All these millionaire candidates railing about “the elite” reminds me….
….about the first paid writing gig I got. The summer before my senior year, I was hired as the press secretary and speechwriter for Scott Harshbarger, who was running for District Attorney of Middlesex County in Massachusetts. This was 1978, two decades before Romney, when Massachusetts was so heavily Democratic the primary was the election and Election Day was a coronation. (The one exception was Republican Senator Edward Brooke, who was black and had a long affair with Barbara Walters, which makes three exceptions).
Harshbarger was smart, decent, endlessly appealing, an accomplished former assistant Attorney General and a former football star at Harvard, which I shamlessly worked into every press release (“Harshbarger zig-zagged the county on broken-field run of successful stops, finally reaching the endzone at a Sons of Italy Bean Supper where he huddled with supporters….”). He was an ideal candidate with one problem. He was running against a 19-year incumbent, John Droney, who had been appointed by then Senator John F. Kennedy in 1959. Droney had run virtually unopposed in the last four primaries and was so entrenched that few voters knew he had suffered a stroke in 1975 so debilitating he could barely speak. His office was being run by his incredibly capable first assistant, the former Vietnam war hero John Kerry. Yeah, that John Kerry. John “Why the long face?” Kerry.
I joined the campaign in June and was there about a week catching up on various stump positions and showering the local papers with twice-daily press releases (“Harshbarger Scores With Six-Point Plan to Rout Violent Crime”). We had a meeting to discuss an upcoming press conference in which Harshbarger was going to announce he was turning in way way beyond the requisite amount of signatures to enter the September primary. The talk quickly moved toward a discussion of whether or not he would discuss Droney’s health. Should he do it now? Should he hint at it and bait a reporter to ask him? Should he use the phrase “irretrievable neurological deficit?” Do the words “slurred speech” sound like a slurred speech?
I said nothing until the end of the meeting, when I raised my hand (which got a laugh from the other six people) and said, “In every piece I’ve read since I got here, you would not bring up Droney’s health. That you would not make his health an issue. So, why are we talking about it now?”
Scott Harshbarger smiled at me and said, “Because I am in a political campaign.”
A month later, a local councilman who was always in the paper for getting a pinball machine franchise from a North End mob guy walks into the office and gives Scott Harshbarger a giant hug. And Scott Harshbarger hugs him back. And there’s a lot of shoulder rubbing and “Don’t forget the Bean Supper Thursday!” And maybe an envelope. The guy finally leaves and everyone is spongeing stamps and answering phones except me, who is staring slack-jawed.
And again, Harshbarger smiles and says, “Political campaign.”
Which, 34 years later, is what I still have to tell myself when I see and hear the things I see and hear.
(POSTSCRIPT: Harshbarger brought up the health issue three weeks before the primary, lost by two percent, then came back and beat Droney four years later. He served two terms as Middlesex County DA, then two as Massacusetts Attorney General, winning reelection in 1994 with 72 percent of the vote. In 1998, he ran for Governor and lost narrowly to incumbent Republican Paul Celucci. People will tell you he lost the election because he was not appropriately sycophantic to Democratic House Speaker Thomas Finneran. Other people. Not me. What do I know?)
