From the time we were kids, politics was woven into our experience. Dad represented both the M and the I of the MIC and Mom was a ghostwriter for the lobby set. Earliest memories included deciphering Herblock's cartoons in the Post, our morning daily. Then Kennedy, then King then Kennedy.
Then Nixon. I was too young to really grasp how dreadful that man and his posse were, but he wasn't. He worked on McGovern's campaign in '72, though he was too young to vote himself, hipping me to Hunter Thompson's coverage in Rolling Stone.
Though he made his dough in other fields--printing, publishing, rights management--he never lost his obsession with politics, wholeheartedly agreeing with Heinlein's declaration that it is the only proper game for grownups.
Toward the turn of the century, he made it his own game, consulting on various Democratic campaigns and advocating a new national strategy for the party. In April of 2004, he put his ideas into a memo entitled "Project 90," after the adage that ninety percent of success is just showing up.It called for Democrats to run campaigns for every House seat, not just the winnable ones, arguing that uncontested Republicans can simply PAC out their campaign chests to 'Pubs who do have competition.
The idea caught the attention of a couple of guys around here, and the candidate he'd been working for that year, and eventually was built into the Fifty State Strategy.
In the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department, he was tossed a whole lot of long shot campaigns over the next few years, some of them epic in their Sisyphusian absurdity. Still, he always had a soft spot for the underdog (we grew up Senators fans, dig?). Half of the very few diaries he published here were about beautiful, righteous doomed campaigns on election night.
Maybe it was taking on the karma of lost causes, or maybe the shine of winning some, but his fame in the game grew, in the US and Europe, as a message man, a guy who could boil your appeal down to Serious Narration over Grim Grayscale Images or Hip Minimalist Animated Mockery of the opponent. Those Saturdays with Fractured Fairy Tales came in handy.
He founded a few consulting shops, his most recent being something of a moving, shaking political media group about town. Name in the game with armfuls of Pollies, don't you know.
So respected was his ear for message that the American Association of Political Consultants asked him to be a judge at this year's Pollie Awards in California, an honor he happily accepted.
He was careful on the trip, having had major surgery a few months prior. Despite that care, he caught some sort of bug which steadily worsened after he returned home. A couple of weeks back, he checked into the hospital. Sadly, he did not check out.
Walter Ludwig was my brother. He was a mentor and collaborator and an inspiration and a pain in the ass. He thought more, and more clearly, about politics than any person I have met, including his clients. He was the Mycroft Holmes of this shit.
I will never, ever talk with anyone about American politics at as deep and multi-layered level as I did with him. A dictionary has caught fire and burned to ash in my hand.
I could tell you about what he had to get past to get where he got, but that's not as important as what he did for others: He inspired a faith in politics, in the potency of the popular will combined with knowledge of the machinery of power.
His work on countless campaigns helped build the strong party we know today, and, whether you know his name or not, you owe him a debt.
This season, pick a long shot. Back a worthy Democrat in a district they have almost no chance of winning. Heck, maybe even be a long shot. Run for that impossible seat yourself.
He would have liked that.