Since the odds of you being attacked by a shark are about the same as being marooned on a desert island with Jennifer Lopez or Russell Crowe, New York Times writer John Tierney has written The Best Case Scenario Handbook, a parody of those successful worst-case handbooks. If you are going to learn how to survive an elevator free-fall, why not also learn how to act when Santa Claus actually shows up (“Santa knows the difference between ‘good’ scotch and ‘bad’ scotch”)? Or how to receive a divine visitation (“Be accommodating, but not slavish”)? Or how to respond when an ATM just keeps on spitting money at you? (Duh.) Tierney, who co-wrote the self-help spoof God Is My Broker: A Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth , has crafted a witty, often hilarious book that lives up to the expectations laid out in Christopher Buckley’s laughing and touching introduction. (To wit: the conceit is funny, sure. But it wouldn’t stay funny for 125 pages if Tierney couldn’t keep the laughs coming.) By the way, step number three for surviving on a desert island with Jennifer Lopez? Discreetly avoid rescue.
Category: Article
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Cicero, The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt
Many people don’t understand that “May you live in interesting times” is a curse. It is certainly one that befell Cicero, who was indeed Rome’s greatest politician, in the sense both of statesman and opportunist. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, and Augustus, the figures that did most to shape Rome into the empire we know. But Cicero was not an aristocrat, but a man who rose by virtue of oratorical skill to be the most powerful Roman who didn’t command an army. The Rome of the first century B.C. was in chaos. Its system of government, with interminable layers of checks and balances (which served as the primary model for the writers of our constitution) was paralyzed. Only consensus could make law, and consensus was virtually impossible to achieve. Dissidents had only two courses: they could argue loudly for reform and usually end up assassinated for their trouble, or they could raise an army and impose reform. During this time, Cicero, who was not even a native Roman, achieved the rank of Senator and Consul through pure force of intellect. Luckily, the evidence of his intellect, with all his human foibles, is preserved—in his speeches as a lawyer and senator, his philosophical treatises, and in 900 letters to friends and rivals. Everitt has done a marvelous job of synthesizing this material, as well as all the other evidence, to create a readable biography not just of the man who walked a delicate line defending the Roman republic during its slide into dictatorship, but of that interesting time itself.
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Viewers Like You? by Laurie Ouellette
When our associate editor’s sister writes a book, we can’t help but think you should buy it. Especially if that book was the successful and superhip result of a Ph.D. dissertation on the unlikely subject of contemporary television programming and viewing. In Viewers Like You?, Laurie Ouellette finally explains why, despite knowing better, we vegged out in front of white-bread shows like The Price is Right and Love Boat instead of the plentiful whole wheat “educational programming” just a channel away on PBS. Viewers Like You? traces the history of public broadcasting in the U.S., and argues that public TV’s rejection of popular culture has cut the legs off its capacity to appeal to the public it purports to serve. Ouellette explores history and cultural theory to reveal that PBS programmers consistently miss the mark on the needs and interests of the public, mostly because they rely on pat cultural assumptions steeped in the politics of class, gender, and race. Ouellette is an assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, and is currently working on an anthology about reality TV.
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Heartland
The opening of Heartland could not have been timed better. With winter approaching, our primitive souls yearn for the comfort food that will sustain us through the next six months. Lenny Russo, the former executive chef at W.A. Frost, has crafted a North American Midwest cuisine (who knew?) consisting of all locally grown produce, nuts and berries, fish, beef and game, with a menu that changes on a nightly basis. Meat, fish, and veggie tasting menus for the hearty appetite, and a stream-lined a la carte selection for those with a smaller appetite. Heartland, however, goes international with their libations: 138 selections of wine (American, French, some Italian), regional and foreign beer as well. Dinner only. Reservations are strongly encouraged, as the restaurant only seats around fifty. Heartland, (651) 699-3536.
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Portait of the Artist as an Old Master
Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.
You walk up a flight of stairs and down the flourescent-lit cinderblock hall of a faceless warehouse in the industrial heart of East Hennepin Avenue. You push through a set of black steel doors labeled simply The Atelier, and you enter a space where time and the outside world have lost their hold. The stinging smell of oil and turpentine hangs on the air, and the pristine white walls are punctuated by long gray curtains hiding innumerable rooms beyond. Dividing the walls like a riot of unrelated windows are hundreds of paintings.
The paintings are landscapes, still lifes, and a small army of figures, mostly nudes looking on. They are solitary images, some in color, many in black and white or sepia, each with its own demure elegance. Pull back one of the curtains and a cascade of cool, northern light dapples the small room as if it were a private chapel. More paintings line the perimeter of the room, stacked upright four or five deep. Opposite the window is a table covered with blue silk, a white porcelain pitcher, a silver tray, and a clutch of pink roses. From one wall, a plaster face, milky and deathly in its bone-like monochrome, frowns down at a disheveled assortment of paint tubes and brushes. The silence is vast, the scent of mineral spirits dizzying. The stillness is both mesmerizing and foreign.
But the sensation suddenly evaporates when a voice chimes out from behind. A small woman with a flash of brilliant blond hair appears from around the corner. Her greeting reveals an easy Texas drawl as she introduces herself as Cyd Wicker, co-director of the Atelier, a school for fine art painters. Wicker’s name reappears over her shoulder, attached to a large painting of Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. It’s a relief to know this isn’t a time warp anymore. As we stroll through room after room of pedestals, easels, still-life props and paint carts, Cyd explains the courses that would-be painters pursue at the Atelier. Four years full-time, drawing the figure three hours every day, five days a week. Pencil, charcoal, painting in black and white, painting in color, portraiture, still-life, interiors. She speaks in terms of tonality, light, nature and observation.Then she ticks off a list of names: Burne-Jones, Millais, Godward, Waterhouse, and Bouguereau (yes, the beautiful child and mother offering an apple at the MIA—the one that’s on all the posters). But mostly the names are unfamiliar, long dead. Foremost, Wicker talks of lineage, the ancestry of the Atelier—as if it were a family tree. Still more names: Ives Gammell, the Boston School, William Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jacques-Louis David— these men, too, long past. Except one, Richard Lack, who founded this institution in Minneapolis more than thirty years ago.
At 74 years old, Richard Lack is an institution in his own right. “It’s really been incredible what he’s accomplished,” says Steven Levin, a successful painter and one-time Lack pupil. Lack has been an artist nearly all his life. A well-regarded portraitist and landscape painter, he has works in collections all across the county, including governor’s portraits at our Capitol. Moreover, as the founder of Atelier Lack, the forerunner of the current Atelier, he’s taught his craft to dozens of others. His students consider him to be one of the most influential teachers alive today, a teacher of whom they speak in the same breath as Rembrandt and Rubens. Steve Gjertson, in his recently published biography of Lack, unabashedly calls him “one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century.”
Yet Lack’s success hasn’t made him a household name by any means, and the fact that people have come from all over the country to study with him has gone largely unnoticed by the cognoscenti. “He stayed on his own path, and it’s always been an uphill struggle,” Wicker says. The established art world looks at Lack as an anomaly, part of something abandoned a hundred years ago in the tidal wave of modernism and its tangle of currents. While Lack may not appreciate the dismissive posturing of the moderns, he doesn’t give them much heed. It’s the past that he really cares about. He is an apostle of a tradition of painting that all but perished in the 20th century. Yet it’s a tradition with roots reaching back to the Renaissance—to the imagery, style, and techniques of those still known as the giants of art history, the likes of Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci.
Lack is a purveyor of realism. “Classical Realism” to be exact, a term his biographer claims Lack himself coined in 1982. And the company of the old masters suits him just fine. It’s their impulse he lives by. For Lack and his followers, what is good in art today should be judged by the same merits it was judged by then. As he wrote more than twenty years ago, “Our criterion is broad and simple: A picture must be beautiful in line and color, and the representational element skillfully achieved. Only then can we dwell on matters of taste, style, innovation, historical significance, relevance of subject matter, paint handling…”
The teacher wasn’t writing about Cherry Spoon Bridges. “The rest of the world can have it,” he says in a satisfied undertone, on a glorious autumn day in his studio. His snow white hair and quiet gaze give him a countenance that is at once ancient and full of life. Somehow his aluminum walker and blue robe have a regal dignity, lit from north facing windows set at 45 degrees, just as da Vinci dictated. In a way, you could call it a matter of perspective.
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Wellstone the Teacher
My son Matt, who is a freshman at Carleton College, called me early last Friday afternoon to tell me that he’d just heard that Paul Wellstone had been killed in a plane crash. He’d got the news right after getting out of his freshman political science class, the same class I’d taken at Carleton 32 years ago from Paul Wellstone.
By then I’d been at Carleton for two terms and had encountered, I thought, all the typical types of college teacher. The calculus teacher had a beard and wore a peace medallion over his turtleneck and smoked dope with students. The Latin teacher was 70 years old and chain smoked Pall Malls while quizzing you on Virgil’s grammar. The English teacher lost his collection of tweed jackets and Hemingway when his house went up in smoke.
Wellstone breathed fire.
He was the first teacher who reminded me of me—short stature, long hair, loud voice. Like me, he wore t-shirts and jeans to class and seemed to pay scant attention to the reading list he’d assigned, except that he had an amazing command of facts that he used to support his lectures, which actually were more like speeches. His brilliance was manifest. He was a first year teacher, so he couldn’t have memorized his lectures, but he spoke without notes for an hour. He wasn’t constrained by a podium, but he was predictable. Every lecture he’d start with his fingers jammed into his jeans with the thumbs hooked over the edge of the pocket, as if he were trying to restrain himself from what he must have known was coming–the inevitable rising volume, quickening cadence, and karate chopping of knowledge into our small freshman brains.
Sometimes you’d come out of class feeling as if you’d been assaulted by an intellect and energy so far superior to yours that you’d never measure up. But more often, you felt smarter for having spent an hour with him. That was his power, and he used it to great effect on people who had yet to fully develop their own critical abilities.Wellstone didn’t fit the Carleton mode. Then, Carleton was the ivory tower, and the presumption was that most of what you’d ever have to know could be learned within the confines of campus. Students were not permitted to have cars. All students lived in the dorms. And the work load was so ferocious and academic standards so high that every moment spent other than in class or the library was regarded as lost. Carleton’s stature among the best liberal arts colleges seemed a justification of its insular attitudes. Whenever we had a large snowfall, I imagined the college news bureau coming up with a press release headline: “Highway 19 Closed, World Cut Off.”
Wellstone wasn’t of such scholarly demeanor. In 1974, he was given a negative evaluation by his department and was on the verge of being fired. The then president openly wanted to be rid of him, as did most of his colleagues. (To their credit, many Carleton profs admitted this even after last Friday.) But students and recent alumni, who’d obviously picked up something about the power of politics in his classes, organized in his defense, as did some sympathetic colleagues. The college eventually agreed to an evaluation of his work by scholars not connected with Carleton. This evaluation was overwhelmingly positive, and the decision was reversed. He was actually granted tenure a year ahead of the normal cycle.
Carleton was an early power base for him. A liberal arts college in a liberal state is a Petri dish for growing lefties, and he knew it. From Carleton, he started organizing in Rice County, moved from there to the western Minnesota power line controversy, to the nomination for state auditor and to the Senate. His cadre was young, very smart, and mesmerized by his power to harangue. Wellstone never taught, by example anyway, that it was sometimes more effective to shut up. (Rick Kahn, a former student who spoke at his memorial service, unfortunately didn’t pick up that lesson from anyone else either.)
Wellstone’s attractiveness lay not just in his oratorical skills, though, but in his liberal message itself, repeated endlessly. His true believers never flagged.
But to others, the diatribe became tiresome, and we lost interest. It’s hard to tell whether it was from pure repetition or because of the seeming change in Wellstone from outsider to insider, best typified by the change in his advertising strategy from the distinctive wit and message of 1990 to the same monotonous doggerel broadcast by every other Candidate X ad infinitum. As his erstwhile ad man said last month in The Rake, “He drank the Kool-Aid.” Hell, if you believe what you hear from those who spend too much time on counterpunch.com, our interest waned because Wellstone wasn’t radical enough.
I went to a Democratic fundraiser with Al Gore last month. The main topic of the evening was why Democrats were losing ground every election. Gore, one would think, should have more insight into that question than any man alive. A brilliant man with the right ideas, who so muddled his message during the campaign that he couldn’t even carry his own state, somehow didn’t offer me any answers. Congressional candidate Janet Robert made it all clear to me though. She chimed in that she was in such a close race she had to support Bush’s Iraq policy so she could get elected.
Since I also have never learned the lesson of shutting up, I asked “Why then should Democrats vote for you if you’re just going to act like a Republican? Any first year marketing student could tell you that you have to draw a clear distinction between your product and that of your competitor. Do you think they sell Aquafresh toothpaste by telling you it’s just like Colgate, only a little bit tastier?” There was a brief lull in the din, which in a room full of Democrats, is about all you can hope for.
Wellstone wasn’t there that night, but he gave us his answer the next week by voting against granting Bush dictatorial war powers. He was the only candidate in a close race to do so. He certainly didn’t do it for marketing reasons, because, if anything should be clear to us, it’s that Wellstone knew nothing about marketing. What he did know was what was right. Oddly, that was his market advantage, and his polls immediately trended up. I wonder if he even knew why.
That’s the last lesson the professor got through to me–that despite the prevailing political wisdom, the people will ultimately know the genuine man not by what he says, no matter how loud and often he says it, but by what he does. The rest is silence.
Photo courtesy of Carleton College
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Mock the Vote 2002
A few years ago, Gerard Cosloy detailed the reasons why we shouldn’t encourage voting. The founder of Matador Records (and legendary Gen-X curmudgeon) argued convincingly that the last thing this nation needs are legislators put into office by the same people who have made Eminem, Spongebob Squarepants, and Miller Lite what they are today. Is that an elitist point of view? Of course it is. Is it correct? Probably. Look at it this way: Do you really want MTV’s viewership deciding the fate of Social Security?
Of course, it’s a matter of degree. Even the most informed political junky can have a few blind spots. For many years, we entered the voting booth with both a sense of purpose and angst. Why were half the names on the ballot completely new to us? Why hadn’t we seen significant public debate among the major-party candidates for dog catcher? What exactly did the State Auditor do besides run for office every four years? Why were regular, law-abiding citizens–most of whom haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom since The People’s Court–being asked to elect judges?
One response–and we think it was more common than anyone lets on–was to vote for a woman, all else being equal. (Consider this salient truth: The single largest minority or “special interest” is women, who at about 51 percent of the population are actually a numeric majority. So why do women hold less than 10 percent of all elective offices?) Well, we know now that there are plenty of women who are just as capable of wildly misanthropic policy positions as men.
The lesson? If you don’t know for whom to vote, then don’t vote. Simply casting a ballot is not enough. Better you don’t vote at all, than vote for someone arbitrarily on the basis of party affiliation, the color of her lawn signs, or the number of vowels in his surname.
But if, on the other hand, you simply don’t know where to vote, try here.
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Forgiving Rick Kahn
Fritz Mondale said Wednesday that the effect of the tragedy on those closest to Wellstone didn’t justify the tone of his memorial service, “But we’ve all made mistakes. Can’t we find it in our hearts to forgive?”
I certainly hope so—for a couple of reasons. First, how do we blame Rick Kahn for an electorate that gives Norm Coleman only 30 percent of the vote when he’s running against Jesse Ventura but 50 percent when running against Fritz Mondale? And second, if the Democrats are in a situation where one speech by one person that nobody had ever heard of can kill their election chances, their problems undoubtedly run deeper.
So, whom can we blame? I think Ventura gets a heaping share for making such a big deal out of Kahn’s speech that he walked out of the memorial, appointed Barkley to the senate seat, and ordered the flags which had been lowered for Wellstone back to the top of the staff. (Of course, if you believe the disingenuous Pioneer Press editorialist D. J. Tice, we should praise Governor Dimwit’s swift assessment of Kahn’s speech, for if not for Jesse, response to the memorial faux pas “would have hardened along partisan lines, producing mostly confusion and still more bitterness.” Yup, thank God for Jesse helping to mitigate the bitterness so voters could get back to considering the real issues.)
Some blame should accrue to Jim Ramstad, the Republican singled out by Kahn that night, who immediately said, "People get carried away sometimes with emotions. We all get carried away sometimes with emotions. Just let it be." The stark contrast between the class Ramstad and the crass Ventura not only benefited the Republicans, but helped sink Ventura’s party mate Tim Penny.
Don’t forget Norm Coleman, who was facing certain drowning under a tidal wave of Wellstone sympathy, and yet never complained, nor showed anything less than regret at the loss of an honorable opponent, even when he knew he would now have to go up against the second most popular politician in Minnesota history.
President Bush deserves particular blame, too. The son of the man who once called Paul Wellstone a “chicken shit” praised Wellstone’s principles, even though he agrees with not a one.
Yeah, I’m blaming the Republicans for their victory, in Minnesota and in every other state where they kicked Demo butt. They are better actors, better marketers and much better politicians. If you don’t believe that, ask yourself if you do believe, had the shoe been on the other foot, that the Republicans would have let the family send some overwrought accountant without a script to deliver Jesse Helms’ eulogy.
It reminds me of the line in The Untouchables when Sean Connery accuses his opponent of “bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Well, the Democrats brought a pea shooter. They have the best orator that’s been in the White House in my lifetime in the audience and they let the admitted drudge Tom Harkin rattle off the same old Democrat doxology? We should be glad these guys lost, because if you can screw up a funeral that bad, imagine what they’d do to the country.
Which, come to think of it, is what you have to do–imagine what the Dems would do, because I’ll be damned if I can remember if they told me in the past several months. One thing you can say about the Republicans is they’ll sure tell you what they are going to do. In case you have forgotten, it’s destroy Iraq, give you a prescription drug plan, fix social security, make sure your neighbor is not Al Qaeda, police up the corporate villains, fix the schools, and get tough on crime while keeping it easy for a 17-year-old undocumented alien to get a sniper rifle. Best of all, you won’t have to pay for any of this because they are not going to raise taxes. What makes it even cooler is that each one of these messages fits neatly into a 30 second voice over of pictures of a good looking young man in an open collar shirt shaking hands and kissing babies.
That is how politics is done. And as long as the Democrats believe that a man like Fritz Mondale, whose thoughts on complex issues don’t fit neatly between the sports and weather on the 10 p.m. news, can win against this kind of expertise and execution, I don’t see much hope.
As for me, tonight I’m going to start acting like a Republican. I’m going out for a very expensive dinner, and I’m going to charge it to my kids.
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Jem Casey Explained
Many readers write to ask about Rake contributor Jem Casey. He is modest, and unlikely to speak up for himself, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to answer a few questions that frequently come up.
Under several different pen names, Jem Casey has written stories for magazines like the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Prairie Schooner, and Harper’s. He also publishes a quarterly newsletter called JUPPER. He has received numerous awards for his short fiction.
Jem Casey is in charge of newspaper clippings at The Rake. As his fans already know, he is frequently the author of the anonymous “newsbreaks” which appear at the bottom of the columns in the print version of The Rake.
Jem Casey is not “the Poet of the Pick” made famous by Irish writer Flann O’Brien. He did not write “the pome that’ll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather.” He is that Jem Casey’s great-grandson, and he too believes that “The Workingman’s Friend” will “live as long as there’s a hard root of an Irishman left by the Almighty on this planet.”
Jem Casey can be reached directly at press@rakemag.com.
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The Puppet Master at Rest
He is responsible for getting Paul and Jesse elected. Minnesota’s premier political ad consultant is the very best in the business. So why’s Bill Hillsman sitting this one out?
Photos by John Noltner
If American politics were the fount of democratic possibility it’s made out to be, Bill Hillsman would be a very rich man for one simple reason. In the fortysome-year history of media-driven political campaigns, there has been no one else remotely like him, no one who possessed his particular combination of razor-sharp ad skills, an impeccable feel for the spirit of the moment, and a gift for making people talk about his candidate. The media critic at the online mag Slate, Scott Shuger, called Hillsman “the greatest political adman who ever lived,” and by whatever yardstick you choose—the sheer inventiveness of his work, or its overwhelming role in electing not one but two populist longshots to prominent office—there is really no contesting the proposition.
With Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Jesse Ventura in 1998, Hillsman proved it was possible for outsiders to crash the party on a shoestring budget. He did it with ads that were funny and engaging and, most important, plainspoken. Hillsman’s spots, from “Looking for Rudy” to “Jesse the Thinker,” threw away the insular, sloganeering language of conventional political advertising; they made jokes instead, elegant little 30-second jibes that tapped workaday outrage over the tyranny of politics as usual. There’s just one problem with Hillsman’s professional prospects: The national political parties want nothing to do with him. “No,” Hillsman agrees ruefully, “we don’t get asked to play very much. The pollsters are against us because I’ve knocked polling. None of the established consultants have anything good to say about us, for obvious reasons. And the Democratic party…” Hillsman trails off without finishing the thought: The Democratic party machine doesn’t want to deal with any media guy whose specialty is getting the unanointed, insurgent candidate elected. At the end of the day, both major parties would rather lose with the known quantity than win with the unknown. The Rake sat down with Hillsman recently, to get his views on this fall’s races and to talk shop about the art and science of the modern political campaign.
The Rake: Do you agree with the argument Kevin Phillips and others have made recently—that scandals involving wealth and power and politics have reached a critical mass and there’s a sea change in public attitudes taking shape?
Hillsman: I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think I do. One thing that’s happened now because of corporate malfeasance is that a lot of people are hit where it hurts the most. Normally you would expect politicians to react fairly quickly when that happens, especially in an election year. Which is why you saw that legislation passed so quickly. But was the legislation meaningful? It was mainly window dressing. And maybe I’ve just been doing this job for too long, but I think by and large people will buy the window dressing until the next crisis comes.
The Rake: You made your mark in political advertising with Wellstone in 1990. What did you sense about the public mood that made you believe that style of political advertising would work?
Hillsman: It wasn’t so much what we sensed in the public mood. It was more a matter of trying out some theories developed for commercial advertising in the political arena. Paul really had nothing to lose, and he didn’t really know he was being used to try out theories.
The old theory of political advertising, which still holds in Washington even these 12 years later, is that media is nothing more than a commodity—and if you layer it on thick enough, you can convince the public of basically anything. That’s how you wind up with Al Checchi spending $40 million in California, [Jon] Corzine in New Jersey spending $60 million, and Mark Dayton spending $12-14 million in Minnesota, which is equivalent to spending about $60 million in Jersey.
It’s a benighted notion about how you win elections. But Paul’s bought into it in the last two elections—the notion that you have to fight fire with fire and keep pouring on the media so people can’t turn around without seeing a spot. Then the message will somehow invade their consciousness, and they’ll go out like robots and vote for that person.
My counter-theory—and this was out of necessity, really—was something that we started to fool around with in the commercial sector in the early 1980s. Commercial advertising used to be framed by this same view about media, that it was more or less a commodity and the number of ads you ran determined your success. When I first came up in the industry as a copywriter in the mid to late 1970s there was a formula for doing commercial ads. In a 30-second spot, you needed to mention the product name in the first five seconds, you needed to mention it at least three times overall, and you needed to show the package or the logo for the last 3-5 seconds. If you did all those things, you had a successful ad. But all this approach did was telegraph to viewers that they were watching a commercial. And most people don’t like commercials. They try not to watch them. What we decided in the early 1980s was, let’s not telegraph that we’re making a commercial. Let’s keep them in suspense, sometimes for up to 20 seconds. And let’s give the people watching a real payoff. It might be making you laugh, touching some emotion, or giving information that’s genuinely of value to you.
What we proved in the early 1980s, and a lot of it came straight out of Minneapolis, was that if somebody pays attention to your commercial, you don’t have to spend as much on media. And that’s significant because media is the single highest line-item cost in any sort of ad campaign. You’re talking tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.
That was the theory. And with Wellstone you had to do it that way, because there wasn’t any money. We basically decided to make the entire campaign a media campaign. Paul had already been out there on the stump, and he was in danger of losing the primary to someone who hadn’t campaigned at all. That’s how little interest there was in this guy’s campaign. Rudy Boschwitz, on the other hand, was going to be on the air a lot. So we tried to pre-empt him, to make every Boschwitz ad that came on work against him: “Anytime you see a Boschwitz commercial, it just means he’s trying to buy the election.” That was the positioning for Paul in a nutshell. It was entirely a media campaign and we pulled it off.
The attitude of the spots was different enough that they appealed to a lot of people who hadn’t felt interested or involved in politics since the 60s or early 70s. It brought a lot of progressives out and united a lot of people. It caught the attention of younger people who had pretty much given up on politics. In many respects it was a precursor to the Ventura campaign. It took people that wanted to believe in politics but had been so disappointed they practically gave up.
But none of those people would have voted for him if you had told them that in 12 years he’d be running an $8 million re-election campaign.