David McElroy

I still remember the first political mailer I did that made me feel completely slimy. In 1998, I was doing work for an incumbent Alabama governor. I had played a minor role in the campaign, but I’d handled a few mail pieces and had made some nice money. At the last moment, the state party came to me and wanted one more mail piece to go out to a lot of households, something like 300,000 or so.

The guy I had done the work for was about to lose. This mail piece was to be an attack to try to hurt the challenger at the last second, after it was too late for him to respond. The pitch was simple. The Democratic challenger had somehow been vaguely and briefly associated with somebody who was a ’60s radical. So I was supposed to tie the challenger to a collection of something like five or six anti-war protesters from the ’60s, even though there was no connection in real life.

I don’t remember how I worded the piece, exactly. I remember that it looked nice and it was clever in the way it implied the challenger was one of those people — people such as “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, whose picture was included, of course. If you just looked at the card briefly, you would assume that the fine print must surely have exposed the challenger as an awful, evil radical who was a danger to us all. But it did nothing of the kind, because that wasn’t true. It never quite said anything inaccurate. The copy and photos just implied it.

I don’t remember too much more about that piece, but I do recall that I pocketed $10,000 in profit from that last-second job. It’s the kind of slimy, unethical thing that’s done every election — by people in both major parties — but it was the beginning of the end for my ability to stick around. The money helped, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from feeling that I’d done something very, very wrong.

It’s 14 years later, and someone else here in the state did something that was similarly very, very wrong this week. I don’t know who was paid to produce this piece. All I know is that it’s a lie. You might be interested in looking at how such lies work.

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The woman appeared to be in a world of her own. That was my first impression. I sat down to eat lunch by myself Wednesday at a small place in a part of town where I hadn’t been for awhile. She was beautiful. Around 28 or 30 years old, I’d guess. But the longer I sat there, the more something about her just wasn’t right.

She had papers and folders spread out on the table where she sat. She was intently studying something, but I couldn’t tell what. She would sometimes pick up a small mirror and look at something closely on her face. Then she’d look back to the papers. She wasn’t aware of anything else.

She finally looked up and stared out the window for a moment. Then she turned in my general direction and said, “Do you think my chin looks wrong? I’m afraid it’s too wide. Or maybe the angle isn’t right.”

She could have been talking to the wall, as far as I could tell, but I was the only other person in the place. Besides, she actually looked as though she expected an answer. The question was a little too odd for me to know how to respond. My initial thought was to tell her — honestly — that her face seemed absolutely perfect to me, but I didn’t know what was really going on, so I just stuck to saying that her chin looked fine to me.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She came over to my table, bringing one of the brochures she had been looking at. It was filled with pictures of close-ups of faces. “This one looks better than mine, doesn’t it? I look so ugly.”

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Now that Barack Obama has been elected to another four years in the White House, some people around me are in denial. Mitt Romney has gone down in flames, much like John McCain did four years ago. (Remember him?) And standing on the sideline are various libertarians saying, “If you had only nominated Ron Paul, we would have beaten Obama.”

Four years ago, a lot of people were upset with the election of Obama. Some didn’t like him because he’s black. But most who opposed him did so because they deeply disagreed with him about the direction for the country. A group of people loosely calling themselves the Tea Party emerged to say that the direction had to change. They were going to organize and march and demand lower taxes and smaller government.

Four years later, how’s that working out? That conservative backlash has helped the Republicans to hold onto the U.S. House, but that’s about the extent of it. Democrats hold the Senate and the White House.

What’s more, the Tea Party is a weird mix held together only by a hatred of the progressive left. Although the Tea Party had libertarian roots, it’s more of a mainstream social conservative group now. Yes, they still talk about economically conservative ideas, but social conservative ideas have taken more and more prominence in places where the Tea Party groups have been successful in gaining influence.

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