis home.

• Vermin “Love” Supreme, a Republican whose platform includes a plank calling for a mandatory tooth-brushing law. Supreme has run before – in 1992, when his slogan was “Mayor of the Eastern Seaboard,” in 1996, when he campaigned as “Mayor of the lower 48” and in 2000, when he ran for “Emperor of the New Millennium.”

• Caroline P. Killeen, 81, a Democrat who believes the path toward curbing global warming begins with using clotheslines to dry clothes instead of electric dryers.

For the students, it was a lesson in democracy, mass media and fairness.

“Realistically, I’m not sure it’ll have a huge effect,” said Nick Martin, 21, a senior from Litchfield, N.H. “It could just reinforce the fact that a lot of these guys are just weirdos.”

For the candidates, the Web site represents coverage they can’t get elsewhere.

“I signed in on this campaign Sept. 6, the same day as Fred Thompson,” said Cap Fendig, Jr., 53, of St. Simons Island, Ga., a GOP contender in the New Hampshire primary. “Repeatedly since that day, I’ve e-mailed all the national network news and media organizations and have gotten not even the courtesy of a “Thank you, we’re not going to cover you.’

“I knew that entrance into that arena was roped off. I just didn’t realize how tightly and how bad it was roped off,” he said Wednesday.

He welcomed the attention from the students’ Web site, and said he believes it’s responsible for some e-mailed inquiries he has received about his campaign.

However noble, the push for press for fringe candidates won’t affect the race much, in New Hampshire or anywhere else, according to Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University.

But it taps into a feeling shared by voters who resent the media’s “coronation” of certain candidates at the expense of others, he said.

“At some point in a presidential primary campaign, attention turns to the overlooked and forgotten. I think it’s probably part of the American love for the underdog that causes them to try to do a little bit of excavation, to get to the bottom of the heap.

“Students, in particular, find lost cause candidates attractive. The hope is that somehow, out of this undifferentiated heap of losers and people who never quite made it, there will emerge some star who will come along and snatch the lead away from those who the mainstream media has deisgnated as front-runners,” Baker said.

Will the students’ effort help the candidates?

“They’re beyond help,” said Baker. “This is the Intensive Care Unit of American politics.”

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On the Web:

Minor Candidates: http://minorcandidates.com

AP-ES-12-19-07 1701EST