Exit Polls for Staffs of Candidates

Monday night while we are sleeping in California, the good folk of Dixville Notch, N.H., will cast their votes. Seven hours after that, we will troop to a neighbor’s garage, or a school auditorium and cast ours.

Somewhere in California, it will be raining, probably in Redding because it usually is, and the electorate will shrug into their raincoats and splash to the polls. And afterward when they are wearing their “I Voted Today” buttons, they will get that fine round feeling of having done not just their duty but something good, something satisfying. They will feel that they are one of the good guys.

The work of the campaign is over, and unless some candidate does something horrendous, everything done from here on is just busy work. Oh, the campaign headquarters will be open and busy people will call you on Tuesday and remind you that you haven’t voted. Try to be patient with them and do not raise your voice. They have been on the phone all day doing what their campaign has asked them to do, working the phones for the last get-out-the-vote effort.

Rejoice if the call is from a volunteer of a candidate you like. That means the campaign is still lurching along on track, until the final end of the chapter. If you don’t get a call, your guy is in trouble.

When I was in the mad endeavor called politics, I never went into the campaign office on Election Day. I voted as soon as the polls opened and then, with my secretary, disappeared. There was absolutely nothing left to do except to take phone calls from hysterical people calling about fraud in the polling place or someone calling with a real killer of an idea for your campaign. It’s all too late, honey. The train’s done gone. The midnight choo-choo has left for Alabam’.

One time I spent a delicious Election Day at Knott’s Berry Farm eating fried chicken and panning for gold. One time, I spent the day on Olvera Street. Several times, I went to the Los Angeles Zoo, idly wondering if I were on the right side of the bars.

By now, the exit-poll teams have been assigned their swing precincts and are ready to ask the voters what they did behind the curtain. I still think that’s an obscene question because it can and does affect votes in the West and Hawaii though the network sachems say, “It is incumbent on us to let the people know.”

By whose fiat? Who decided that Westerners must know what has happened on the Eastern Seaboard before we can vote intelligently? I froth about this every election year and they still do it. Only because they can, I often think.

Let me tell you what the campaign people are doing right now. They are deciding what time (early) their man or woman should vote and putting the time and place out as a news picture advisory. The last photo opportunity of the season.

The kids in the offices are typing up resumes while they still have access to the rented computers and typewriters. The ones who have been promised jobs in the new administration are calling friends in Washington or Sacramento, asking about places to live, seeing if someone can meet them at the airport and does anyone know an overnight cleaner?

At the end of a campaign, just at that moment at the end of all, I always wished that my part of the operation had been perfect, with square corners and a neatly tied bow on top. It never came out that way, but not because I didn’t try.

For the missed commitments, for some of the interviews that had the dynamism of lukewarm oatmeal, for the helicopters that blew dust in our faces and for rhetoric like procaine, mea maxima culpa. Oh, other people’s culpa too, but I always felt that somehow I should have made it better. I couldn’t, sometimes, but I gave it a go.

We always did it all--the airplanes, the buses, the police escorts, the press room up the stairs at the end of the hall, the photog’s lost jacket, the warm beer, the cold coffee.

Being with a campaign tour is like being with a bunch of nomadic, irritable Eskimos stuck on the last dog sled train out before the ice breaks up. With the diet, it’s a wonder we didn’t all have scurvy. Only thing that saved us was the occasional quarter of lime in the vodka. We didn’t see the basic four food groups for a year.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been through another one. All the charges and countercharges, the niggling things and the great big pie-in-the-face mistakes. As we said in show business, they did us another one, they played it pretty for the people. Or at least, they tried.

You’ve had all the starchy, self-righteous little sermons you need on your duty to vote. Just know that I, personally, will put the Irish curse on you if you don’t. Why do you think Robert Emmett died? And Wolfe Tone?

Vote, and from me, here’s one last one for the boys in the back of the bus.