Election Day in Half a Week

Election Day is within sight. All Souls Day, to be precise. El Día de los muertos. Do we have an omen here? Nothing much to vote for on the statewide level. The Republicans true to form have decided on candidates whose qualifications are that they are incomprehensibly wealthy. Beyond the dreams of avarice. The Democrats have plumped for the insane and the breathtakingly evil. We have some decent folks running on the local level. They don't, of course, have the chance of a popsicle in hell (google "gerrymander" for an explanation) but I shall enjoy voting for them all the same. And there are a few jolly propositions to vote for this time, one of which may do something about that gerrymandering. And a few crackpot schemes to enjoy voting against.

I have ticked most of the boxes in my sample ballot - many of them with a great deal of reluctance. But this year will probably not vote for some of my perennially favorite write-in candidates; Al Smith, Jefferson Davis, and Frank Skeffington.

You don't know Frank Skeffington? You've never read Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah? Haven't even seen John Ford's movie version? I'm astonished. You need to remedy that ASAP. I've been avoiding political ads on radio and television by re-reading The Last Hurrah. What a delight. A primer on big-city politics in the first half of the last century. A sample (almost) at random:

[His candidate's political broadcast] had had a remarkably tonic effect on him; he was in that state of phenomenal good humor into which he could be lifted only by the ingeniously reprehensible behavior of an ally. His quarrelsome little features had softened, and were now set in a grotesque pattern of intended benignity; his normal truculence, while not entirely shed, had been made less manifest. It was a time of satisfaction for Festus Garvey; he felt that now, for the first time in years, there was truly a chance of defeating Skeffington. He was satisfied by the progress of the campaign. He was satisfied by the coalition of which he was a part, satisfied by the funds it had collected, satisfied by the fact that none of its members, with whom he worked day after day, appeared to suspect his duplicitous attentions towards them all the minute the election was over. But most of all, he was satisfied by his candidate. Not by his ability, but by his remarkable, unlooked-for plasticity. In the beginning; Garvey had had some fears that McCluskey might prove intractable. As an old politician he had more than once observed, in otherwise-promising young politicians, a fatal obstinacy: a reluctance to jettison promises and ideals, a refusal to respond to the little suggestions of older, wiser, and more flexible men, men who understood the ways of indirection. (He himself, for example, over the span of many years, had had a little trick he liked to use on his political broadcasts, when he was all alone in the radio studio, and nobody could see what he was doing. He would stop, all of a sudden, in the midst of a sentence, maybe, and drop his penknife or a few coins on the floor, just to make a little clatter that the radio audience could hear. Then, after a bit, he would start up the old gab again, saying, "Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. I beg your pardon for breakin' off so sudden in ·our little chat together, but my rosary beads slipped out of my fingers and dropped to the floor and I had to stop and pick them up. I know you understand my feelin's!" Oh, it had been a grand trick - one that had worked like a charm; it had been all the better because it had been thought up by his own lovely mother. May God have mercy on the Ma, he murmured with silent piety, as he reflected upon all that he owed to her training. Until the very day she died, he went to her for advice: you could always get some good out of a few minutes gab with the Ma.)