How to Run a Filthy Campaign

...All right, for the late arrivals: My name is Machiavelli and this is Poli Sci 501, Pragmatic Presidential Politicking, from A to Z, Aaron Burr to the Zimmerman Telegram...

...In 1978, a candidate for United States Senator in a Midwestern state--a social shaker-and-mover who had already run through two wives--was nailed in flagrante with a female friend, the proceedings preserved for posterity by a tape recorder tucked away in the bed springs...

...But take care: Among the many contradictions within the American electorate--a hangover, no doubt, from your Puritan heritage--is the fact that although voters enjoy dirty politics, they disapprove of dirty politicians...

...We called it pomp and pageantry...

...Nothing new there, really...

...By opposition-bugging, I refer then, specifically, to disrupting an opponent's campaign by driving him and his staff to distraction...

...Thus, the appearance of any political advertisement credited to, say, "The Independent Citizens Committee for Truth, Decency, and Good Government" is an unconditional guarantee to voters that their best instincts are being appealed to by a high-minded, nonpartisan group of concerned community leaders--regardless of how scurrilous and irresponsible the content of the advertisement may be...

...Taboos in this category have lost some of their cutting edge, but keep in mind that errant fornication is merely one side of the knife...

...The superintendent's metaphysical flight, one feels, is not so much a case of a minor character's "getting out of scale" as of the novelist's reaching for a kind of significance that is much better left to the reader to infer...

...Decency" is another such buzz-word, with "good," "independent," and "citizens" also near the top of the list...

...That should do it...

...In 1980, chronic alcoholism among political wives has become quite the fashion, to the extent that the condition, once confessed, is viewed by a substantial number of voters as a positive attribute, it having "drawn the candidate's family closer," as talk show hosts are wont to say...

...I have particular trouble accepting the psychological credibility of Mine...

...After Nixon and Carter, the public will believe anything about a presidential candidate's associates and relatives...

...My advice, then, is to turn the reporter's questions over to your public opinion augurer...

...So much for the Issues...

...Similarly, we can't help being jolted out of our immersion in the story when we are hit with the reflections of a minor character (a police superintendent) who glances at Smiley's face and thinks to himself: "Not one face at all, actually . . . . More like your whole range of faces...

...If, therefore, you're serious about moving your personal belongings to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January, give the folks what they want: a show with a hero, you...

...Ostrakova, whose troubles set in motion the whole elaborate chain of events that leads to the final confrontation between Smiley and Karla...

...It's the same principle I expounded to Lorenzo the Magnificent back in 1512: "Lorenzo," I told him, "politics is one mean frigging business...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 21...

...Our text, needless to say, is my masterpiece, The Prince, revised, annotated, and currently selling for 4,000 lire at your nearest bookstore...

...But for all his media reputation, Tuck is a mere novice in the art of bugging campaigns when compared to the fun-loving trickster whose idea of making democracy work as an entertainment form in 1980 is to...

...In a former era a dirty trick of that magnitude would have been sufficient to drive the recording star into private life...

...But enough forensic foreplay...

...Now the smiling candidate seated to your right...

...Yet it is precisely because these lapses are so rare in Smiley's People and the plot and characterizations generally so strong that it strikes us finally as an achievement well beyond the reach of any other popular novelist writing today, and of most other novelists whose claims to "seriousness" are accepted without challenge by the critics...

...Chosen to occupy that Chair for the political year ahead was none other than the dean of pragmatic poh'tics himself, Niccolo Machiavelli, who, following a Berlitz crash course in Madison Avenuese, dehvered his virgin lecture in a classroom full of attentive Presidential candidates shortly before the primary season got underway...

...It's the element in every campaign that separates the political studs from the geldings, the winners from the also-rans...

...If you should be tempted to elaborate on any topic, remember the lesson of Honest A1 Smith...

...What you're dealing with here is a nation with an insatiable appetite for entertainment...

...Not only did the miscreant stay in the race, but he won by a healthy, or as it were perverse, majority...

...As for the idea of electronic eavesdropping on someone's smoke-filled room, why go to the trouble of breaking the law when the ancient, dishonorable practice of planting informers within the enemy camp can produce the same information at roughly half the cost...

...he turns back the odometer on his rented car 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 after regular matinee performances with his best friend's underage daughter...

...What this means is that your opponent is physically or mentally unfit for high office...

...It wasn't, as Joe Kraft and other columnar airheads would have you believe, because the electorate was disillusioned by Watergate, Vietnam, and the system...

...Save your rumor-mongering for the final week of the campaign when it can do the most damage...

...But not, as the British would say, bloody likely...

...More your patchwork of different ages, people, and endeavors...

...1. Print up flyers for Bible Belt distribution, inviting voters to a Linda Ronstadt rock concert on the White House lawn on Inauguration Day if Jerry Brown is elected...

...That, after all, is the whole point of maintaining smoke-filled rooms...

...You candidates in the back row, knock off the chatter...

...Not that it's as simple today as it was for Honest Ai's opposition...

...5. Guilt-by-association-or-relation...

...A little heavy by 1980 standards, but you never can tell when an outbreak of botulism at an opposition barbecue might come in handy...

...Not long ago blessed matrimony was considered an absolute must for any politician harboring serious ambitions for high national office...

...Any or all of the above, applied to your opponent's political associates and members of his family...

...One more dozer like that last race and they'll have to offer door prizes to get voters to the polls...

...The fact is, regrettably, that Americans of voting age are more tolerant these days about matters once considered pure poison at the political box office, for example: divorce, separation, and other manifestations of an unhappy home life...

...Though we do see and hear her on several occasions as well as read about her in her lover's thoughts, she never becomes more than an author's strategem and an inexplicable one at that...

...2. Incapacity...

...Purity against Mr...

...Indeed, there are some screw-ups hardly worth the ink required to print a smear sheet...

...As recently as 1964, the estimable philanthropist, Nelson Rockefeller, couldn't even buy a primary after he had divorced and then remarried a younger woman...

...In the latter, Guillam falls in love with a flower child flute student named Camilla...

...If he's worth what you're paying him, your stand on the tough ones should print out something like, "I am foursquare for a meaningful foreign policy, a meaningful economy, a meaningful environment, and a meaningful etc...

...3. Corruptton...

...Besieged by undergraduate demands for a curriculum more relevant to an age of politicaI Stfirm und Dreck, the Carmine DeSapio School of Public Affairs recently endoweda Chair in Pragmatic Campaigning...

...himself to engage in routine field work (the interrogation of Lizzie Worthington's husband and parents), nor that he would have the heads of his Soviet and Chinese research sections conduct other interrogations on their own...

...Though Nixon's best and brightest failed to grasp the principle, the telephone is never used to discuss serious campaign business in American politics...

...And the League of Women Voters actually wonders why the turnout was light...

...Proving...

...Vic Gold, author of PR as in President, lives in Washington...

...Specifically, the American electorate has always responded and continues to respond well to five kinds of political smear: 1. Sex...

...Politics in your country, as I perceive it, isn't that much different from politics in 16th century Florence...

...J . Edgar Hoover once put him under surveillance...

...2. Dress out two dozen unemployed actresses as milkmaids to solicit contributions outside all John Connally rallies...

...that his children matriculate...

...You call it show biz...

...The time spent cogitating about foreign policy, the economy, the environment, etc., could be put to better use working out ways to bug the opposition...

...Richard Tuck, for example, the much-vaunted Democratic expert in the field, has built a political career out of clever little tricks, such as directing a Nixon whistlestop train engineer to start rolling while the candidate was still in mid-speech...

...In 1928, Smith, not one to mince words, took a courageous stand against Prohibition and talked himself hoarse, warning that the economy was going to Hell in Andrew Mellon's limousine...

...Your opponent is a Communist, a fascist, a proponent of automobile seatbelts, once appeared on a platform with Jane Fonda or William F. Buckley, Jr., or otherwise gives evidence of taking his politics far too seriously to be President of the United States...

...It is particularly useful during the final weeks of a campaign, when the going gets sticky, and two or more surrogates can be dispatched around the country to indulge in "excesses...

...he was involved in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa...

...If you want additional details, I'll tell you the same thing I told Lorenzo the Magnificent: "Lorenzo," I said, "that will cost you 4,000 lire...

...Old age and affliction by an incurable disease are the more obvious forms of physical disability, but planting rumors concerning your opponent's psychiatric history or his suffering from ongoing and unconfessed alcoholism and drug addiction can also be effective, particularly if he has a tendency to stumble, bump his head, garble his syntax, or rub his nose in public...

...And now that public hanging is considered gauche, and cockfighting pass6, and the National Football League has seen fit to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 19 place curbs on the maiming of defenseless quarterbacks, what could be more entermining than to watch two or more hacks in a gouging contest--First Prize, the White House...

...3. Organize a Committee to Help Advance Peace, Progress And Quicken the Universal Instinct for Democracy by Dumping the Incompetent Carter for Kennedy...

...If being too interested in women isn't the drawback it once was, being disinterested in women--save in certain precincts of San Francisco--still is...

...Udall, in the event, lost the Michigan Democratic primary by the length of a bowser's nose...

...If nothing else, he had at least to look like a man content to love, honor, and stay bedded with the same woman for life...

...Specifically, recommend an old-fashioned Florentine recipe for hot sauce, one sure to lay an audience in the aisles...

...Niccolo Machiavelh (1469- ) is a consulrant to the Carnegie Council on World Peace...

...he kites checks...

...What follows is a transcript of that historic disquisition (copies ofwhich may be obtained throug h the professor's American agent, Vic Gold...

...Not by today's standards, however...

...It was just a matter of dull casting and a wretched plot...

...The reason is obvious...

...that his sister was once a practicing thespian in Manhattan...

...Your opponent is a crook...

...The final count was: Hoover, 444 electoral votes...

...he has links to the Mafia and the CIA...

...he takes bribes...

...5. Form a three-piece minstrel band to greet Ronald Reagan at airport stops, playing "Old Folks At Home" as he deplanes...

...Let him check out the numbers, pro and con, per Issue, and fill in the blanks...

...No more...

...Take it from there...

...You figure out the dollar exchange, I can't keep up with it...

...then add him to your Dung List...

...But Guillam's mistress in The Honourable Schoolboy, a girl called Molly Meakin, is utterly lifeless...

...C l a s s called to order...

...Hecklers and egg-throwers at opposition rallies reflect this technique in its cruder form, but there are subtler means toward the same end...

...That on any given Election Day, one good Prejudice can beat two good Issues...

...Asked afterward whether he approved of Young implying that Udall was a racist, Cartel" told reporters that he couldn't be expected to put a muzzle on all his supporters...

...If you want the exact quote, spring for the 4,000 lire...

...Well, perhaps...

...Positively filthy, and about time...

...Again, driving a wife to drink might once have been considered something of a liability to a serious candidate...

...During the 1976 campaign, for example --it was one of the few entertaining interludes in the Carter-Ford show--Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, a Carter supporter, pointed out that his candidate's chief opponent, Congressman Morris Udall, was a Mormon, and the Mormon church had a history of excluding blacks from its hierarchy...

...E v e n . . . o f different faiths...

...No matter what you were told in high school civics, you see, dirty politics is as native as stale apple pie at an all-night truck stop...

...6. Finally, if all else fails, get to the caterer making up the menu for the next fund-raising barbecue for any of the above...

...All of which tells us that in a permissive society, dirty trickery isn't what it used to be...

...Before Carter, Nixon preferred employing his vice-presidential running mate in the role of chief surrogate, but the redoubtable Duke of Whittier managed to put extra lather into his after-the-fact handwashing...

...With or without embellishment, these are all sure winners...

...is no great political handicap...

...4. Ideological Kookiness...

...A good, hard look, with special attention given the jugular, because if there's one idea I want you to take out of this course, it's that trust is something you set up for your kids after you've made your bundle...

...Less important to the plot, and for that reason perhaps more revealing, is le CarrCs carelessness in portraying Peter Guillam's (he is Smiley's principal assistant) romantic attachment in The Honourable Schoolboy in contrast to an identical subplot in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...

...4. Retain a free-lance reporter to accompany Billy Carter, taping his replies to questions about Libya, his brother, his mother, his sisters, how the Eastern media urinated on his friend Bert Lance, the global demographics of Jews and Arabs, and anything else he might have on his chest...

...But now for the good news...

...Whenever Spiro Agnew laid into an administration opponent, as per instruction, Nixon would leak word to the press that he was appalled by his running mate's "excesses...

...and a heavy, the miserable SOB sitting next to you...

...Nothing of the sort...

...it sounds invented--the sure sign of a character who, though she has an important narrative function to serve, has never really taken root in the author's imagination...

...This technique is variously known as Looking Presidential or Staying Above the Battle...

...Given that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is even better and The Spy Who Came in from the Coldat least as good, there can be little doubt that the literary establishment will one day accord ie Carr6 the kind of status his legions of devoted readers--I among them--think he truly deserves...

...Before we begin, though, I want you to take a good look at the friendly candidate seated to your left...

...Meanwhile, Smith's resourceful opposition was busy spreading the gospel that (a) he was an Irish Catholic rummy, and (b) if he ever won the Presidency, the Pope would dock his U-boat in the Washington marina on Inauguration Day and take up residence in the Lincoln Room...

...Down to some excerpts from my new edition: No sooner than you announce for President, some smart-aleck reporter is certain to inquire how you stand on the Issues...

...For this category, simply pass the word that his campaign manager has been known to sympathize with hemophiles...

...Running against Popery was all right 50 years ago, but any candidate who tried that line in 1980 would be laughed out of the gutter...

...Today, however, with half the voting population either split or paying weekly visits to marriage counselors, divorce, separation, etc...

...Young, who neglected to add that Udall was on record as opposing his church's racial policy, made his statement to a black audience...

...that his brother is a sibling...

...The general rule is: Never say anything mean.spirited about an opponent that a surrogate or front group can say for you...

...That's the unexpurgated edition, by the way, where I get into food poisoning as practiced by the Borgias...

...he owns stock in Exxon...

...For that matter, old-fashioned adultery is nothing to write anonymous letters-tothe-editor about, given the spirit of the times...

...Smith, 87...

...Something to that effect...

...Times may have changed, but there is still a mother lode of political taboos out there in Middle America only waiting to be mined by the candidate ready, willing, and eager to dig up the dirt...

...If the reporters asks what, specifically, you mean by "meaningful," stare him down...

...he steals Gideon Bibles from Holiday Inns...

...If the name is too long, try the acronym...

...Though we get only the briefest direct glimpse of her--most of what we " s e e " and " h e a r " o f her is recorded in Guillam's thoughts--she is so artfully drawn that she seems to be an important presence in the story...

...Too often the interior monologue which le Carr6 ascribes to her simply doesn't ring true...

...If you've already been foolish enough to fall into that trap, squirm out, and quitkly...

...In Smiley's People, too, though a leaner, tauter book, there are occasional failings that cause me to rank it below (though close to) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...

...The reason, of course, is that religious prejudice is no big deal in American politics anymore, unless, God be praised, you're fortunate enough to be running against (a) a Hassidic Jew, (b) a Joseph Smith Mormon, (c) a Jehovah's Witness, (d) a Zen Buddhist, (e) a Shiite Muslim, (f) a Moonie, (g) an Avowed Atheist, or (h) a Black Female Catholic...

...First things first...

...No, not wiretaps...

...One more item: If this happens to be your first presidential campaign, let me caution you that 1980 shapes up as one of the dirtiest political years of the century...

...Ford...

...Decency: Carter vs...

...Predictably, "truth" heads the list of buzz-words used by front groups formed for the sole purpose of running television spots and newspaper advertisements that the candidate's official campaign organization does not care to sponsor...