Missing the fun and the big crowds
Once upon a time, politics was a panoply of color, crowds, and, on occasion, good humor.
Not today. Today’s politics is a grim, self-isolating business.
The men and women running for high public office in the here and now are veiled by social media and TV ads from the eyeball-scrutiny of voters.
And they are not even remotely funny. Intentionally, that is.
If you’ve even casually been following the Georgia Senate race, you probably saw Republican Herschel Walker pull from his suit pocket a badge – it was an honorary one – and deadpan, during a debate with his Democratic rival, Senate incumbent Raphael Warnock, that he was heavy into law enforcement.
The expression on Walker’s face was worthy of comic Buster Keaton, the great silent screen stoic.
Dems will hate hearing this, but Donald Trump is probably the most entertaining politician around. He packs ’em in. One lingers over the possibility that his appeal has more to do with his entertainment value than his conspiratorial rants or tough-guy persona.
Trump’s platform chops were honed on reality TV.
Franklin Roosevelt once told Clark Gable (or it may have been Gary Cooper) that the movie star was the second greatest actor in America. FDR, by his own lights, was No. 1.
For better than a decade Roosevelt was the warm, liberal avuncular figure Americans invited into their homes on radio. He was the same fellow who appeared from time to time in their public squares, all with stunning electoral results.
FDR charmed, he excited. So did his distant cousin, a generation earlier, the progressive, Theodore Roosevelt.
We are approaching the anniversary of the day TR campaigned in Uniontown. The year was 1914, and nothing explains better Roosevelt’s impact on the American voter of his day than to summon one Davy Crockett (no, not that one) who caught a glimpse of the Rough Rider at the B&O railroad station in town. Crockett later said he was either drunk or crazy with excitement as Roosevelt stepped off the train. (Maybe a little of both.)
Always the showman, TR vaulted into his waiting car, a Peerless, which whisked him from Gallatin Avenue to a flag-draped speakers’ platform erected at South and Morgantown streets.
Accompanied there by a band, TR would comment to the crowd that he appreciated two banners that were held aloft along the parade route — “that I was a friend to all people and that I had a big stick for crooks.”
The band and the banners were part of the show. A good time was had by all.
If the music of politics died in Dallas in 1963 (see Mary McGrory and Daniel Patrick Moynihan), we at least have the satisfaction of knowing that it was fun while it lasted.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were classic political theater. The two rivals for a seat in the Senate matched wits and political positions in seven Illinois towns (excluding, interestingly enough, big city Chicago).
They stopped first in Ottawa, Ill., which swelled in size with nearly 15,000 on hand. As Allan Nevins relates, the throng became “one mass of active life” so that “it became difficult to force a passage through the crowd. Horses neighed, drums thudded, fifes squealed, and knots of men bore transparencies aloft.”
The Freeport debate was delayed momentarily. A friend told Lincoln, “You can’t speak yet. Hitt isn’t here yet.” With Douglas coolly smoking a cigar, the dueling pols thus awaited the arrival of the Chicago journalist and shorthand expert, Robert R. Hitt.
The Kennedy campaign in 1960 was notable for its “jumpers”: the girls and women, in cities and villages, who would bounce like jacks-in-a-box as the candidate’s car passed by. To writer Teddy White, the ups and downs were “thoroughly sexy oscillations.”
JFK’s jabs at GOP candidate Dick Nixon were consistently pointed and humorous.
This is not to say that past politics were just fun and games. Far from it. Some 600,000 died in the Civil War under Lincoln; the world came close to blowing itself up during Kennedy’s watch. Both men were assassinated.
A dollop of funny is a good way to make a point and to change minds. Or at least to try. A little live entertainment can’t hurt. People love a good show.
It’s better than mean outrages, exhausting moral imperatives, and packaged, remote-control campaigning.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.