One of the established political
clichés compares sausage-making with government and usually concludes with some
suggestion that people don’t want to look too close at either process – the idea
seemingly being that there’s too much blood-and-guts to deal with.
This is roughly 180 degrees from
the truth. Making laws and making hot dogs are messy procedures, yes, but
tedious ones. All you have to do is attend a few hearings or inspect a few
assembly lines to get the idea. Something that starts out living and breathing
is transformed through various mechanical actions into matter that is limp,
lifeless, and, quite often, indigestible. There’s a reason why they refer to the
“grind” of legislative business.
But luckily there is such a
thing as political theater to reawaken our interest in public business and to
focus our attention on the issues. Take a recent cause celebre featuring
Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr. (who, perhaps not coincidentally, is
gearing up a campaign for the U.S. Senate).
As anybody who watches a cable
news network knows, Ford was conspicuously involved in a fracas last week on the
House floor. It came after a freshly elected member of the House, Republican
Jean Schmidt of Ohio, delivered a “message” from an unidentified Marine of
her acquaintance to Rep. John Murtha, a venerable Democrat and himself a
former decorated member of the Corps. The message? – “that cowards cut and run,
Marines never do.”
That’s what Murtha, the ranking
member of the House Defense subcommittee, got for suggesting the time had come
to consider a staged withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. A commotion
ensued, in the course of which several Democrats shouted out demands for an
apology, and Ford, often accused by his adversaries on the left of “crossing
over” to the other side of the political aisle, did so quite literally and
dramatically.
All reports had Ford shouting
and storming over to the Republican side, and The Washington Post would
quote Ford as “screaming, ‘Say Murtha’s
Name!’” Various accounts went on to indicate that Ford was led back to his side
of the aisle (“gently taken by the arm,” as one report had it) by Rep. David
Obey of Wisconsin.
Only the readers of The
Christian Science Monitor got the follow-up account, which detailed how
Ford, after leaving the floor, was approached in the House lobby moments later
by Republican congressman Patrick McHenry of North Carolina. One might
suppose that fisticuffs were imminent. But no – “both men broke into big smiles
and high-fived each other.”
As the Monitor goes on
explain, the two congressman, though in opposing parties and presumably
differing on both Iraq and the Murtha matter, had been teammates in a football
game two nights before, one matching House members against Capitol police. (The
game was a fund-raising affair to benefit the families of two officers who were
slain inside the Capitol in 1998 by a gun-wielding invader.)
Debating the withdrawal issue
with another Republican colleague, Arizona’s
J.D. Hayworth, on MSNBC’s Hardball
this week, Ford, who prides himself on his good relations with GOP members, was
once again conciliatory.
“I was amongst a group, the
first group of Democrats to pledge my support for the resolution authorizing the
use of force,” the Memphis congressman pointed out, going on to say, “I’m as
committed as you are, J.D., to winning. I voted for this effort in Iraq, I voted
for the money, I’ve been to Iraq several times like you, and you and I are
friends.”
Even more
chivalrous was the praise conferred by Ford on Hayworth for his sponsorship of a
resolution (defeated 403-3) calling for “immediate” withdrawal of U.S. forces
for Iraq. Though many of his Democratic colleagues accused Hayworth of having
distorted Murtha’s position in an effort — successful, as it turned out — to
force the issue, Ford credited him for bringing about “the first time in more
than three years that we’ve had an open, honest and essential debate about
Iraq.”
Which was the real
Harold Ford – the belligerent combatant of the House floor or the ingratiating
colleague on MSNBC? Answer: Both or neither (the choice depending largely on the
politics of the beholder). All successful politicians know when to hold up and
when to fold up, and, for better and for worse, a sense of theater would seem to
be a useful civic attribute, both for the public actor himself and for his
audience.
Corrections: Mark White,
not Mark “Wright,” is the former legislative candidate who will seek the
Republican nomination for Ford’s 9th District congressional seat;
Though former U.S. attorney Veronica Coleman proudly owns up to a
Democratic background, she notes correctly that the office of Juvenile Court
Judge, which she seeks, is formally non-partisan, involving no party primaries;
GOP activist Bill Wood has expressed interest in the seat now held by
Memphis school board member Michael Hooks Jr., not the county commission
seat occupied by Michael Hooks Sr.
Zioncheck for President
Nation Books, 290 pp. (paper), $15.95
We all know the familiar dictum attributed to the late Tip
O’Neill, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives: “All politics is local.”
I’ve often parroted this line myself, but not until I read Zioncheck for
President, a seminal new work by my old Flyer colleague Phil
Campbell, did I realize exactly, and in how many unexpected ways, that statement
is true.
Zioncheck, which plays off the apocryphal-seeming
but utterly real history of a half-mad onetime Seattle congressman who pushed
all the envelopes before killing himself in 1936, is the account of a 2001
city-council campaign managed by Campbell after he got fired from his job at
The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly that he went to after
(voluntarily) leaving the Flyer in the late ‘90s.
That may not sound like material for a minor little
masterpiece, and I surely didn’t expect one when, after some unconscionable
procrastinating, I finally opened it up for a read. But the book – funny, sad,
serious, and illuminating – works uncannily well on several levels, including
one or two that I didn’t know existed. All I can say is that now I understand
that wicked but (it would seem) vulnerable gleam that played in Campbell’s eyes
during the few years that he occupied a cubicle next to mine at the Flyer.
He sees things.
Add that to some world-class doggedness and – in every
sense of the adjective – offbeat creativity. Having discovered some years ago
that there was a town in Alabama called Phil Campbell, the Ohio-born writer
rounded up a score of similarly named people through the United States and
declared an annual “Phil Campbell Festival” there. For all I know, it still goes
on.
Campbell understands that life is a kaleidoscope, that all
the trivia of our private lives somehow connects, metaphorically and actually,
to the large macro-universe and that, in a profoundly democratic sense, every
part of it is equal to every other part. Even as our interest is being whetted
concerning the issues of that faraway city-council election – which focused on
the candidates’ different ideas for an urban transit system! – we are also
seduced into caring about Campbell’s simultaneous power struggles in the group
house he lives in. Even when 9/11 occurs in mid-campaign, we see that
catastrophic event – and the principals’ long-distance reaction to it – as a
part of the general cacophony. The symphony, rather.
“Grant, the Twin Towers are gone,” Campbell tells
his candidate, who responds, “We’ll go watch the news in a minute. But right now
we need to pick up some materials from a few volunteers.”
In other words, everything is life-or-death all the
time – for Campbell, for his candidate, for the apparently disturbed housemate
who tinkers ominously with a Glock pistol, and for the prominent Seattle
personages, living and dead, whose destinies keep cropping in. Most notable of
all is the case of the late crazed congressman Marion Zioncheck himself, whose
compelling personal history – tragic, madcap, and intensely relevant — is
interspersed throughout the narrative in the manner of those historical
anecdotes Hemingway used as chapter-dividers in his short-story volumes.
The book will give you goose bumps. It’s a page-turner.
And, oh, for those who knew Campbell and those who didn’t, there are some
intriguing Memphis memories here.