|
Internal Affairs Chapter Two
By The Host
The Proposal
I knew of him. Not everybody did, not yet, but they would soon. Regiopolis isn’t huge – about six thousand undergrads – and word travels pretty quickly, especially within political circles. The major item of discussion was always who was going to run, and though there was still little mention of Williamson, he was making some obvious gestures in that direction.
I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, but it’s important to know that planning a campaign is an involved process, and there’s a lot that has to be done even before planning begins. There’s a standard pattern to be followed.
As a freshman you become involved with a few key clubs and organizations. A lot of politicos wrap themselves up in the International Affairs Association before realizing that all that matters to the members of the IAA is the IAA. They won’t be voting in student government elections because their organization’s internal politics consumes their lives. No, a safer bet is Model Congress or Model United Nations. Maybe you’ll volunteer on a low-level committee in student government; no commitment, just resume-padding, and getting to know some student government types doesn’t hurt. You might also want to join a political party (only Republicans or Democrats need apply, or people who can effectively fake it for four years), or join debating, but you can’t join both debating and the Democratic party. Which isn’t to say we don’t have our share of Democrats in the debating union. We’ve got all types: Republicans, Democrats, even a smattering of Libertarians and Naderites. But the Democrats, alone out of all of them, refuse to carry a card. Official political affiliation is petty. It’s beneath them. Active Democrats are feckless opportunists; Republicans are evil bastards who will stop at nothing to win an election; the Libertarians are simply Republicans in denial; the Naderites are self-righteous crusading assholes who make people feel guilty about wearing shoes and eating hamburgers. But the Dems, at least the halfway intelligent ones, are above all of that, that, that . . . politics.
Go figure.
As a sophomore, a budding student politician is going to want to jack up his involvement. He’ll definitely want a volunteer position in student government this year. He’ll also surround himself with a group of people who are politically savvy and hopefully not too objectionable; these are his campaign volunteers, although for the next eighteen months or so he’ll call them ‘friends’ (and then, if he wins the election, ‘employees’). If he’s a she she’ll probably want to volunteer in the community, preferably in some high-profile humanitarian project; if he only thinks he’s a she, he’d best lose his illusions before he embarasses himself.
Model Congress, always the watershed moment, is where the first hints will be dropped. The shrewd observer will be able to easily spot those gunning for office. New Model Congressmen will likely either take it way too seriously or not take it seriously enough; fogies past their prime will show up for half an hour here and there and otherwise spend their time working up drunks and working them off. The would-be future leaders, on the other hand, will be something to everybody: they won’t miss a chance to debate; they’ll be alternatingly funny and eloquent; in the nights they’ll go wild – but not too wild.
Next comes the election, one year before yours: listen up, because this part’s important. If you’re feeling pretty confident about one of the current candidate teams you might want to ally yourself with them. Officially this shouldn’t help you at all, because all Regiopolis student elections are non-partisan; no campaign team carries over from year to year. In reality, all campaign teams tend to fall into one of two general factions, pretty cleanly along party lines, and you see the same campaign volunteers from year to year to year. Of course, there are more Democrats on campus (Regiopolis is, after all, a small New England liberal arts college), but the GOP runs a better campaign and has an incredible ability to convince students to vote against their own self-interest.
Go figure.
Aligning yourself with one team or another can be tricky. First of all, you have to be careful about how you ally yourself. Actively campaigning can put you in close touch with potential volunteers, but it brands you in the public consciousness as one of those volunteers, which places you somewhere between ‘retarded janitor’ and ‘syphilitic ex-con’ in the university pecking order. The more effective option is to meet with the ‘back room strategists’ (volunteers too repulsive to unleash upon the student population) and offer ‘campaign advice’ (it need not be good advice). Perhaps you can send a letter to the campus newspaper supporting your guys or, better yet, blasting the other team; just make sure you resist the temptation to ever again write any other letter on any other subject. Only crackpots write to campus newspapers, political flunkies on campaign being the sole (excusable) exception.
The other fear, of course, is that your team will lose. Or that they’ll win and then suck. Either way you’ll be left with a demoralized husk of an obviously sub-par campaign machine, and you’ll have denied yourself the flexibility of being either an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’.
You’ll soon lose that flexibility anyway, unless you’re an especially adept political manipulator. Once the new executive has been elected comes hiring season. Has the newly-elected executive set its stake on the opposite side of the political abyss? Do you have more respect for Hitler? Doesn’t matter. The only question worth bothering with is this one:
Are they gonna cock things up?
If not, then you want to be working for them in a high-profile position. And if so, don’t even apply. There are no points here for being a pansy, either. Aim for an important position or accept none at all; don’t allow yourself to believe that being a mid-level committee chair will let you go either way. If you don’t get the job you apply for, don’t be tempted to try again for a position further down the food chain. Like it or not, you’re now an outsider. All you can do is hope that your original impression was wrong and that the newly-elected exec will bring the student government to the brink of self-destruction over the course of the next ten months. It doesn’t hurt to try to nudge things along in that direction.
But if you’re an outsider and the executive actually seems to be halfway competent then you’re just going to have to spin. Understand that the student body is profoundly stupid and easy to fool, and then, with a smart communications strategy and a light touch, you can turn Mother Theresa into Satan’s lawyer. If you have some friends working for the campus rag, this can be done pretty easily. If you don’t, get some.
Things might seem to be a little easier if you’re an insider. Sure, your every decision will be analyzed in great detail by over-zealous student reporters, but there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and nobody who hasn’t already made up his mind about the election months in advance really reads the paper anyway. If the year is going well you’ll want to take as much credit for it as you can; if things are going poorly, you should distance yourself as quickly as possible. Openly criticizing your coworkers may make things a little tense around the office, and maybe even ruin some friendships, but there’s hardly a better way to both wipe your hands of the mess you’ve made and get some free publicity to boot. Like the man says, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Just keep your eye on the prize.
An additional benefit of being an insider is the large network of contacts it gives you. Granted, most of these people are constitutionally required to remain neutral throughout the campaign, but you’ll quickly learn that no piece of paper is going to stand in their way. Nonetheless, this can be a double-edged sword, as it makes it all the more likely that rumor of your aspiration will escape early.
And that brings us to the final, cardinal rule of electioneering: do not let it be known that you intend to run until the last possible moment. Not really, anyway. There is a very specific timeline here. First, there should be some stirrings of interest at the Model Congress one year before the campaign, and you’ll want to start quietly gathering together a team shortly thereafter. Be careful to deny all allegations. If you can’t lie with a straight face, or you have some moral qualms about deceiving your friends, Regiopolis has a small school of theology for you. Politics, I’m afraid, just ain’t your bag.
Now, come fall you should have the core of your campaign team together, and the rumors should now include your running-mate, but they shouldn’t extend beyond political circles. You’ll want to start attending meetings of clubs you have absolutely no interest in, especially cultural and religious ones. Maybe you can even found a club, as long as it never actually does anything. You’ll also want to make a concerted effort to gain the attention of people much cooler than you could ever hope to be. Maybe you’re friends with the football team’s waterboy and he introduces you to some linebackers. You might have to offer them jobs or money or love. Whatever. Just start gathering these people around you, because they’ll come in handy later.
The general student body should remain oblivious to your machinations until at least mid-November. By this time you’ll have a platform which you can use (discreetly) to recruit volunteers. Actually, you’d better leave recruiting up to someone else. You don’t want to actually deal with these people directly, after all.
Then, at Model Congress – and not a moment before – it should become obvious to everyone that you intend to run for office. Two weeks later campaigning begins in earnest.
So, you may be asking, why keep your cards close for so long? Well, there’s one simple reason.
You don’t want to look ambitious.
Jamie Williamson, unfortunately, never really understood this.
In February of 2003, as I said, I knew of him, but I didn’t know him personally. I had probably met him once or twice, and I had seen him at Model Congress, where he was Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was singularly awful, especially when speaking before the full session; it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
But now I was a train wreck. It was my last day as Acting Commissioner of Internal Affairs. I’m not going to go too far into the internal functioning of our student government just yet; suffice to say there is a Commission of Internal Affairs and, at its head, a Commissioner. Among other things, the Commission oversees student elections; so when my boss, Meghan Lake, decided to run for the vice-presidency, I had to step up and take over for a few weeks – so it was all well and good that I’d decided to wait an extra year before running myself.
Meghan was an insider, and Mike Shantz, who had won on his second try, was the president that year – this meant that Meghan, like Mike, was going to be running with the support of the Republican camp, although she herself was more of a centrist Democrat. This also meant that when Williamson decided to gamble on supporting a team, he had to support hers. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t be willing to set aside his political convictions and run as a de facto Democrat next year; it’s that nobody would really believe him if he did. Meghan could moonlight as a Republican because she pretty much kept her views to herself. Jamie, on the other hand, was a young Rush Limbaugh without the vitriol and jowls.
So he took a risk by supporting her and it didn’t pay off. She lost. He had blasted the other guys in a letter to the campus newspaper, the Herald. So he was indelibly linked with a failed campaign, and he had no chance of getting hired by the very people he had so publicly lambasted.
I, on the other hand, had received accolades for doing a swell job of running elections, an eighty hour a week endeavor, while carrying a full course load and dealing with a severe lack of experience. I’d survived, and now I was a shoe-in for the post of Commissioner full-time next year. So I was celebrating: the election was over, my duties had been dispensed with, the future looked bright, and I was getting paid for another six hours.
I left the office at 10:00am, the moment the House of Lords Pub opened upstairs, and I’d spent the last four hours there drinking with a handful people: first Mike Shantz and his vice-president, Emma Kaufman, and four or five people I barely knew; then a half-dozen people drifted in and out of the place to have lunch with me. Now I had spent a couple of hours alone in the bar with Rahool Moloo, who had been Meghan’s running-mate and was a long-time friend of mine from debating. We talked about student politics – he was still smarting from his recent loss – and world politics – he had decided to tramp around Boston for the summer and try to get himself attached to a Democratic presidential campaign – and debating politics – Derek was gunning for the union’s presidency – and women – I was still, in my words, miserable and alone – and beer – in short, everything that mattered to us. Rahool knew Jamie Williamson through the campaign, and when Jamie came in, escorted by Brimstone (that’s the name we gave to Rahool’s campaign manager), they made a beeline for our table.
We talked and talked and talked. I liked Brimstone. I don’t know why. I mean, objectively speaking, he was a detestable human being. He was a parasite on the political process; a canker on the ass of democracy. His only purpose in life, for as long as he could remember, had been to attach himself to people who had all those things he lacked – leadership, vision, charisma, good hair – and help propel them to victory in the hopes that he could lap up some scraps in the aftermath. Of course, he was little help even to those whose campaigns were successful, Mike Shantz being the obvious example. Brimstone’s skill wasn’t campaigning, it was taking credit for other people’s skill at campaigning. He did it exceedingly well.
He was positively insufferable. He was ugly, he was obnoxious, he was unhygienic, he was crude, he was an alcoholic. He had ulcers from the time he was sixteen and, he bragged, his GP told him he was on his way to a heart attack by the time he turned twenty-five. His mentors were, in no particular order, Niccolo Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger, and Darth Vader. Not to mention himself. He dominated all conversations he entered, and all that he talked about was politics, specifically his campaigns, which is to say his accomplishments.
But I liked him. I really don’t know why. Maybe it’s because he was such a caricature of himself, a figure that could only exist in movies and books (I know, I know). He was Billy Bob Thorton as Richard Jemmons as James Carville in Primary Colors. He was living, breathing comic relief. He was harmless. He amused me.
He amused Williamson, too. Rahool was too drunk to be amused. (He’s a big guy but I swear my mother’s got a higher tolerance.) I have to admit, I was feeling pretty tipsy myself. I guess I let my guard down.
Brimstone asked the question first. ‘So, who do you think is going to run next year?’
Butterflies in my belly. My ears, I think, physically pricked up. Should I say anything? No, you stupid fuck. Primary rule. You’ve got a year. Give it time and, right now, see who your competition is gonna be.
Williamson leaned in, looked closely at me, then at Brimstone, then back. It was the first time he’d spoken in at least half an hour.
‘Who do you think is going to run?’
I turned to Brimstone. He took a long swig of Stella, then a dramatic silence, an affected thoughtfulness. He smiled.
‘I keep my ear low to the ground, and I don’t do it so I can tell you all what I hear. So. I asked you first. Who?’
Williamson leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, grinned.
‘I am definitely running next year.’
I don’t know if I flinched. I don’t know if a visible change came over me. Suddenly I was conscious of the beer swishing around in my belly and the blood rushing warmly to my head. I put my elbows on the table, my chin cupped in my hand. I played it cool.
Williamson leaned forward again, speaking quietly but forcefully. ‘I am going to be president. There’s nothing that will stop me. I am determined to win this election; I’ve never been so determined about anything in my life. I can do it. I’ve already got people ready to pound the pavement for me. All I need is a running mate, give me one week to get together a platform and throw me against any candidate team: I’ll win, this time next month. I’ve got a year, though, and that’s just padding. That just makes everything all the more certain. I know I’ll win. Nothing else is acceptable. And people better know not to fucking cross me when my mind is made up.’
He sat back heavily in his chair, his eyes ablaze. I sat back in mine slowly, carefully. Rahool rubbed his big hand across his forehead and stared into his glass. Brimstone smiled.
Please comment!
-The Host
3/8/2005 10:15:43 PM
Comment on this fan fiction!
|
|
|
