I had no intention of writing this post. But a Canadian poet friend and I got to exchanging views this morning on the temptation of some voters to tune out and drop out, politics having become so depressingly raunchy, what with a fetid madman in realistic competition for the United States presidency — after proving for four years in that office that he is, in fact, mad.
Anyway, my friend mentioned that he remains engaged, which is to say, interested, in both his country's politics and ours (more so in ours). He did, however, confess to tuning out during the Reagan years, and that remark prompted the reply below. After I pressed "send" it occurred to me that those of you interested in more than newspaper coverage of politics might also be interested, from a personal vantage point, in one of its failed strategies and the curious psychology of one its failed candidates. My reply — as unpleasant to my recall as some of its portions are:
I didn't actually "tune out," I drank my way through the Reagan era instead. The decade is largely a blur, although I did manage to keep the same job in broadcasting. (I was cursed with the ability to down a vat of hooch and still walk a straight line and maintain reasonable syntax.) Though on the haze-filled sidelines, I was asked to join a U.S. Senate campaign in 1986. I was leaning toward sobering up and reengaging.
Then I declined, because at the end of a lunch date with two campaign staffers, in which we discussed my job, one of them said, almost sneeringly, that I must wear a suit from then on instead of the corduroy jacket I had on. Some folks would dismiss the remark as insignificant; nothing more than a dress code unveiled. To me it was a huge red flag that said these guys are focused on the wrong things. And that did not bode well for the Senate candidate's campaign.
Sure enough, they fucked it up. I had a friend on the candidate's staff; not one of the two at the lunch. At the time the candidate was running well ahead of her Republican opponent. And yet her staff was running negative ads on him, which is incredibly stupid when your candidate is leading. (It causes the pol to look mean-spirited.) My friend told me he'd become apoplectic in campaign strategy sessions, yelling that they were, in fact, fucking it up. He finally gave up; he left.
The candidate's numbers began dropping — and then she lost, as we both suspected she would. The staffers I had lunched with earlier were but two classic examples of young, self-styled political whizbangs. They are regrettably legion in Democratic politics; they know all, and because they know all, no one can tell them anything. They also fancy themselves as hardened, "tough" and steadfastly aggressive, hence their insistence on going gangland negative precisely when that was the wrong, ill-considered, disastrous strategy at that time.
A year later I did get back in the game when asked to work for a Democratic congressional candidate. I advised when I believed my advice was essential, which it was when I strongly suggested that our moralistic, "Christian" Republican opponent's extramarital affair be, ahem, mentioned repeatedly though off the record to local journalists. My candidate, a retired judge, was a genuine Christian who counter-believed that would have been a below-the-belt punch. My response: Your point being? (At the right time, aggression is not ill-considered.)
Mostly I was the finance guy, the really essential element in politics. I dealt exclusively with PACs, raising a quarter-million dollars — more than $700,000 in today's currency — for a Democratic candidate in one of the country's reddest districts. (Strange it is that I've always done well for others money-wise, but for myself I'm a goobering buffoon.)
As I'm sure you realized, the Democrat's chance of winning in such a crimson congressional district was always skirting on the edge of hopelessness, even if he was, which he was, a moderate-to-conservative Democrat. That aside, here's where psychology came in; not mine and not the staff's — the candidate's.
We did polling, as most every campaign does, and somewhat surprisingly our guy would run within 8 points of the Republican. Even though this was a sterling outcome for any Dem in that district, we had to be careful to keep the judge in the dark about his numbers. Early on, when informed that he was behind, he'd become moody and withdrawn, not exactly the kind of persona one wants on the campaign trail. So later, whenever he'd ask about polling, our answer would be You're doing great! This was enough to satisfy him and maintain his spirits.
The polling had been spot on. Our guy lost by 7 points, well within our surveys' margin of error. After that I returned to broadcasting and started drinking again — a lot. These days I total out with tea; I never really quit drinking, I just lost my taste for it. That however is totally beside the point, or rather points. Should you ever get involved in a political campaign, I hope the above on strategies and psychology served as some sort of primer on what you might encounter.
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