In Sales We Trust

...A door-to-door saleswoman uses as a standard opener, "Hi, there...

...but he also appreciated how much ordinary working people emulated the predators, aspiring to their riches and seeking to indulge in the same conspicuous waste...

...It was marked by a widening of the gap between rich and poor, and between caring about one's fellow citizens and caring only about oneself...

...former columnist, New York "Times" IT HAS BEEN SAID that the harshest assaults onjob security for workers have been made by fully tenured professors...

...But manufacturers know full well how important it is today to create, sell to and, if possible, capture a market...

...to its opposite...

...An epigraph to the Introduction contrasts Robert L. Shook's glorification of his trade in a book called Hardball Selling (Shook learned from his beloved dad, "a super salesperson," that selling is "a noble profession") with the opinion of an un-beguiled poet, e. e. cummings: "a salesman is an it that stinks...

...Selling is, to put it crudely, a kind of con game...

...Loman's disgrace before his sons remains after 45 years one of the heartbreaking episodes in the American theater...

...Bill Clinton studiously avoided the great domestic questions of our time...

...We have not yet begun to see what this new age of salesmanship means for the economy that created it...

...tolerant of him...

...The economy, he says, has moved past producing things of value...

...It is doubtless one reason why St...

...Unlike them, the author of A Nation of Salesmen is intimately familiar with the territory he covers...

...Americans may be whizzes at selling, as our success in entertainment, communications, finance, marketing, and other service businesses demonstrates...

...Augustine asserted, "Business is in itself an evil...

...They recognize that without salesmen capitalism is merely going through the motions, whether profitably or not...

...Trust me" is the underlying theme of every effort to seduce...

...Of present-day politicians, it is Clinton the salesman, the characterless opportunist, who receives the harshest treatment...

...He kept Jesse Jackson in the background and never spoke the words social and justice in that order...

...Shorris' view is essentially that of cummings ("A lie," the author says, "is not poetry...

...Even earlier, social scientists were describing the dishonesty implicit in having to mediate between a customer's true desires and a producer's intention to make as much money as possible...

...Machiavelli, the consummate political realist, said, "He is unfortunate whose mode of procedure is opposed to the times...

...In similar fashion, the most pious celebrations of the market as the handmaiden of political democracy and guardian of individual freedom stem from the ideologies of academics, whose professional advancement is exempt from the market's discipline and the guiles of selling...

...Even Ronald Reagan, who flacked for General Electric on radio and television and at conferences, was not, strictly speaking, a salesman...

...He let the market choose his campaign...

...For, as Shorris says, the salesman lives as if he were in exile, among strangers: "Loyalty is for him the love of negative freedom...

...He was a pitchman whose best lines were provided by others...

...And power is not democracy, however subtly it is acquired...

...in the probable or necessary sequence of events...

...Arthur Miller captured the moral degradation of Willie Loman's business and private life in his devastating and foresightful Death of a Salesman...

...Even the less dangerous issues did not hold an important place in the campaign...

...Faking your way to a high level of trust is a particularly ugly, alienating kind of hypocrisy...

...Shorris writes: "Bill Clinton behaved according to the rules of selling...

...Could Clinton have done otherwise?or is the political game in its present incarnation, as a subdivision of selling, too appealing for any would-be winner to resist...

...Ralph Bunche Institute on the UN, City University of New York...

...One might question this by pointing to the huge difference that persists between the capitalist who owns the property and creates the goods and services and the marketer who purveys them...

...But selling is subversion, since the assumed interests of the customer are really the goals of the producer...

...he appreciates the country as long as it is...

...The most dramatic change of the past few decades, though, has been the rise to preeminence of the salesman, the handler, the ad man as the marketer of national leaders...

...The battle cry of the campaign, 'It's the economy, stupid,' was based on market studies...

...His disdain for the market's corrupting effect is the product of firsthand experience and of observing other sales people become the creatures of their own hustle...

...A writer who also had a successful career as a senior advertising executive at the big N. W. Ayer agency, Earl Shorris dealt with such lucrative accounts as General Motors and AT&T...

...A survey conducted on November 3,1992, by Voter Research & Surveys, a consortium of ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News, reported the importance of issues in determining how people voted...

...It's the perfume lady...

...Of course, all of Clinton's marketing has not masked the issue of his character—his obvious unwillingness to tackle the less salable items on the Democratic agenda, important as some of them are...

...We should never forget how Hitler employed the arts of advertising and public relations, pioneered in the U.S.A., to capitalize on the prejudices and passions of the German people...

...Although Shorris offers far more despicable examples, her approach captures the false bonhomie and the sucking around for confidence...

...We must look for a way to escape this subversion of American culture, especially now that it is fast becoming the model for world culture too...

...Thorstein Veblen, an outsider in this country and a bitter critic of its corporate civilization, saw the upper class as a kind of predator...

...There is, as he himself notes, nothing unfamiliar about the salesman's indifference to judgment and moral law...

...It may be a tribute to the American people, a sign they have not fallen too far from the old belief in the moral integrity of their leadership, that in fairly short order they became furious with the President's shiftiness...

...the whole point of contemporary enterprise is to maximize profit and, if possible, kill the competition...

...But the most striking aspect of the book is how far he goes—beyond discussing the corrosiveness of pushing goods and conventional lying on an individual's character—to indict American society at large...

...Education, for example, did not get Clinton's attention then, and it has not gotten his attention since...

...Political democracy, a relationship among human beings possessing free will, says Shorris, is being supplanted by market democracy, a competition to command the will of others—in other words, grab power...

...On the other hand, it is true that the salesman has become the very avatar of capitalism...

...Half a century ago, the sociologist David Reisman characterized the spirit of business life as one of anomie...

...Thus one master salesman's advice to the young and ambitious: "Think murderous...

...In every tragedy, according to Aristotle, there is just such a sea change: a turn "from one state of things...

...The author may be overdramatizing matters in arguing that the evolution of the salesman has wrought a total transformation of American culture and politics...

...Salesman after salesman stresses to Shorris that the primary message?the foundation of the whole relationship between seller and buyer—is trust...

...Shorris dates the latest American peripety to "some time during the last quarter of the century...

...It's morning in America," the slogan that helped propel the movie actor into the White House, was the creation of professionals atBBDO...

...The deliberate manipulation of public opinion—on behalf of a particular candidate, or a special interest group willing to pay enough—has had a potent impact onournation...

...The pollsters had been correct from the outset: The economy was first at 42 per cent, followed by the Federal deficit at 21 per cent and health care at 20 per cent...

...In Shorris' estimation this country has undergone a new peripety...

...In these cold-blooded times the tyranny of the market may be inevitable, but its cost is still a national calamity...