The Weekly Screed (#756)

It’s bean-bag season in America
by David Benjamin

“ ‘You’re not a politician,’ the man said. ‘You’re a public servant.’”
  —    New Hampshire voter at a Donald Trump forum, 8 Feb. ‘16

“This is real retail politics, the way it’s supposed to be…”
       —    N.H. voter Tom Lovely at the same forum

PARIS — Tom Lovely got it right.

Primary elections are politics. Donald Trump is a politician. And politics, as Mr. Dooley stated long ago, ain’t bean-bag.

Well, maybe this year it is.

When I was 17, I ran for vice-president of my senior class at Robert M. LaFollette High — a school named after a politician. My opponent was my best friend, Dick. By virtue of our aspiration to political office, we were politicians, although Dick never challenged my foreign policy credentials and I never made an issue of his dalliance with a buxom brunette named Julie (whom I had seen first). We were both “low-energy.” Neither Dick nor I thought to reassure our classmates of our integrity by saying, “I’m not a politician.”

That would have been a lie. Worse, it would have been supremely phony.

Dick, reprising what happened with Julie, won. He looked dashing in the yearbook photo with Patt, Tracy and the Rev. Mr. Black, our other class officers.

In every election cycle, there’s at least one candidate who disingenuously announces, “Hey, c’mon, folks! I’m not a politician.” Inexplicably, you then hear hundreds — thousands — of voters declare their childlike fealty because they cherish the illusion that this blatant politician is not what he obviously is.

I understand the rationale here. For centuries, American voters have been told — by politicians whose vested interest is to discourage voters from voting — that all politicians are crooked grifters who seek office solely to curry favor with the moneyed elites, to line their own pockets with ill-gotten booty and swindle all those non-voting voters who refused to vote for them because they’re politicians.

For these legions of cynical/gullible non-voting voters, the ideal antidote to not voting at all is to vote for an office-seeker who disclaims both the title and technique of “politician.” This one is different, he assures us. He’s neither senator nor governor, councilman nor elected committeeman. He’s just a regular slob. Like you and me. He’s a (small) businessman, or a simple dirt farmer, a “dealmaker” or the son of Greek/Polish/Italian/Irish immigrants. This self-effacing non-politician, according to the propaganda fomented by his crack team of non-political political operatives, is unsoiled by the grime, slime, duplicity and compromise of politics.

Pure. Like me and Dick. An amateur. An ingénue. A simple proletarian son — or daughter — of the huddled masses, yearning to help us breathe free.

Listening to these non-political political demurrals, it always strikes me that politics is that rare pursuit in which we seem to be reluctant to call an expert to do the job. We don’t ask a beautician to fix our pipes, or a hedge-fund manager to replace our carburetors. We wouldn’t ask a high-school physics teacher to disarm an atomic bomb. But we insist, sincerely, that it’s a great idea to entrust the trigger on 10,000 hydrogen bombs to a “non-politician” who knows bupkes about physics and nothing at all about international relations.

It’s hard to think of another realm in which we so eagerly prefer amateurism over competence. It shows up in a certain class of murder mysteries. Except that Miss Marple is a cozy figment of Agatha Christie’s imagination.

I guess, also, this amateur thing sort of ruled the Olympics before 1988. Except… who really ever believed that those broad-shouldered, hairy East German girl swimmers were anything but full-time pros?
 
Certainly, some of America’s great, larger-than-life anti-heroes, down through the years — from Boss Tweed and Huey Long to Joe McCarthy, Dick Daley and Rod Blagojevich — have been professional politicians.

However, if we hadn’t tolerated a few political pros throughout our history, we would’ve silenced a few grand figures and important voices, starting with the four guys on Mount Rushmore, plus John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, FDR, JFK, LBJ, the Gipper and Slick Willy, not to mention Ann Richards, Shirley Chisholm, Margaret Chase Smith, Tip O’Neill, Ev Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Bill Fulbright and Sam Ervin, Thurgood Marshall, Robert Brooke, John Lewis, Julian Bond, Earl Warren, Joe Biden… Even Fighting Bob LaFollette.

On a smaller scale, one of the most honorable men I’ve known was Bob DeLong, a Selectman in a small Massachusetts town. Bob was a conscientiously professional politician when he was running for re-election. He tried not to be political when he wasn’t running. But Bob was a Selectman, and people treated him that way. So, he never got to be entirely normal and candid. This is the fate of the professional politician.

Bob would have never said, “I’m not a politician.” That would’ve been flatly untrue, and Bob never told a lie that I ever heard.

Which brings me back to Trump, the largest current version of the non-politician politician, an office-seeker who – according to the fact-checkers who review his every syllable – lies to voters 75 percent of the time. That level of  bullshit suggests that Trump is not taking politics —  a serious profession – either seriously or professionally.

I wonder. Don’t any of those fans holding up their “Make America Great Again” signs even suspect — way down deep — that they’re being hustled into a game of bean-bag? By a fast talker named Donny the Dude, who carries around a personal set of custom-tailored bags, loaded with hand-polished Andalusian beans?

Me? I can’t help but feel a skeptical twinge when I hear a big, loud rich guy proclaiming that he isn’t what he is.

Or, to paraphrase Hermann Goering, when I hear the words, “I’m not a politician,” I reach for my seltzer bottle…

…and a very ripe tomato.