Movie break: A “narrow fellow in the political grass”* meets his match: Frost/Nixon (2008)

A dramatization of TV interviews and their background brings out the rather gripping backstory of a media event that also, in forgiving retrospect, amounts to history

A real-life tale shows how cultural “racehorses” were given respect in an analog age, before the Internet came with its capacity to make worthy-enough persons into roadkill

What a long and bizarre downfall [for Nixon] it had been. If you had tried to tell me that there would be more than 40 members of this administration convicted of felonies, that the president himself would be the ringleader of a widespread criminal conspiracy directed from the Oval Office, that there would be CIA operatives tapping phones and breaking into houses, that there would be hush money paid and a guy using his wife’s dishwashing gloves so there wouldn’t be any prints on the money, I’d have said that the odds were better of seeing Fidel Castro riding through the Capitol Rotunda on a giraffe.

—Dan Rather, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012), p. 144; I recommend this readable memoir, by CBS’s main evening-news anchorman from 1981 to 2005, if you’re interested in national-level U.S. journalism or the history of the U.S. for the past 50 years

*Alludes to an Emily Dickinson poem—see at end of this entry.

Subsections below:

The historical phenomenon of the interviews

The Frost/Nixon play comes to shape the legacy of the interviews; the movie goes further

Associates of the principal characters often stand out, in their seize-the-day roles

Langella and Sheen in superb performances

Frost as the film’s education-undergoing pointman

How Frost as the fun-loving flirt finally comes to terms with the project, after Nix with night thoughts spills bile on the phone, complete with heavy-duty curse

A little too much Austin Powers here?

[For an entry reviewing the film All the President’s Men (1976), see here. Edits 10/30/13.]

Richard Nixon still matters today because, as plenty of now-aged baby boomers will tell you, he had a remarkably corrupt administration, he was the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and he was almost impeached by Congress (i.e., could have been subjected there to a trial, with possible conviction for felonies).

Moreover, his handling of the second half of the Vietnam War has been subject to intense criticism by some (the Frost/Nixon film has character James Reston point out more than a million deaths from the Vietnamese and Cambodian populations); and Nixon was at best an odd character who not only showed his derision-drawing side during his presidential tenure (1969-74), but showed it at all sorts of points in the prior portion of his career, starting with the Alger Hiss case of ~1948 and the early-1950s “Checkers speech,” and on through the years. (For a biographical film I suggest with reservations, see my two-part review on Oliver Stone’s Nixon [1995].)

Watergate still stands as sort of “exemplar” of political corruption. The Iran-contra affair of 1986-87, whose investigation in the press I followed with as much deep interest as older people had regarding Watergate in the early ’70s, directly concerned more important matters of international policy than had Watergate. (On Iran-contra, articles by historian Theodore Draper in The New York Review of Books were fine, thoughtfully probing reviews of proceeding transcripts and the like in 1987.)

Meanwhile, the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998, which led to the first actual impeachment of a president since the 1800s, certainly captivated popular attention with the media coverage, but to me it was (at the hands of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and Congress) a farce, with President Bill Clinton’s alleged wrongdoing unworthy of the Congress to dignify with a trial. For the last 50 or so years, the only presidential scandal—which seems (as a matter of historical pattern within the past 40 years) to turn up in the second term of a reelected president’s period of service—that so redolently showed a culture of rampant and felony-level corruption within an administration was Watergate.

The historical phenomenon of the interviews

I remember when the interviews of Richard Nixon by David Frost in May 1977 were on television. Our TV at home had been on the fritz for some time, and it was fixed (I think) just before these interviews aired, which seemed fortuitous. There was some anticipatory ballyhoo in the media about these interviews (such as in the major newsmagazines); Nixon, whose disgrace was still fresh in people’s minds, was expected now to be faced—presumably with tough questions—for the first chance of anyone’s holding him to some kind of account for his most fundamental malfeasance in over two years. Typical of him, most generally he had evaded prosecution (and President Ford had pardoned him); detail-wise, so much of his addressing questions, before August 1974, about the Watergate break-in and the prodigious consequences seemed to be limited to handling that was evasive in one way or another, done under cover of technicalities, or ostensibly addressed by his close administration advisors’ being led to resign like fall guys. Would “the man at the top” come clean, and/or show some contrition, about Watergate? It was “must-see TV” at a time when that concept wasn’t so familiar yet.

The fact that it was David Frost doing the interviewing, as I recall, was a bit novel, but not too bizarre to my young mind. I was 15 by the time this program aired, and I had heard of Frost as, most of all to my naïve mind, a talk show host. What I clearly enough remember is that it seemed a little odd Frost was the one in the seat of the American TV inquisitor. If I draw inferences with hindsight, Frost did not have the air of a tough, “ready-to-grill-the-interviewee” news reporter; but it’s possible I thought he was OK because he was some kind of fairly well-rounded TV personality in terms of the range of things he did. And maybe we naifs took him as acceptable because we laypeople put faith in the TV networks and producers, in line with how they were held in regard as having usually “unimpeachable judgment” in filling their public-service roles, in the days when there were mainly three networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) covering world-historical issues of moment like the nuclear arms race, and that was it.

But more importantly, since this was Nixon being grilled, I think just about anyone in the possible audience wouldn’t have felt the interviews would comprise a puff piece, especially since they went on over several broadcasts. It was ostensibly a big production, focusing on a person who couldn’t help but be regarded with sober assessment, so how could the interviews help but have some depth and a sense of serious responsibility?

There were comments from viewers after the interviews, such as on when Nixon got confronted about Watergate. A teacher I had for a European history class in ninth grade that school year (1976-77)—Arthur DiBenedetto, age about 25 at the time—echoed a sentiment that I think many had, mocking Nixon’s claim in the interviews, “It’s OK when the president does it” (which is I think how “Mr. D” phrased it). This sentence stands for one rough summary of what many people took away from the interviews’ evidence of Nixon’s at-least-somewhat unapologetic demeanor and arguments. In fact, this idea in particular was what rankled people the most: it showed he was the same old Nixon, and in some sense he hadn’t been in these interviews—and may not ever be—brought to account for his crimes.

That is, before the Frost interviews, Nixon never really said “I’m sorry” for the trouble he had caused (as weak as this gesture still might have been). Then, in the interviews, he merely said mistakes were made, and he had “let the American people down.” This reflects what the historical stakes, as perceived, were. Meanwhile, until that time, no one before David Frost had had the opportunity to give a fairly rigorous set of interviews to Nixon, and no one had gone to the effort to try to get Nixon to be held to account on TV so that people might get some semblance of “closure” about Watergate. Net result: The audience was not-trivially disappointed by the interviews, I think; but Frost’s effort was better than not doing it at all, and the interviews certainly made for high-ratings TV for a week or two that spring.

I think it’s fair to say that over the years the interviews took on a stature as being more noble and effective than they were regarded as immediately afterward. When David Frost died this year, one newspaper headlined the obit as if the Nixon interviews were where Nixon had apologized, but I clearly remember that that fact hadn’t entirely been achieved, and this was widely enough understood in 1977. But when you figure there was no other chance afterward, until Nixon died in 1994, to “give [him] the trial he never had,” as is said by the Frost/Nixon character of James Reston, Jr., played vividly by Sam Rockwell in the film, these interviews would (by default) have to stand for that trial, and they took on historical significance for that reason.

The Frost/Nixon play comes to shape the legacy of the interviews; the movie goes further

When I heard about the play Frost/Nixon in the early 2000s or so (as I’d later find, both the stage play and the screenplay were written by Peter Morgan), I felt it was a somewhat derivative thing to do about something that in 1977 had been a little anticlimactic. The idea of such an adaptation conveyed, to me, some of the “catch-as-catch-can” quality of some Broadway efforts, similar to something from years ago called Nixon in China (directed by Peter Sellars), where Nixon’s visit to that country was a central image and piece of drama of the play. It goes to show that Nixon’s novel, fulsome career is ripe for stories of one kind or another—books, plays, movies—so that even if the artistic efforts are a little second-rate, you still have some real-life drama to draw from, whether you hate(d) Nixon, admire(d) him, or something in between, despite whatever the point of the art was.

All this is to preface my assessment that the film Frost/Nixon, which incidentally gives me a chance to cover a film directed by the prolific Ron Howard, is a fine work, and it is not only adaptable as part of a history-class effort to show what Nixon was about as a historical figure and as a source of pungent meaning in political culture even today. I think the movie, as could be true of the play, might overstate how the interviews were regarded by people in 1977; but in terms of the facts of the chanciness of how a historical TV event was arranged, and what was more ideally at stake, the film is incisive and suspenseful, with a lot of vivid details, and it has enough depth to reward multiple viewings. And Frank Langella gives an excellent performance as Nixon, perhaps one of the very best you’ll see of that fellow in any film. Michael Sheen as Frost is also quite good, a sharp figure when at his best.

Actually, this film benefits from the fact that both Langella and Sheen had performed their roles on the stage. They so much had their characters under their skin that they brought excellent performances to the screen. Since their characters were the “men of the hour” in this story anyway, that excuses, or justifies, how their performances seem more solid and sharp in details, than, arguably, those of the other actors, who have more of the “fleetingly” incisive performances of movie actors stepping up to the plate on an emergent chance and being “on point” largely because of the sheer opportunity they had for doing their significant-enough jobs, which in a sense was also true of the real people they played.

In other words, Nixon’s side men, as was true of Frost’s, and other associated people such as TV production technicians, a literary agent, and so on, “stepped up to the plate” to “be themselves” only (or in good part) because of what this interview meant in a “nexus in time,” while the “nexus” came off the heavily-demanded-on backs of Nixon and Frost. But Nixon and Frost, as the movie conveys, were more thoroughly grounded in what fate these interviews presented; they had their grander reputations and futures at stake here, thus they had to give their work at hand whatever they had as men to make this encounter work. Thus it was quite fitting that Langella and Sheen’s performances showed some fullness of whatever their men had in them, and the actors meet this goal.

(How times have changed; all this seems like professional men—“seasoned handlers”—from various political dispositions could come together, generally peaceably, to see how two well-treated racehorses would do in a tight race. Nowadays, control of “media exposure,” especially on the Internet [where control is much harder to effect], means that “people of moment” are less like respected racehorses, and more like rabbits or other small game that can be smashed into roadkill on a highway.)

The result is a film that as director Howard says in DVD commentary is a sort of “a thinking person’s Rocky.” The metaphor that this is a sort of boxing match with multiple rounds isn’t too hokey. And even if some little details are fabricated for the story, the film shows that, indeed, the Nixon/Frost interviews were a sort of boxing match—one would think more formidable for the aging Nixon than for Frost; and this naturally brings suspense to the story, and adds to the chances for spicy character turns by the “corner men,” as Howard calls them—the helpers of the boxers who, after a round has ended, tend passionately to them when the boxers retreat to the corner to get washed off and a chance to spit.

Associates of the principal characters often stand out, in their seize-the-day roles

In this capacity, on Nixon’s side, Kevin Bacon as Jack Brennan, the ex-Marine chief of staff at Nixon’s San Clemente redoubt, is especially vivid and effective. Bacon generally looks like someone attempted to carve a handsome face out of oak and had trouble; and here with economical shows of emotion, he does a good, etched job as Nixon’s tough protector, both having an H.R. Haldeman flavor of a hard-ass confidant and showing some glimmers of humanity amid his more routine tactics, as he wheels through a range of responses to the promising-yet-dangerous situation his man is in. Other characters who are present as Nixon’s advisors/cheerleading team, including a blonde woman playing Diane Sawyer (who later in real life became a TV reporter and anchor), seem like ghosts by comparison.

Frost’s “corner men” are a motley crew, but vivid in their own ways:

Matthew Macfayden plays his British producer John Birt, whom Frost tapped to help him in this project as he aimed to make media-event hay out of a “big fish.” Birt more or less protects his man amid the Americans, and is adequate as the advisor who most reflects Frost’s home (Commonwealth) culture.

Oliver Platt plays Bob Zelnick, identified as a bureau chief of ABC News, who brings some appropriate street smarts and Nixon-critical moxie from the TV journalism world, and Rockwell as Reston brings a sharp presence from the analytical cloisters of the academic world. Reston, per the film, had written books on Nixon and abuses of power already. Zelnick and Reston are in a producer/advisor role, are from the U.S., and are ready to provide (from ad hoc research) all the factual and historical metes and bounds within which (in their opinions and with their sense of obvious relevance, as Americans indignant at their former President) Frost can and should zero in on Nixon when the interviews are taped.

Rockwell through numerous films has given colorful performances (such as in Matchstick Men [2003], on which I did a two-part review last summer [July 31 and August 3, 2012]; by the way, the Frost/Nixon musical score is done by Hans Zimmer, who also scored MM, and I get a “flashback” sense of MM with some of Zimmer’s occasional repeating-figure mood music and Rockwell kibbitzing around in Frost/Nixon). Here Rockwell brings the most potent show of youthful indignation to the “representatives of schools of rigorously critical thought on Nixon” who avidly contribute to the production of the interview-bout. His turn of Reston’s initial inclination not to shake Nixon’s hand when the old fellow turns up on set with a certain courteous equanimity, and to stare at him with a kind of elegantly indignant air of being appalled (while also being thrown off his balance), symbolizes the sort of stark disapproval that the young who in 1977 found Nixon to be decidedly outré would have exhibited, even if it would have been rude in the context, by more conservative moral standards.

In terms of the more trivial style points of his character, Rockwell says in DVD commentary that he thrives in 1970s depictions (or such); in fact, he was born in 1968 and would have been a young kid through much of the ’70s. I wasn’t much older then, but I remember the personal and social styles from that time, and I think if you really want a truly ’70s-flavor “hip firebrand” type, you would have to look at more hippieish models like Dennis Hopper or other shaggy and somewhat loopy types from films of that time. But today’s audiences best identify with what is stipulated as their ultra-hip stand-ins when the latter are more like the modern version; and as an excellent example today of a restlessly hip type, Rockwell is as good as anyone to play “sharp-eyed youth” stepping up to the feverish edge of the ring where Nixon may get his due. Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper, even if give sci-fi style “time travel” from his Apocalypse Now role to today, in order to play Reston, would seem quite dated and odd to modern viewers.

Langella and Sheen in superb performances

Langella in his portrayal of Nixon, as you’ve probably heard, is excellent. (He got a Tony for his stage role.) Nixon is such an odd character that not only have multiple actors tackled him in high-profile projects (see, e.g., Oliver Stone’s Nixon films, where Anthony Hopkins tackles him meritoriously, but [it may be argued] gives a slightly campy take; and maybe Hopkins was inclined to perform along these lines because of how the film as a whole slants toward camp, whether intentionally at director Stone’s hand or not). Actually, Nixon has been imitated by many people of all stations in life (including myself—showing how “indiscriminately” widespread this has been), with Nix’s manner that marries to his more dignified side a pretentiousness, a rather cardboard seriousness, neurotic mannerisms, and a certain importunate darkness, all in one package.

Comedian Rich Little did him for years, when Nixon was still alive. You could feel that to portray such a character well would be like trying to imitate the painting the Mona Lisa: there’s only one of that ilk, so how imitate him? But then, if you just watched the TV clips and sound bites of Nixon himself, for some people their reaction might be as if to a rather spasm-inducing eternal object of scorn and dismissal, or like that of a cat to a natural enemy: with a hissing, the raising of hairs on the back….

Langella manages to find a portrayal that doesn’t come across as mere camp or an “impression,” and adds well-earned dignity to the mix. You get Nixon’s hunched posture, his carriage of himself that seems to teeter between (1) the genuine gravitas of an accomplished personage who has that certain ineffable je ne sais quoi of the world-historical Leader Among Men, and (2) an old, strikingly ordinary oddball who seems like he hasn’t moved his bowels in four weeks. The banality and self-respect are both there. The passing biased or curmudgeonly remarks. The shows of hypocrisy and the eternal willingness to self-justify.

Langella has the character down so well that when he has Nixon spontaneously make a joke, or even has his eyes look lively and probing after a passing-through attractive woman in the taping studio (at which Bacon’s Brennan offers his clipped “Focus, sir!”), these actions blend in with his Nixon character; they aren’t simply, as coming amid an overall hack imitation, like some indulgence in some whimsy that seems inconsistent with the ongoing imitation.

Even when, in the interview chair, Nixon shifts his eyes with indignation, or otherwise undergoes some fleeting “moral readjustment” as Frost interviews him, we seem to see “this Nixon” displaying his wide-ranging heart’s different sides. It’s remarkable to watch this performance; we seem to smile and be amused, not because we’re laughing at how ridiculous the real-life Nixon was, but because of how well Langella delivers a character that, when treated most sympathetically, is still a weird if somehow worth-examining “piece of work” for us more average people to try to understand.

Sheen as Frost is often very interesting; his character, inevitably, is lighter in mood—with its own busy mastery of his career- and personally-related areas of affairs—than that of Nixon. (Sheen recently played William Masters in a cable TV film on scholars of sexuality Masters and Johnson, titled Masters of Sex.) This Frost has all sorts of jaunty and sophisticated ways of showing—amid his flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants business—British good manners and elegant good cheer. Nixon, with his more ponderous song and dance, we seem to know all too well, but Frost—beyond the bites of him we’ve seen in all sorts of TV engagements over the years—is more of a revelation in this film. For one thing, I didn’t know he was such a playboy.

In fact, less pleasingly—as I’ll return to—here he seems to have a certain (unintended) Austin Powers air, especially in scenes as on the airplane, when he picks up a woman, Caroline Cushing (played by Rebecca Hall, who appears here with a certain Shelley Duvall look), who will end up being Frost’s female companion throughout the interviews project. (Hall ends up being one of the very few consistent female presences in a film that is overwhelmingly a story about men, i.e., is almost a sort of war or high-government film, which in a certain sense it is. It’s interesting that Cushing has a much bigger profile here, as Frost’s “consort” so to speak, than does the Diane Sawyer character, whose limited part here seems very much like that of a TV-movie style also-ran, with seemingly her blonde hair [and being named] the only feature marking her as Sawyer.)

Frost’s TV career was quite varied, even before these interviews. His first big break, I think, was in a British entertainment show, That Was the Week That Was. He so much made the rounds as a sort of all-purpose TV impresario that (momentarily) he was the host present when The Beatles filmed some promotional spots (probably to appear on Frost’s show of the time) for their singles “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” at Twickenham Studios in September 1968 (see The Beatles’ Anthology tapes, number 8). As I said, I knew of him (not as a super-media-knowledgeable kid) as a talk-show host in my young 1970s years.

Frost as the film’s education-undergoing pointman

In the film, Frost seems like a savvy TV operator who, when he sees Nixon resign from office in August 1974 while amid working on an Australian entertainment show, figures it could be a high-ratings coup to do a program with Nixon on TV. A lot of what makes this film interesting—you don’t even have to know much about what it takes to plan and produce a TV special (and goodness knows my own knowledge of this is limited)—is all the preliminary maneuvering Frost had to do, first to try arranging through an intermediary to get Nixon to be interviewed (the intermediary was a literary agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, played here as a slick creep with all the un-sexy quality of a garden slug by Toby Jones), then to try to get the major U.S. TV networks signed on as producing partners (Frost failed to achieve this). Presumably these arranging efforts all happened between August 1974 and sometime in 1976, which the film tells us is when Frost first met in a New York hotel with his ad hoc producing team to really get going on the production.

He ended up funding the production to a large extent with his own money, as corporate sponsors dropped out (apparently because of how credible—not, actually—the project was anticipated to be). For whatever reason, amid the Nixon project, he appears to have suffered having his show in Australia (as well as elsewhere) being dropped by the relevant TV network(s). Thus, he ended up doing the Nixon interviews on speculation, with limited sponsor support (including his paying a huge sum to Nixon, brokered by the oily Lazar, up front). Frost hoped, as apparently depending on how well they came out, to get the interviews syndicated—an apparent alternative to network backing and distribution at the time.

Further, the continuation of his career ended up resting entirely on this project, as did those—from their comments—of his associates Zelnick and Reston. Whatever amount of these details presented in the film is correct—and certainly none of us rank-and-file Shmoes on the street knew about this background stuff in 1977—they certainly, cumulatively, give a sense of suspense to the story of the film.

How Frost as the fun-loving flirt finally comes to terms with the project, after Nix with night thoughts spills bile on the phone, complete with heavy-duty curse

Perhaps what is disappointing to me about the story—along with making Frost seem like such a good-time-y sort that I now and then (with fun humor, watching for a second or more time) compared him on his off moments to Austin Powers—is also what helps tie it together in a sort of gripping drama: that Frost is so cheery and shallow, and a little (daily-initiative-wise) behind the curve in terms of keeping to his agenda while Nixon bullishly pursues his own (even while Reston and Zelnick start feeling their careers are put majorly at risk by Frost’s cheery obliviousness), that he doesn’t realize what a challenge he has—to stand his ground when facing Nixon on the most touchy subject, Watergate. Even in a scene where Zelnick and Reston are taking their concerns to Frost around a “craft service” table in a garage (which may not have been just a set but an actual craft-service table for the film, doing double-duty), Frost seems almost so cheerily oblivious to the political and moral dimensions of what they are doing with Nixon that you have to wonder, was Frost this “out in left field” in real life at the time?

That is, this was the case, the film says, until Nixon phones Frost up one night before the last, Watergate-aimed interview, having had a stiff drink or two. Nix on the phone, at a climactic point—more expressing his career-long sense of grievance than anything personally directed at Frost—explodes in such a volcanic eruption of bitterness and prodigious willingness to show his critics wrong that Frost realizes he has to study hard, as he hasn’t yet, to be ready for the final interview session.

So what does a “homecoming king”–type do? He “pulls an all-nighter”; he burns the midnight oil, and fiercely listens to the Watergate-related tapes, studies the public-record transcripts, and has Jim Reston head off enthusiastically (with his Sam Rockwell bedhead hair) to do some special research in D.C.—all to be ready with the necessary particulars like a well-prepared prosecutor.

It’s as if Frost never realized—could this have been true?—what a source of trouble he was up against with his interviewee until Nixon, in a sudden spell of insecurity, has had a few too many drinks (in real life, Nixon was known among some [like Henry Kissinger], because of pressure, to drink excessively when in the White House), and spews forth his brewing night thoughts to Frost—complete with that certain special-purpose tool, the four-syllable curse word that earned this film an R rating—in a way that can’t help but make Frost blanch (and maybe feel, “I gotta shit!”).

A little too much Austin Powers here?

I think this film, like numerous works on serious topics today, had (from the producers' and/or studio's viewpoints) to be sweetened with the chocolate of coolness, along with a moral compass aspect—so that Frost comes off maybe more “hip” and devil-may-care (as the putative good guy) than he really may have been in 1977 (i.e., he could have been more "square" in 1977). This is so that today’s young box-office ticket-payers could see in this morality play who really had all the aces “morality-wise”: no, it wasn’t the old warhorse in the power suit, who could step out of his car with awkward, “spastic” leg in one tasty moment, and at another, stand at his oceanside villa like a regretful, old, grace-less fellow with one foot in the grave. No, Mr. Cool was the British bon vivant who, when his high-stakes interviews were finally in the can, could turn up at a club with his girlfriend of the time, with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” pulsing on the dance floor.

For me, I think Sheen’s Frost slips a little toward self-parody at times in a way that Langella’s Nixon decidedly does not. So, if we may be sly for a minute, for those who can create at home with video-making tools, a nice project might be a mashup of this film with some scenes from the Austin Powers films. It doesn’t take much to blend, in your mind, the Frost here with Mike Myers’ dandy with his “Oh, be-have!” with effusive grin and profoundly bad teeth; his Brit-fruity way of pronouncing “Oh, you mean a sen-sual [with soft esses] mass-age? [pron. MASS-azh]”

Or, from the first film, his doggerel in a hot tub where he has just let out a bathtub fart, “Pardon me for being rude; / it was not me, it was my food / It just popped up to say ‘Hello,’ / and now it’s gone back down be-low.” With the last word pronounced—you could exaggerate a bit—with an elongated, plummy accent of the James Mason/Tim Curry variety.

But this is small quibble about Sheen's portrayal. Overall, this is a fine film that should be essential for anyone doing a multi-media history lesson on the Nixon administration and what it still means today. And it shows how good a job director Ron Howard can do.

##

Emily Dickinson’s poem #389, written ca. 1865, appearing in Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, selection and with introduction by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961; my copy bought ~1981)—with punctuation and spelling as in original, with line breaks indicated by me with slashes, and stanza breaks with double slashes:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass / Occasionally rides – / You may have met Him – did you not / His notice sudden is – // The Grass divides as with a Comb – / A spotted shaft is seen – / And then it closes at your feet / And opens further on – // He likes a Boggy Acre / A Floor too cool for Corn – / Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot – / I more than once at Noon // Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun / When stooping to secure it / It wrinkled, and was gone – // Several of Nature’s People / I know, and they know me – / I feel for them a transport / Of cordiality – // But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone –

Local color, Part 6 of 7: The 1996 Vernon Democratic campaign—its last efforts, results, and hints of sequelae

Showing that when a political group’s resources are limited, making careful shots is key; and more generally, that politics (as today) should be about possibility, not “ignorant armies clashing by night”

Subsections below:

1. Time for comedy—Jay Edwards at WSUS, and our anticlimactic radio ads

Trying to gain in the home stretch

The final “message decision” is made

2. A summary of the structure of the campaign: Tiny resources, power in a tonal message

3. The election results—hard numbers

4. The issue of “pay to play”

5. Party identity as a major candidate feature

6. Did the fact of slots on ballots for Democrats leave the door open to mischief?

7. Politics as about choice

[Edits 10/8/13, including more comedy in End note. Little edit 10/9/13. Edit 10/11/13.]

1. Time for comedy—Jay Edwards at WSUS, and our anticlimactic radio ads

As I said in Part 4 (under the subhead “Some personal eccentricity…”), the radio ads were one big focus of criticism from Dick and Dan when we Dems met, partly to do a post-mortem, at least as Dick and Dan were inclined to do. There was a definite difference between the 1996 race and the 1994 and 1995 races with this. But the difference wasn’t just in the tone or content of the ads.

I am heartened to go over the old paperwork, showing just how expensive—and how big a chunk of the total spending pie—using the local mass media can be for even a small campaign such as ours. (Maybe I should have said at the start of this series: the township, at least in about 1995, had about 8,000 homes and a population of about 21,000. The physical size is about 64 square miles. The tax base in quite heavily weighted in favor of homes, instead of businesses, which is quite unlike the more developed parts of New Jersey. Sorry I can’t give more concrete figures on this fact.)

Newspapers. Our newspaper costs, the bigger bill being from Straus Newspapers (no real fault of theirs), were bigger than for the radio ads, and I believe this was mainly because our decision to set up newspaper ads, which is inevitably earlier in the process, came when we had more money at our disposal (from the SCDC). By the time (in late October) we were to arrange to do radio ads, we had little money left to come from the SCDC. I remember Charlie Cart telling me there was only so much more to come (he said this either just before or with the last check), and he wasn’t being spiteful or finky. (His hands were tied probably based on how many, or how giving, his out-of-county sources were.)

I have a copy of the contract with Straus for $1,449, for two ads—a half-page running on October 24, and one full-page running on October 31.

Radio. Some of my records from this time are on photo-sensitive fax sheets, and they are quite faded. But the important non-fax papers from WSUS show that, after a fax I sent the station on October 30 asking some ground-rule questions, we signed a contract on October 31 to record and schedule running of radio ads. The broadcasts (of two different 30-second ads) would be on two days, the Saturday and Monday immediately before Election Day, for 24 runnings. Total cost: $897. (I had told the station in my October 30 fax that we had only about $900 to spend.)

How this compares to the previous two elections is enlightening: I have information gathered about then, probably from the state reports I saw, that shows that for the 1994 campaign, in three different orders/installments, a total of $2,930 was spent for radio ads. In 1995, a total (from four installments) of $6,130 was spent for radio.

I encountered one or more people about that time (who as far as I know had never worked in campaigns) who spoke of having been driven nuts by all the Vernon campaign radio ads they heard then (for whichever party, I assume), and I forget whether this was for 1995 (which would have made sense) or 1996. But it was the prevailing wisdom among Dick and Dan—and probably whoever else had been heavily involved in the core activities of the pre-1996 campaigns—that radio ads were the last, most powerful weapon you had to try to win the race until right before Election Day.

On the surface, this makes sense. But when the philosophy was to use this tool as voraciously as you could muster and your messages could be anything that could let you hope to win by whatever means, there would obviously seem to be lines to be crossed, both in terms of the public’s taste and, one would think, in what seems professionally advisable or effective among people who arrange them.

If Dick or Dan—or indeed anyone else (including Republicans) who ran campaigns in the township—felt that the sheer doggedness of getting out communications was more key to winning an election than anything else—whether this lay in fliers handed out at public locations, or mailings duly stuffed into envelopes (almost until fingers were numb) by an army in a garage, or newspaper ads, or especially radio ads—this premise certainly showed, among the Dems, in the spending done ($6,000+) on radio ads in 1995.

We in the K & C campaign definitely didn’t have such an option in 1996. As I’ve said, money (primarily from the SCDC) ran out much more quickly. And as I’ve said, the 1996 campaign “budget” was a little over half, in total, of what was spent on the 1995 campaign. And within the busy 1996 period, we quickly ran into the wall of finding that our money was dwindling when the “big, last, most powerful tool” of the radio ads was yet to be lifted. What to do?

Trying to gain in the home stretch

It was clear to me that, however else you want to analyze this, selecting a good, resonating message was one of the most important desiderata, if not the most important one. In fact, if you had less to spend, being smarter about your message might make up for this. This was common sense. And I also felt that, if in our earlier weeks of campaigning we began with conveying (in gently formulated newspaper ads and fliers) what nice, work-well-with-others people the Dem candidates were (to boil down the later disappointed characterization Dick and Dan gave our media message), it made sense in the last days to gear up with something more incisive and “clinching of people’s affections along the lines of a solid issue.” In late October, I felt that now, with time running out and the competition naturally harder, we had to take the opportunity to make a turn in our message and come down grippingly on the side of an issue. Indeed, this would have been common sense, not anything especially smart.

But also, I wasn’t the only one in our campaign group dictating what our message would be.

For radio-ad copy, I had come up with (typed, on the fly) two themes, with one about the town center. These weren’t final wordage; they were to spur development of thinking.

But now, when we were (during the early-evening hours) in the lair of WSUS, run by Jay Edwards, with Howard Burrell making a sudden commitment to come by and help us out, some new rules were about to be followed.

James Edward Normoyle, stage name Jay Edwards, ran WSUS for years (he died about 11 years ago—see this obituary), along with Peter Bardach, who headed the news side of things, I believe. (I remember seeing Peter Bardach, complete with his odd haircut, doing some periodic interviews in the Sidewalk Café area of the Playboy Hotel when I worked there in 1981.)  I believe Mr. Normoyle’s 2002 obit in the Herald or another paper noted that he had written a pop song or two back in about the 1960s…and one would surmise that, in time, he realized one could, depending on talent, make a surer living running a radio station, with the revenue stream provided by the inevitable mechanics of the pop-music biz, with all those royalties generated with the help of ASCAP and BMI, and a likely cut coming to the radio station, etc.

Jay Edwards’ sonorous baritone could be heard as he plied his DJ and promo-line role on the radio (in fact, his voice featured in numerous tag-line promotional bits the radio routinely ran). His voice reminded you a little of stagily vocal Ted Baxter, the character played by Ted Knight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That is, on the radio, in his stagy way with the catch phrases and so on typical of the medium, his vocal tone reminded you of Ted.

But in person, Edwards was even more like Ted. Or rather, you were surprised how little his normal speaking voice—unlike The Beatles who could sound so Liverpudlian in speaking voice and yet so non-accented in singing voice—varied from his stage voice. With his hair styled in a way suggesting he was a little vain about his appearance, his voice in normal speaking sounded fairly much as it did on the radio. And, in line with how a high school classmate of mine in 2000 said that Jay Edwards, who lived in her community, was regarded as something of a poseur, he could be a pompous sort in person.

The radio station had a fairly simple layout. There was a central meeting room, and there was a studio across the hall where ads could be recorded. (It was a surprisingly informal setup. You could literally walk in and record an ad just off one main hall. Assuming you paid the big fee.) Throughout the whole physical plant, it seemed, you could hear the radio playing continually over a P.A. system. (Not a bad idea, to monitor what was going out over the airwaves, in case there was a technical problem.)

And in those days, they had—was it in the same room as the recording studio?—what was state-of-the-art, or close to it, and today would be something you might see as a routine piece of low-tech stuff—a mechanized machine that played songs from CDs in sequence, rather like a little jukebox. To a fanciful person (and the WSUS people showed it off as somewhat if giving one a privileged view of a nuclear reactor), it might have looked as prodigiously high-tech as a submarine engine in this radio station’s rather small quarters. Meanwhile, more realistically, it was melded to a capacity of a DJ to walk in, quite calmly and insouciantly but with a sense of proper timing, to override the music system for a minute to speak live on the airwaves. This CD-playing thing was, as I surmised, what Jay Edwards’ tag-line voice on the radio referred to when he shilled about the “WSUS myooooo-sic machine!” (This elongated “ooo” wasn’t meant to imitate the mooing of a cow, if you’re wondering.)

Earlier, the candidates and I had waited, with the light outdoors dim and I believe trick-or-treaters on the street, we chit-chatting and a bit nervous, perhaps, about what to do regarding the radio ads; we waited for Howard to arrive. Finally, Howard rolled up in his fancy car (he was coming, I think, from work about 35 minutes away). We quickly went inside the WSUS building. The meeting room, with music piping in (though I guess it could be turned off there, for serious discussions), was where the group of us caucused—Jay, John Kraus, Ginny, myself, and Howard.

I handed over (to whomever) my sheet with suggestions for radio-ad themes, and several looked at it. Jay Edwards eventually was the one to hand it back, and he did so with a barely-disguised air of disdain, as if to say, “I believe this is yours.” I also recall that John Kraus, when he saw the sheet, didn’t really care for the ideas, which I could tell from his face. This was where, in retrospect, I’d see his disaffiliation from how I was guiding the campaign most weighed in; but this was where he would also take his biggest risk, as we’ll see.

I then left the room; my role was done. I waited somewhere until the various others came out to record the ads, which used both John and Ginny, each for a different commercial, to speak the tag line, “Paid for by the Committee to Elect Kraus and Crotty, Greg Ludwig, treasurer.”

The final “message decision” is made

It’s safe to say that, along with Howard, who enthusiastically came with ideas of his own on how to shape the radio ads, the group developed its ideas for a script, with key help from Jay. I am virtually certain I recall that Jay Edwards had been considered rather important to the Dems’ radio ads in the past two years. That is, you didn’t just walk in with a ready-made script, with Jay only acting as a custodian who would humbly get your ads recorded as you wanted, and dully finalizing the contract to run them per a certain rotation schedule. Instead, Jay rather positioned himself, I believe—and I think he certainly was talked about by such people as key campaign managers like Dick and Dan—as a sort of wizard who would, with maybe an imperceptible flourish, find some media-savvy way to formulate your ads for maximum effectiveness. I do recall that whatever media background the other Dems assumed that I had, the likes of Jay Edwards impressed them much more strongly and significantly as a true “media professional” who could do a rare, precious job like few others.

This time, in 1996, I think he was a little surprised we had so little to spend. I mean, $900 after the $6,000+ of 1995 was quite a drop. So he didn’t see the best step as I would have, that you would come up with a couple smart-enough issue-based ads that defined who you were, in relation to the other two campaigning groups. (Not that my particular issue-idea would have necessarily been a big hit.) When Dick and Dan later took the ’96 group to task for the radio ads not focusing on issues, they thought we had dropped the ball majorly. But who among the seasoned campaign leaders in that WSUS meeting room in 1996 were helping shape the ads, which said little more than that we’re nice people and expect to work well together with others on the TC? Jay Edwards and Howard Burrell.

For me, nothing symbolizes the misstep taken here than Jay Edwards handing back my radio-theme sheet as if it was scribbling from a halfwit, and then going on to cook up some ideas, with the others, that were distinctly less than inspired.

I have tapes of the two commercials that I recorded off the radio when they ran. I haven’t listened to them for many years, but at least one has Howard speaking some fairly nondescript copy almost the entire time, with some hokey political-inspirational music playing in the back. Whatever specific little ideas they invoked to show “Kraus and Crotty can work with the others on the township committee” or the like, they said absolutely nothing about concrete issues.

Make no mistake: Howard’s message of “working together” was important to the 1995 race. When the two Republican groups clashing most dramatically in 1995 seemed to define the matters most at issue for the TC, a Democrat’s positioning him- or herself as an alternative to “factional fighting” was a canny strategic move. And Howard had the personality to make this work. And his winning would tend to support the wisdom here.

In 1996, though, that didn’t really define what the race was about. Now there were three groups running. Showing that we were “nice people” (and having a sort of “working families” and moderately municipality-wise slant) was a good start, which indeed I helped enforce when working with Chris Rohde (and Ginny) in coming up with the print ads. At first, tone was a huge part of the message; this was very much my idea. But in the last days, focusing on specific issues was key. And yet Howard seemed to totally miss this point, and remain with (his version of) the “tone” message. Jay Edwards certainly did not help. And John Kraus apparently went right along with this, as if the veterans knew best.

Whether it was a function of how infrequently our ads ran, or how they sounded, I think I heard from someone that he or she hadn’t even heard our ads on the radio.

Anyway, the results of the ads—or their content’s philosophy—would show in John’s amount of votes, which are sadly low, which even I feel bad about, on his behalf. As a hardworking person on the campaign, he didn’t deserve this. But in terms of his not having an issues-oriented message (which even seemed reflected in the fact that Ginny, who voiced in the campaign some solid opinions on township issues, got more votes than he did), it was not surprising. (See End note.)

(Added 10/11/13: Here is a press release from mid-October 1996; first is the first page of the typescript I wrote, which you can skip, and next is the version that the Advertiser News printed, which is not much different from the typescript. You can see a distinct difference between Ginny's message and John's message, which I recall well that they were allowed to pursue in the campaign. This difference, I think, wasn't a strategic mistake [since people in Vernon have tended to vote, for TC, along the lines of personality and the individual candidate's stand anyway], and tactically for me it was wise to do [since, heaven knows, if I was dictatorial in how we sent out a "unified" message, this would have backfired on me amid the personalities in the campaign milieu]. But I think Ginny definitely resonated more with voters than did John; and I had forgotten John's "quiet revolution" theme until I read it in these old records, and I think that was very much something he developed in league with Howard Burrell. I know it wasn't something discussed in my print-ad sessions with Chris Rohde and Ginny earlier in the campaign season. In fact, I think this "quiet revolution" phrase turned up in the radio ads. I will return to this issue when I get to Part 7, which won't appear for a while.) 

2. A summary of the structure of the campaign: Tiny resources, power in a tonal message

A political campaign, headed by about four people, delivered thousands of votes. We did not have (per Dr. John T. Whiting’s theories) “car pool chiefs.” We did not presume to have rigorously chart-delineating means to have individual workers haul in very specific numbers of voters. We functioned as our resources would allow.

We relied largely on mass media. We started with a general message that established our tone. If this tone was 85 percent of our message, and was coincidentally echoed in the radio ads, then that—and not people organized in John Whiting’s manner—brought in thousands of votes. When you tailored a story that would appeal, that would do the work. In a way, you had no other choice when you had so few resources.

3. The election results—hard numbers

Well, so much for trying to shove out this Vernon Democrats series willy-nilly. And thank goodness I made up a fastidious “campaign summary” about the ’96 race right when it happened. As I reflected in recent corrections to Parts 4 and 5, I was wrong about some of who was running in ’96—but I think that’s a function of how weird the race was.

The candidates, their parties, and the election results:

John Logan (Republican)—for three-year seat, apparently—4,012 votes

Ira Weiner (Republican)—for one-year seat, apparently—3,864

John Kraus (Democrat)—for three-year seat—1,959

Ginny Crotty (Democrat)—for one-year—2,226

Heinz Sell (Independent)—for three-year seat—2,371

Dennis Miranda (Independent)—for one-year—2,183

Chris Fuehrer wasn’t running. It was Heinz Sell running with Miranda as a sort of “team” that made up the Independents. I’d forgotten about that detail.

Ginny did come in with the fourth-highest amount of votes.

John Kraus’s amount is notable not only for his being well below Logan’s—which, in terms of how the standard parties usually fared in Vernon, especially in an election year, is not that surprising—but also almost 400 votes below Heinz Sell’s. Now that leads me to be rather annoyed on John’s behalf. Sell was a bit of a crank; while he attended township meetings (as anyone had a right to), he sometimes bothered the TC members whom he kept a sharp eye on, and he also wrote letters to the editor with firm enough opinions. He was a sincere man acting per his rights as a citizen engaging in civic activities; but it was hard to imagine him, an elderly man with strong opinions in line with his generation, as a good candidate for the young-family township of Vernon and on the controversy-riven TC, where younger years seemed apt to help given the stress involved.

On the other hand, he did make it his business to home in on particular township issues (on which he could clash with sitting TC members); and John, as I said, really didn’t do this in how he presented himself as a candidate.

(Regarding how Mr. Sell fit in as a potential local leader: Local stupidity could sometimes weigh in. When Mr. Sell wrote a letter to the editor one time about what he termed the “trash” on the streets resulting from city dwellers visiting to patronize Action Park, some local people—at least one letter-writer responding to him—jumped to the conclusion that, apparently because Mr. Sell was German-born, he was calling members of minority groups “trash.” Actually, it was clear to me that Mr. Sell meant litter by “trash,” which, of course, over many years has been there to see, clearly having emanated from the cars of visiting city residents. Such littering was even very recently remarked on by another newspaper letter-writer. Also, one day many years ago, when I was walking past the Action Park, perhaps walking my bicycle up a hill, someone threw a full can of beer at me.)

4. The issue of “pay to play”

The concept of “pay to play” in politics receives a lot of attention (as from journalists), it raises passions, and it has been addressed legally in various ways (e.g., with reforms) in different parts of the country, not least in New Jersey. Not an expert on it, I am not going to analyze or comment on it definitively here, but I’ll look—from a simple, common-sense perspective—at how our 1996 campaign was funded, and ask (as readers of this series might already have), “Was there ‘pay to play’ going on here? If not in fact, could it have gone on, with the way things were in 1996?”

The reason I bring this up at all is that, surprisingly to me at the time, John revealed that he had to write “thank you” notes to one or more of the people who had donated to the SCDC, with the result that their money ended up with us Vernon Dems. One donator in particular was a man who I believe was a lawyer at a branch (?) of a law firm named Weiner Lesniak (or Werner Lesniak; my confusion on the spelling), in Parsippany. (I think, but am not sure, that the main location of this firm was in Roseland, N.J.) Ray Lesniak, of course, has long been in the state senate (a Democrat representing Union County), and he is a lawyer. What his firm was doing, as was said to me sometime in 1996 I think, was backing candidates with the hope that, if the candidates were elected, they could try to get the firms business in the relevant towns as counsel to the township committee, planning board, or any other body that normally had an attorney (paid, of course). Lezniak’s firm, in particular, did this speculative campaign-donating with a large number of municipalities. I believe this was quite legal at the time; I don’t know if it still is.

Naïve about the whole thing then, I felt that John’s task would have been awkward for me, if I had to do it; he seemed to take it fairly much in stride. I already knew that counsel was named routinely to various boards by members of the governing body (in Vernon, the TC), and these counselors were used throughout a year on a kind of retainer, with their terms able to be renewed at the next government reorganization time. However these firms came to be considered by the TC (and of course different firms or attorneys could be proposed by different TC members as candidates), they were voted on by all of the members of the TC.

It was a bit of a horse race just as it was for any individuals being named as volunteer members of the boards; you got your name considered (e.g., I asked newly elected Howard Burrell if he could get me a seat on the Zoning Board, or such), and either you got a majority vote (or even unanimous vote in some cases) and got on the board, or not. Howard reflected to me one year that it was quite a horse-trading process (not his exact words) getting people named to boards at reorganization, which was obviously harder to do as TC members were of vastly different schools of thought on policy issues.

Whether law firms were subjected to any more “rough and chancy” horse-trading in being named as counsel to boards, I don’t know; it wouldn’t surprise me. But suffice it to say that just because a law firm had donated money to a local candidate, through the county Democratic committee or the like, that didn’t guarantee that the firm would get a position as counsel to a board in the candidate’s town. I remember feeling that, if I were in John’s shoes, I would feel embarrassed writing a “thank you” note when, as hard as my campaign group had tried, we didn’t win (and moreover, considering the results and conditions, it wasn’t terribly likely that we’d win to begin with).

5. Party identity as a major candidate feature

In some respect, John may have felt that, as a true-blue Democrat running on the ticket, that fact should have recommended him to a good number of voters. That might have worked in plenty of other New Jersey towns, but not in Vernon. You needed to do more than just “stand on your standard party platform.” Another way to look at this is, as I remember arguing to different people more than once in those days, the standard party philosophies really had no bearing in Vernon Township. Candidates could present themselves as “from the Republican party” or “from the Democratic party,” but how they really stood up as candidates had to be defined in their grasp of township issues. Since the culture of not only the town but the county is to assume that any viable local candidate should start as a Republican (if from any party), then if you ran as a Democrat, you had to give some special reason why you were really worthy of choice.

The party identity issue had implications in a few directions. Sometimes people, who started out as Democratic, would switch their party affiliation (with the Board of Elections) to Republican just to be that much more viable as a candidate (this happened with John Warren, in the late 1980s, who served on the Vernon TC as a Democrat then moved on to the county board of chosen freeholders, running—and winning—as a Republican after having [for the purpose] changed his party affiliation).

This, to me, I would never have done. If I ran, I would have said that, locally, I wouldn’t apply standard Democratic philosophy to township issues; it simply wouldn’t have made sense. But I wouldn’t have changed my party simply out of expedience in order to be “electable.” I would rather not have run for office than to do that.

Another aspect to this is what I referred to in my letter in 1996 about the race in The New Jersey Herald, which I provided a pdf about here. When one was among a local party group, that was like being in a “club based on faith.” If you wanted to be in a Republican or Democratic group, that was OK for the reason you had affinity with other people along the lines of nationally oriented politics, but in many respects, standard party ways of thinking that worked on the national level didn’t apply on the local level. So a candidate’s positioning him- or herself because he or she was a “true Democrat” would have been like the candidate’s advertising him- or herself based on his or her religious affiliation. Anyone who did that in this local region should have had his or her competence questioned as to fitness for local office.

Similarly, there were local people who posed a litmus test for Howard Burrell based on the sole issue of abortion. I think Howard mentioned having heard this, but I might have heard it from someone else directly, too: the voter would only have considered him as a Democratic candidate based on where he stood on abortion. When it came to a race for the TC, this, to me, raises questions of competence in the voter as a voting citizen.

6. Did the fact of slots on ballots for Democrats leave the door open to mischief?

But (prior to changes in the form of Vernon’s government) the ballots still routinely had slots for Democrats. Sometimes they would go empty. But the fact that a Democrat would always fill the slot on the ballot if he or she got enough signatures on a petition meant there was a road to Democrats’ running.

This was what left a door open for our club and campaign groups in the mid-1990s to even have a realistic chance at all of running someone. The question could then be posed, notably by local Republicans but possibly also by Democrats, just because there was that slot, how do we know if the candidates are worth our consideration? Isn’t it a bit of an easy thing for any Shmoe to get the signatures and get on the ballot as a Democrat, when the Republicans have a more naturally and demandingly competitive weeding-out process?

This is an interesting question, but in a way it is always answered when voters go to the polls. If people thought a given Democratic candidate “got onto the ballot too easily,” they could always not vote for the person.

It was amazing how the abiding disadvantage that Democrats were at—that as a baseline matter, they were ordinarily not considered as credible as Republican candidates—was not fully grasped, or worked with, by various people in our Democratic group. There were some who uncritically thought we should run as Democrats and fly our party flag as openly as we dared. I thought this was a mistake, and I think the results in 1994-96 proved it. Only Howard Burrell won, after a tough race (in 1995) where a ton of money was spent on radio ads, and even then he didn’t win over his Republican competitor by tremendously much (and it helped that the other Republican, Chris Fuehrer, looked callow by comparison to Howard).

It’s kind of interesting to recall that some of our party literature, including in 1996, had reference to “working families,” which seemed in accord with some standard Democratic philosophy. This might have clicked with some in the area, and less with others.

(I’m leaving aside detailed comment about why Republicans are favored here. A thumbnail sketch is that, far from this area’s “rural” quality as being the reason—as if Vernon Township were merely echoing the topography-based ethos/culture of the Deep South or the American West—people here, in choosing to make this a “Republican” area, are primarily reacting to the prevailing political ethos of the more urban areas surrounding New York City. They are rejecting big-machine Democratic prerogatives, and how minority populations determine the politics there. [Sussex County is about 97 percent white.] Having lived here, not continuously, for over 45 years, I would quickly point out that Vernon Township is very much more part of New Jersey than it is “part of Alabama” or “part of Wyoming.” If you want details of why, we’ll have to save that for more confidential discussion than on a blog.)

7. Politics as about choice

For myself, I would never have changed my party affiliation to Republican to run for office in town. I would rather have worked with Democrats for three years as I did, and lost, than to change my party affiliation. This may have seemed to some among the Republicans as a “losing strategy,” but to me, helping a campaign that floated Democratic candidates was a way to offer the public choice. It wasn’t only about a mean horse race between family-fight Republicans. You had some people from the other standard party too.

And even if some of our candidates were a little on the insufficient side, maybe in terms of their grasp of local issues, they stood for something valuable than I am proud of having been part of: offering people choice in whom to vote for. If we grant that politics should be about possibility, about coming up with novel and effective solutions, then a way to offer a township additional choices of candidates, who can speak their minds in public forums to show what they’re about, is one way to do that. If people understand this much, rather than thinking a given Democratic slate was just a set of “stooges” working for Gene Mulvihill, then they might appreciate the choice.

As it turns out, not only did we meet with the inevitable suspicion from some that our candidates were Mulvihill minions, but you would on rare occasions hear some lame-brained remark such as that Howard Burrell was all about “tax-and-spend” as a Democrat, even though this fiscal approach could hardly be put into practice on the township level.

And as we know from higher-level and broader phenomena of politics, you can offer people choice to appeal to their intelligence, but there’s only so much you can do in facing the sheer stupidity that exists among some voters.

##

End note.

On Jay Edwards, a couple little stories are amusing. Here is one: A high school classmate of mine, whom I'll pseudonym Aaron, had worked at WSUS in the 1980s--Aaron is the same person I've mentioned in a prior blog entry, this one from the summer, in the subsection headed "What to make of number 1?"--who became a township health inspector in the later 1980s. Like so many of us with dreams of working in the media, he worked at WSUS for a time in his early twenties, and I think he did news reporting. I think he even appeared on, or was tested for, a cable TV news program that was produced by the video/cable arm of WSUS's company. This cable station, I think, was a crude version of what could be done of that type in those days.

Aaron told me a story of Jay Edwards' warning him to stay away from his daughter, as if Edwards was trying to preempt a "disaster" that Aaron hadn't even given him a solid hint would happen. It was such--as Aaron told it--that, later, I joked with Aaron, imitating Jay Edwards in an insistent, Ted Baxter-ish pompous-boob voice, "You stay away from my daughter, [Aaron]! Don't even think of dating her!"

Local color, signpost: What’s left of the story, and how easy

[Edits 10/9/13. Edits 10/15/13. Edit 10/26/13.]

If Part 5 struck you as a long drink, the rest of this story will go down more smoothly.

Part 6, to come before long [actually, here], will be fairly short by comparison to Part 5, and it will include a humorous episode on our making the radio ads and how they seemed to affect the race, with a particular look at WSUS’s co-owner and DJ/impresario Jay Edwards. I will also make passing remarks on the issue of “pay to play,” as it related to our campaign OR NOT.

Lastly, I will provide some summary info on the 1996 Vernon TC race, including election results (of the six candidates—of which only two could win—Ginny, running for the one-year slot, came in fourth, getting more votes [!] than John Kraus, her mate who was running for the three-year slot, and [less surprisingly] more than her “Independent” opponent Dennis Miranda, who in a more typical two-group race would have run as a Republican).

Part 7 I will wait longer on to post. Not really focusing on Vernon Township politics, it will look at what became of the Dems (Vernon-level and otherwise) as I interacted with them, particularly on the county level, from about late 1997 to about 2005 (and of course, I will only be able to report on what I personally encountered, as I certainly was less extensively involved with the county Dems after ~1997 than with the Vernon Dems in 1994-96). Part 7 will look at, among other organizing themes, Howard Burrell as he figured in different community business I was involved in (and, again, my story will be limited because my involvement was limited). Among other things, you may be intrigued to find how my Vernon/county Dems activity overlapped with my involvement with health-related support group activity, centered in the Newton, N.J., area, by about 2002. And Part 7 will be posted on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog.

Among other things to be considered, as to whether to include them, are facts about the involvement (respectable enough) of Mark Hartman with the county Dems in 1999-2000, with a different phase in 2001. This is important because he was working as the political reporter of The New Jersey Herald at the time, and there were some rather novel ways he handled his role, which I think helped Howard Burrell in his freeholder race. But there were other, more unfortunate developments in Mr. Hartman’s life a little later, along with what he told me of some facts about his endorsing Howard when I spoke with Mr. Hartman in ~2002. So, some interesting stuff, but deliberations are necessary. And anyway, a lot of this isn’t so much a Vernon Dems story.

The subsections of this entry (Part 7) tentatively will comprise:

[a set of remarks on Burrell's 1997 race, which will appear within entry 7, subpart A, on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog]

[The rest of this outline is quite tentative; entry 7, subpart A, will have more details]
My own last involvement in being appointed to township boards, 1997-98

Burrell’s political life after Vernon; Mark Hartmann enters the picture

A novel development: Mark Hartmann’s personal travails

A way the political realm and the support-group milieu intersected in my travels

Summary notes

A missing piece of the 1996 story: building the campaign signs

For the 1996 story, I forgot this part: putting together the campaign signs. The SCDC did indeed have our Kraus & Crotty signs manufactured for us (and it paid for them), and they were ready to pick up at an office in Newton. But in those days, the signs were just professionally printed pieces of cardboard; we local campaign workers had to affix them to wooden posts. (I think it was by the 1999 campaign that Howard Burrell ran for county freeholder that the signs came with their own thin metal posts already attached.)

So this was another task for the person inclined to be an “endlessly” laboring artisan to do. It actually wasn’t as bad as stuffing the thousands (literally or seeming-like) envelopes we stuffed. Per completed sign, we took two pieces of the cardboard signs—about two-and-and-half feet by one-and-a-half feet in size—and used a heavy-duty staple gun to attach them to either side of a wooden stake. (The stake was made out of 1 x 2 [I think was the designation] pine lumber, rough-hewn; each sign stake was about three feet long, with the bottom cut at one angle [as I recall] so that it could be pounded into the ground. I seem to recall doing some of the sawing on those, but I don’t remember who all did that task; the sawing might have been done at Dick Conklin’s garage. Assembly of the signs happened mostly, or entirely, elsewhere.)

I seem to recall driving to John’s house with a large number of the pre-cut 1 x 2 pieces of wood, maybe six feet long each, to drop off at his house. I also seem to recall—since the road leading up to his house in PVL was very steep—finding it a bit of a weird ill-balanced-load situation climbing the hill with all that wood sticking out of the back of the Dodge Shadow I had at the time. (It’s funny how I don’t remember all the details of this; and this hill-climbing account may be off-base in some way.)

Anyway, I mention all this because, not only did I manufacture signs in my own cellar at home (which has carpentry-related workshop facilities that my father built in the 1960s), but John Kraus himself worked on a lot of these signs at his house. I think maybe he had his children work on some of them.

There were hundreds of signs in total. As I said, this task, while laborious, wasn’t as crazy as the envelope-stuffing task.

One pain-in-the-tail feature of the signs (a point of some controversy between some of us) became stapling the edges of the signs (one piece of cardboard on each side of the 1 x 2) together along the edges with a stapler, so the whole sign would hold together well. As it would turn out, when, after being placed on roadsides, the signs had been rained on, the edges of some of the signs would come undone where they were stapled.