Minds to change and votes to win
Blame it on jet aircraft, which allows candidates for president to cruise the skies without once looking down except maybe at the bright lights of cities.
Or maybe it’s the televised nature of our politics that’s at fault; more exactly, television markets – the idea being that local televisions stations, say in Pittsburgh, beam a candidate’s appearance in the city to voters outside the city, say in Fayette and Greene counties, and that satisfies the campaign imperative to reach out to as many voters as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Perhaps candidates and the managers of presidential campaigns just forgot how to do it – campaign, that is. Such things happen, you know. Like the guys and gals at ESPN, who sincerely seem to believe that all sports started around 1989, maybe today’s political operatives are working on the assumption that modernity began with Bill Clinton and that anything before 1992 or thereabouts is old hat, outdated, fuddy-duddy.
It’s a fact that presidential campaigns confuse and conflate Pittsburgh with the rest of western Pennsylvania. Making an appearance in a Pittsburgh neighborhood two weeks ago must have seemed astute to Joe Biden; it was a way of reaching out to voters throughout the greater Pittsburgh region without really going there: it was a case of Lawrenceville as stand in.
Here’s a scoop: some of Biden’s most illustrious predecessors did it differently. They went to places Biden and the rest of the president-wannabes would (seemingly) never think of going.
Here is what the great Russell Baker wrote in The New York Times about a campaign swing through western Pennsylvania by John F. Kennedy in 1960:
“The Kennedy barrage (against his Republican opponent Richard Nixon) was laid down as he campaigned by motorcade with speeches in seven towns around Pittsburgh and drives through dozens of small ones along the way.
“The speeches were made at Sharon, New Castle, Beaver Falls, Butler and Kittanning, with appearances tonight in Indiana and Johnstown. Crowds were big and enthusiastic at each stop and streets in towns along the route were so packed that the candidate’s motor caravan was brought to a halt while people pressed around to shake hands or simply touch his.”
Imagine that: a guy who would be president pressing the flesh in places as remote from Pittsburgh as Indiana, Johnstown and Kittanning. And this was the stretch run, in mid-October, of the campaign.
And Kennedy was not just showing up. He deployed some of his finest artillery for the occasion. Baker wrote, “‘What is Mr. Nixon, anyhow?’ (Kennedy) asked as a huge crowd in New Castle screamed its approval.
“Which Nixon would Republicans be voting for? … ‘The practical progressive? the outspoken conservative? the old Nixon? the new Nixon? the modern Republican? the old-fashioned Republican?'”
“It would be helpful … if Mr. Nixon ‘will make up his mind what he is.'”
It was the best of Kennedy the campaigner, and he was miles removed from the city.
Kennedy wasn’t breaking new ground. In October 1932, candidate Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, took a day-long barnstorming tour from Pittsburgh to Wheeling, W.Va., and back again (for an evening speech at Forbes Field).
A remarkable photograph of the Roosevelt motorcade in front of the Washington Country courthouse, in the heart of “little” Washington, shows the candidate waving to a crowd 10 to 12 to 14 rows deep; kids are hanging off the stone buttresses fronting the courthouse to catch a glimpse of the candidate, while men in fedoras and women in plain clothe coats, standing streetside, cheer the candidate, or look on in wonder.
In Claysville – Claysville, mind you! – spectators rushed the Roosevelt car, so excited were they to have the candidate in their midst.
Everywhere crowds hurrahed, “Atta boy, Roosevelt.” In Wheeling someone held a banner aloft, Roosevelt read, ” In Hoover we trusted, now we’re busted.”
This is old stuff, admittedly. The Roosevelt example dates back nearly 100 years. Television and jet travel were years in the future.
Kennedy, too, belongs to an era whose time is past. Heck, 1960 was before the big escalation in Vietnam, before the Voting Rights Act. Color TV was incubating, the Internet … well, the Internet and its offsprings Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were simply unimaginable.
Yet both men may yet serve as examples when it comes to how to campaign for president. They went to the hinterlands. They spoke to the rubes. Men and women candidates 2020, come on out. The campaigning, as FDR and JFK knew, is fine.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.