A Campaigner’s Mettle of Honor : In Politics, as in Business, the Office Drudge Does It All

Now that the election season is history, I can relax and reflect on the experience. I was on the staff of Lloyd Bentsen’s election committee (the successful one, the one that got him re-elected as Texas’ Democratic senator while he was also running for vice president). It was the kind of job that everyone should have at least once in a lifetime. It was the kind of job that could make a troubled teen-ager go straight.

There are not many paid staff members at a campaign headquarters; in fact, there are only a few key people--people who know who they are, what they are doing and how to make others feel lost and confused.

When a campaign is going full steam, people don’t just move, they scurry, usually in a pack; you’ll even see them trying to get through the front door all at the same time, like the Twelve Stooges. But not you; you just sit at your post waiting to do your job: answering the telephone.

You are the telephone answering machine, and the reason they hired you is because you don’t use batteries, and there is no assembly required.

The phone rings and rings while you are trying to assist an angry constituent who has just come in, and your boss comes by to yell at you for letting the phone ring too long. So you smile obediently and answer the phone while the constituent complains about you to the boss, who nods her head as if in agreement.

Yes, you are the human answering machine, taking calls from everybody, all of them very important. These calls come in all at once when there are a hundred other important things for you to do. When you’re caught up and sitting quietly in front of it, the phone only rings once or twice per hour.

As your co-workers come in, they will ask if so-and-so called, and they will look through the messages you’ve just handed them, and then they will ask the question again.

In a political campaign, as in any organization, there are three levels in the hierarchy: the Big Wigs, the Little Wigs and the Baldies. You can always tell a Big Wig, because he will never look directly at you while he’s talking, but will mumble in your direction as he flips through the stack of messages you’ve taken for him. The Little Wig will go through his stack with eyes narrowed. If you’ve misspelled his name or circled a.m. instead of p.m. on the message pad, he will point out your error, especially if important people are sitting around waiting to see the Big Wigs. The Baldies are those little people like you who never speak and are just thankful to ever get a message at all.

The campaign goes along like that, on the edge of the abyss of madness, and you stand in the middle of the chaos trying to please the Big Wigs, the Little Wigs and sometimes even a Baldy.

Then, just when you are frazzled into an unidentifiable heap, your co-worker comes to you smiling and says, “The senator will be here Friday.”

So you clean and sweep and rearrange boxes, trying to make it look like you have hardly any campaign material left in hopes the senator will think to himself, “Hmmm, these people really know how to move campaign material.” In reality he won’t notice anything, because when he finally comes through the door, the press has preceded him, filling the place with grim and grizzly faces, flashing cameras and machine-gun bursts of questions, so he wouldn’t know the rooms even had walls, let alone tons of carefully concealed campaign material.

Finally, Friday comes, and there you are, standing by the phone when the senator arrives. His is the only calm face in the procession of Big Wigs, Little Wigs and a few straggling Baldies. He looks at you as he strolls past your desk, as if to invite a handshake, and you reach over, careful not to get too far away from your post, and he moves his shoulder a little, lifting a hand to meet yours. But the crowd cannot be stopped for even a short moment, and the pressure builds behind the senator’s hesitation. You can almost hear knees locking like the wheels of some lurching locomotive being held in place on a railroad track. The senator reaches further, and you abandon your post altogether to grasp his hand and hear what he has to say. Your boss tries to distract him, pointing to the Little Wig who is standing first in line, but the senator ignores her, leans toward you and says, “Thank you for all your help.”

There is a moment of silence and then you think you hear the phone, but the sound is obscured by the procession in retreat. You return to your post and indulge in a smile.