independiente, capítulo ciento y siete

The Campaign

Chapter 21

It’s all my fault

1. Merch ubiquity

Remnants remain. To this day I regularly see our bumper stickers on cars of a certain age. I played at the AllGood Cafe up in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and it pained me to see a poster right there on the stage––every time I looked over at the guitar player stage right, there he was, my old boss Kinky Friedman, staring back at me. The next day I played at the Continental Club here in Austin, and when I bellied up to the bar to grab a beer after our set, there he was again. The familiar twinkle in his posterized eyes seemed to say something far different:

Future me will embrace Rick Perry, you miserable, deluded fuck.

For a long time after the campaign, you could drive past our old headquarters and still see the big sign we had commissioned, mounted atop the business signage-type pole by the main entrance. It was maybe thirty feet tall, big enough to be seen at some distance, high enough to be seen from the freeway flyover that rises right next to it.

The building we occupied must be tough to lease out­­––it’s been mostly vacant in the intervening years––so it wasn’t that strange that no one took the trouble to pull down our colorful and (at least until light bulbs started giving out) well-lit sign. But it was downright weird when our building was resurrected as a campaign HQ ahead of the ’08 primary and the new tenants left Kinky’s Guy Juke-rendered image to loom over their doomed campaign.

The Hillary Clinton for President Campaign.

Our Ft. Worth office manager Jimmy beneath the ATX HQ roadsign

In my building.

Under a Kinky sign.

The first time I drove by there after her staff opened up shop, I thought I was hallucinating––had I gotten so accustomed to seeing it that my brain simply kept it there? ––so I made a big freeway loop and came back, this time on the frontage road. Sure enough, there it was, bigger than Dallas.* As I edged by Hillary’s headquarters, looking closely to see what her staff had done to make it, well, more Hillary-ish, and I was surprised to see the Gov Bug, in all its hot pink glory, still parked in the car wash bay at the back of the parking lot.

Goldern thing stayed there the duration of the Hillary Clinton Campaign

2. Boobitude: a reflection on mistakery

Of all that I learned during the course of the campaign, what surprised me the most was the quality of the opposition. Going in, in a kind of wonky way I was almost looking forward to the savage beating I expected from the Democrats and Republicans. I was anticipating ruthless and implacable political machines of great efficiency.

That ain’t the way of it. I guess I should’ve known––a quick list, off the top of my head, to demonstrate fundamental boobitude of our leaders, and by extension, those who work for them:

Watergate. WMDs in Iraq. Gore in 2000. John Edwards. Reverend Wright. Vietnam. The Second Amendment. The Great Depression. The Great Recession.

I could keep typing for days.

Think about the McCain campaign against Obama––if I’d been allowed to script their demise, I would’ve never been able to devise the self-torpedoing shit they came up with! And his people were pros? Despite their many fumblings, Obama’s people seemed like geniuses next to the McCain/Palin horrorshow (a few days after he chose Palin, I wrote in these very pages:­­­­­­­­­­­­­ “­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Intense loathing of Republican Party prompts McCain to steer the Straight Talk Express right into a ditch.”).

Hillary’s efforts seemed nearly as inept, remember? Her ego-mad husband was staggering around the country, misspeaking at every turn, while she––in every way a serious and intelligent woman, I believe––mainly managed to convey whininess and arrogance. What about the Bosnia we-landed-under-sniper-fire thing? Never mind her own shoulda-been-highly-sensitized bullshitometer failing to edit the words coming out of her mouth, you mean there was no one on her staff that spoke up and said, Uh, Hillary? ––there were people there that day, remember?

Leaving Kinky’s sign up over her Texas campaign headquarters wasn’t the worst thing her people did, not by a long shot, but it was indicative. Details matter. The old saw “Don’t sweat the little shit (it’s all little shit)” is some terrible fucking advice for a political campaign. You have got to pay attention. If I’d been Clinton’s guy in Texas, I would’ve taken that sign down and had our ridiculous trailer removed first thing. I would’ve climbed that fucking pole myself if I had to.

They did, change it, eventually––after it’d become a small joke around town:

Ouch

Finally tossed over the Kinky sign, emblematic of her campaign: late, sloppy, and half-assed.

I offer these observations as a message of hope and possibility––

Political Axiom # 28: If you don’t believe one person can make a difference, you’re overestimating the opposition.

3. How do I love thee? Let me county the way (okay, that is one suck-ass chapter heading)

All of which leads me to a discussion of counties. Stay with me now…

There are 254 of them in Texas. Harris (that’s Houston) has about 4 million people living in it, Loving about 60. In the course of acquiring the signatures needed to put Kinky on the ballot, I made it our business to get at least one signature from every last county––and we did, with Guns Up and Cathy Cadillac bringing in the last holdouts.

Our campaign was organized around counties, presided over by campaign-selected super volunteers called County Coordinators, advised and supervised from Austin by Regional Coordinators––all Field Team members. Under The Pro, the counties were organized in six (I think) regions. When I took over, I reduced the number to four. There wasn’t anything wrong with the Pro’s model––I just felt I had four natural Regional Coordinators and that the less time the other two spent talking to Texans, the better (although that wasn’t how I explained it at the time). My four: Rutgers, West Texas and the Panhandle; Big Laugh, South Texas (including San Antonio, the second largest city in the state), Big Spring, southeast Texas (including Austin AND Houston), and Ong Ak, North and northeast Texas (including Dallas/Fort Worth).

Of course, we didn’t have every county organized––far from it––but we had someone in place in well over half of them, and certainly all the main population centers in the state were covered. If (and I’m just making this up, but it sounds reasonable enough) .5% ––1 in 200––of any population is politically active, and if, in 2006, a tenth of that population wanted to work for Kinky, who would show up at a Loving County meeting? A severed toe? A sideburn?

Our particular organizational structure meant that we had tremendous variance from county to county. You might think anthropomorphizing a county might be taking it a little too far, but I swear they had personalities that didn’t just emanate from the coordinators.

At least not completely—they were expressions of the collective subconscious, somehow. Bexar County (San Antonio) was the well-scrubbed teacher’s pet whose hand always shoots up––Me! Oh me! Pick me! Tarrant County (Fort Worth) was the grumpy old fuck that shouts at you to get off the lawn. Smith County (Tyler) was (maybe this was just me) the divorced mom in the neighborhood that makes all the prepubescent boys feel like their pants are too tight. Lubbock was the youngest son, sensitive to all slights. El Paso was the street guy that has conversations with invisible people. Harris County (Houston) was like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy––wild and uncontrollable at first, but then it turned around and got its shit together.

And Dallas––o! Dallas, thou bane of Nineveh! Contrary to any preconceptions you might have about the city, our Dallas was the unselfconscious hippie chick that flow dances in front of the band.

In Dallas, they just…improvised. Even though I was often (more often: Ong, who had Dallas, Fort Worth and Tyler to deal with) the one that had to make the call to get them to stop creating their own t-shirts or try and convince them to actually keep track of contributions, it was my favorite county group. They got stuff done, and they hardly ever complained––and when they did complain, they usually had a pretty good reason.  Contrasted with the regular geriatric gumming out I got from my Fort Worth people, at once so needy and demanding, Dallas’ freeform self-sufficiency was downright refreshing.

4. Quicksand

But not to Nineveh.

I’ve made fun of her glacial pace––she was detail-oriented to an exquisite degree––but when you work for someone as impulsive as Kinky, that can be a very good thing. She wasn’t the only one––The Counselor, for example, tasked with the insane flea-herding task of trying to turn our free jazz interpretations of campaign spending laws into coherent Ethics Commission filings, had to keep sharp and minute focus––but where it was a matter of professionalism for The Counselor, for Nineveh it was a matter of genetic predisposition. And when it came to campaign art––that is, our t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers and yes, the big road sign, she was fiercely dedicated to getting it right. Her background in the music business made her especially attuned to the world of record covers and the artists who make them (she was a good friend of Guy Juke, aka Blackie, aka De White­­, to whom we owed our iconic image of Kinky).

By way of example, here’s the original album cover that became our central campaign image:

The image, more or less as the artist envisioned it

Behold the degradation of image:

Despite Nineveh's intense efforts, the colors lost their 'pop' ...

Further:

This pink was so far off that I think she had a stroke when she saw it...

Look at the three images, side by side, with an eye to skin tone–Kinky, Lebanese Kinky, Lebanese Kinky frequenting a tanning salon:

Left to right: Kinky, tanning bed Lebanese Kinky, Lebanese Kinky

Implacable or no, you can see for yourself: Nineveh was in a constant battle, and I don’t think she ever felt like she ever actually won, exactly––at best she was holding off the worst abuses. Some of the difficulty had to do with analog artists creating analog colors––they just don’t show up in the digital realm with that subtlety (or at least they didn’t in 2006, a million years ago in computer terms). A larger part of her problems simply resided in the cluelessness, laziness or incompetence of the various printers we dealt with: It’s yellow, right? What’s the difference?

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the difference––she’d hold up damning evidence of color indifference, eyes blazing––See? See what these wretches have wrought? ––and I’d think,

It’s yellow, right? What’s the difference?

It’s the dark side of the detail-driven––on which details will you obsess? I appreciated (no, I really did) that she stood up for that pink, that yellow, but the sensation I remember most clearly from that time (so strongly I’m feeling it again, right now) was of falling. Election Day was the ground, rushing towards us with the speed and finality a parachuter must feel when he pulls the cord––and nothing happens.

Instead of addressing ‘chute malfunctions on the way down, we were studying our fingernails.

Again: yes, you have to pay attention to details––the question is, which ones? Every second I spent telling Dallas, No, you can’t make powder blue t-shirts emblazoned with a happy gnu saying

Glory be! I’m voting for Kinky!

(not really, I can’t remember what they actually came up with) was a second lost to a detail that might’ve, oh, I don’t know––gotten more votes? With the sand in the hourglass dwindling––oh, yeah! my metaphor! ––with the ground rushing towards us, why were we wasting time feuding with county coordinators about motherfucking t-shirts?

But the problem wasn’t Nineveh, given to micromanaging digital colors, bathroom cleaning schedules, types of #4 coffee filters (bleached? unbleached?) and candidate scheduling with equal obsessiveness. The problem was that she was

lodged

right

in the middle

of everything.

When Jewford effectively took over the campaign––in many ways a positive development, given the quality of boobitude (there it is again) that preceded him––Nineveh, by virtue of executive fiat and The Senator’s complete abdication, just sort of defaulted into the position of central authority on the campaign staff. Jewford, chief of staff and chief accountant, was mostly gone, on the trail with Kinky, and her word was (rightly) taken to be his.

That’s administration and money, right there.

In addition, she was in charge of Kinky’s schedule, which effectively put her in charge of (or at least gave her tremendous sway over) Field, press, and fund-raising. The few scraps of campaign functionality that were left––padlock choice, grout cleaning policy, pigeon shooing––inevitably accrued to her as well, because, as I think she would’ve been the first to admit, no one else could manage, well, anything nearly as well as she could.

At the very center of our campaign, then: administrative quicksand. If you wandered into it, you were going to get stuck.

At the very center of our campaign, then: an advocate for Kinky the musician, Kinky the writer, Kinky the merch begetter.

What was it like on the other campaigns? I can’t be sure of the specifics, but I can tell you this: it’s not so much that you win elections––it’s more like you lose them less than the other guys. Details matter––like this one, for example: the word “rally” was virtually absent from the campaign vocabulary. Events, fundraisers, golf tournaments, silent auctions, Art Car Parades, gigs…all these were bandied about, constantly, but “rally” ––and its close correlative subject, “voter,” were almost unused.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying on my part. I regularly tried to insert the dad-blamed voter into our planning, but my superiors just couldn’t see what they were missing.  That’s the way of structural defects––you don’t see them until it’s too late.

Top-level structure of the Kinky Friedman for Governor Campaign:

Kinky’s emcee/Borsct Belt sidekick/piano player Jewford was Chief of Staff. Jewford’s significant other Nineveh, working essentially as a booking agent, served as his day-to-day proxy.

The campaign director was The Senator. Resolutely he dozed.

Sidekick+Booking Agent+dormant director. There you have it. The campaign was Kinky-centric, and nothing I said or did was going to change that.

Every campaign is candidate-centric, you might say––it’s the name on the yard sign! Fair enough. It was Kinky’s campaign. But top staff treated him like an entertainer, not a candidate. Jewford, Nineveh, The Senator­­––they acted exactly the way road managers, booking agents, and managers have behaved in bands I’ve been in.

Political Axiom # 29: Enabling is how you get a musician on the stage––but it’s how you cripple a politician. (cf. Hillary Clinton, 2008)

Fans and voters are very different creatures. I don’t think everybody gets that. I don’t think Kinky did, I don’t think Ad Man did––and I’m positive Jewford and Nineveh didn’t. As a fan, you surrender ego and primacy––at least a little, right? But when you pull that curtain behind you in the voting booth, you become a selfish motherfucker: what’s the very best thing for me? Success in politics depends on getting that fundamental point. Kennedy’s famous formulation:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

was just the purest (and most brilliant) kind of bullshit. What can I do for my country? Fuck that! I want: no taxes, perfect roads, safe schools, a kickass volunteer military, plenty of money, lifelong employment, assured retirement, affordable healthcare, 8 square meals a day, a warm place to shit and superb plumbing to take it away! ––oh, and I don’t want to stand in any lines, either!

Politics, you see, is a service industry.

5. Get me a motherfucker to blame, right now

So! Who was to blame for our major dysfunction? Five years ago, I would’ve fought you on this, but with all this time to think it over, with all this time I’ve spent observing campaigns from a newspaper-ey point of view, I gotta say it: I blame me. I saw what was going on at the time. I got it. I even spoke up about it, from time to time. What I didn’t do––and I should have––was force the issue.

Would it have worked? Could I have changed the culture?

Fuck if I know. Maybe. Maybe not. The point is I could see what was going on, and I didn’t do everything I could to change it.

I’m not saying I was the only one who knew––I think just about everybody knew exactly where the quicksand pit was––but you have to understand: with a perpetually absent candidate allergic to anything that even remotely resembled administration, with a campaign director determined to drink and nap his way until he could return to the Great White North, Jewford and Nineveh held absolute sway over the campaign. Nineveh decided who was naughty and nice, and Jewford signed the paychecks. Fuck with them at your peril––we’d all seen the results. Rolling heads. Bloodstains.

They were autocratic.There were four places you could occupy in their Royal perception: with them, against them, in contempt, or neutral.

The ‘with them’ group was decidedly small:

Me, and Rose.

I’m sitting here trying to think of anyone else, but that’s it, that’s all I’m coming up with. Not even Willow made the cut, and she was on Nineveh’s immediate staff. Everybody else existed in a constantly shifting judgment matrix: neutral with, neutral with mild contempt, against but necessary, and so on, a semi-paranoid, wholly disconnected maze.

Besides Kinky himself, I think I was the only one who might’ve been able to alter the course of the campaign, to put us on surer footing for what was to come. It wasn’t because I was wonderful or exceptional or nice or good or kind or capable, it was because I was willing––I’d been willing since my first day, putting my shoulder to any task that needed one. A year and a half later––with all kinds of help, of course––I’d filled buildings with furniture and computers, cleaned bathrooms (a little less help there), gotten us phones, found us a whole IT department in one man, chilled out ten thousand crazy civilians, de-postalized a potential psychopath, pushed loose cannons off the deck, isolated and quarantined Kinky hangers-on and sycophants, stopped leaks (all kinds), disrupted sexual harassment, done the shopping, changed the light bulbs and made the coffee.

It just happened that way. Firing me would’ve been a hardcore action, for real––Kemah and I once had a serious discussion about backing up my position, in case I died, or something, but I never did put together any To Whom It May Concern instructions––it was too difficult to summarize, too much to take a couple of days I didn’t have to codify my job.

It would’ve taken a lot more than me vigorously hollering about our uncampaign to get me fired: with me gone––

––it sounds like I’m overstating it, doesn’t it? It’s not that the campaign could not survive without me––it would’ve been just fine, thank you very much––I just think there was hardly anyone, least of all Jewford, Nineveh, Kinky or The Senator, that wanted to contemplate the ramifications of me, gone.

I was the one motherfucker who knew more or less where everything was.

Which means I had the power to at least try and change things.

And I did.

A little.

Sometimes.

And that, patient reader, is not enough.

_________________________________

*In fact, it was rather smaller than Dallas–that’s just one of our colloquialisms for “very large, indeed.” “Bigger than” is pronounced biggerd n, i.e. Biggerd n Dallas.