Cross-posted at BloggingforMichigan.com
The other night, I did a double-take when a "re-elect Joe Knollenberg" (MI-09) ad aired on TV. The ad gave a starring role to L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland County (Michigan) executive who himself is up for re-election. So we have a 69-year-old political warhorse endorsing a 75-year-old congressman on a Republican ticket headed by a 72-year-old.
The age and, especially the insularity, of those three men reminded me of Mayor Frank Skeffington, the hero (if you can call him that) of the classic political novel The Last Hurrah. At the age of 72, Skeffington commits the classic political blunder: running for re-election one too many times. He winds up getting trounced by an empty suit named Kevin McCluskey, whose biggest advantage is that he has no record to campaign against....
Confident to the end, the mayor decides to wage one last old-fashioned political campaign. It's meant to be Skeffington's monument to himself. The mayor uses TV and radio to reach voters, but does so grudgingly: he considers the broadcast media "shortcuts" that can't compare with personal contact with the people he's comfortable and familiar with.
Skeffington is the politician's politician: he's a master at exacting revenge, an expert vote-counter, and a schmoozer extraordinaire. But none of that helps him at the polls: times had changed, and he hadn't. He relied on advisers who were even older than he was, and he spent an inordinate amount of time practicing retail politics at events like wakes, where he got up close and personal with an aging tribe of old-line Irish Catholics. Those supporters weren't being replaced, and that created an vacuum in which anyone--including a nobody like McCluskey--could knock off Skeffington.
Of course, it's 2008, not 1956; Oakland County isn't Boston; and McCain, Knollenberg, and Patterson are all facing much higher-quality competition than Skeffington ever did. Nevertheless, I'm getting the impression that all three men are repeating Frank Skeffington's mistake of campaigning to a diminishing base of hard-core supporters. They could be in for the same rude surprise that Skeffington got on Election Night.
Bonus coverage. Some of my favorite lines from the book:
"I thought he died years ago; he seemed to be the kind of man who would die years ago."
"The distinction between private and corporate theft if a neat one; I've never been quite able to accept it."
"Everybody likes the village idiot, which doesn't necessarily mean that they'd like him as the chief of police."
"I listened to a political speech only once in my life and I nearly died as a result."
"I'm not sure where they get the meat for these ceremonial dinners, but I suspected it comes from a beast especially bred for the occasion. Probably a banquet variety of yak."
"Everybody likes to be considered a bit of authority, and for some reason most people want to be considered political authorities."
And the best line of all...
"He can mean whatever he needs to mean in order to get elected. After that, we can change the meaning."