It’s politics galore for publications

WASHINGTON -- Politics magazine publishes many fine articles, but the most astonishing, amazing and entertaining thing about the magazine is the ads.

Flip through the March issue and you quickly come to an ad illustrated by a photo of a wood-paneled sitting room where three animal heads are mounted on the wall like hunting trophies. But they’re not the heads of deer or moose. They’re the heads of donkeys.

“We bag the big ones,” the headline reads. “And we’re ready to add your Democrat to our collection.”

It’s an ad for the Traz Group, a company that does direct mail for Republican candidates.

Turn the page and you see an ad illustrated with a picture of a smug old coot steering a yacht while a young woman, who looks like she might be his latest trophy wife, smiles demurely at him.

“There are other ways to reach rich Republicans,” the ad says. “But you’ll need a yacht club membership.” It’s an advertisement for Newsmax Media, a website that claims to have a pipeline to folks who own yachts and stocks and luxury cars and might be persuaded to pony up some cash for Republican candidates.

There are also ads for Democrat-oriented companies, but for some reason they don’t have quite the same pizazz.

Politics is the new name of the magazine formerly known as Campaigns & Elections. Founded in 1980, it was a trade publication for what could be called the “campaign-industrial complex” -- political consultants, campaign managers and pollsters, as well as the folks who make bumper stickers or run the phone banks that bombard voters with prerecorded “robo-calls” touting Candidate X or slandering Candidate Y.

Last fall, the Arlington, Va.,-based magazine hired a new editor, Bill Beaman, 51, a former Washington bureau chief for Reader’s Digest. Beaman’s goal is to keep his base readership of campaign professionals while expanding the circulation of 12,000 by attracting readers who love politics but aren’t in the business.

“A friend described Campaigns & Elections as an eat-your-peas publication -- good for you but not a whole lot of fun,” Beaman says. “My hope is to make it engaging and lively and bring more political junkies into our readership.”

To that end, Beaman changed the magazine’s name to Politics, perked up the design and began running articles that you don’t have to be a campaign wonk to appreciate. The March issue, for instance, has a cogent explanation of the byzantine rules for Democratic delegates and superdelegates, and a profile of Charlie Summers, a naval reservist from Maine who is running for Congress while serving in Iraq.

The magazine still serves its base with articles on the nuts and bolts of campaigns -- fundraising and polling.

And let’s not forget the ads for the myriad accouterments of the modern campaign -- buttons, bumper stickers, “inflatable political billboards,” machines that fake the candidate’s signature (“Real Pen & Ink”), and pit-bull private investigators eager to dig up dirt on your opponent.

There’s one vexing problem that is a recurrent subject in the magazine: Pols who don’t pay their bills. Apparently, candidates are eager to hire people to help them win but are less eager to actually pay them.

“I’ve got one candidate who’s into me for eight grand and he’s been into me for six years now,” Brian Harlin, a vendor of Republican campaign gewgaws, told the magazine last year.

Politicians breaking promises and squandering other people’s money? Shocking!

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Golfers and rockers

You don’t have to read Politics to read about politics. In this election year, magazines that usually avoid the subject feel compelled to produce political stories. For instance:

Golf Digest’s April issue contains a 12-page section on golf and politics. Much of it is devoted to a painstaking day-by-day chronicle of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential golfing.

In his eight years in office, Ike played golf more than 1,000 times. In 1958, he either played or practiced on an astounding 194 days.

These days, golf in Washington just isn’t the same, the magazine reports. Ethics legislation passed last year bars lobbyists from taking a friendly pol out for a free round of golf. Naturally, there’s a loophole.

“We can’t pay to take congressmen out anymore, but they can call and ask us to pay to play in their fundraisers,” one lobbyist grumbled. “That doesn’t seem quite right.”

Meanwhile, rocker Dave Grohl has announced his candidacy for president in a cover story in the music magazine Harp. (The final cover story, as it turns out: Harp is closing up shop with the March-April issue.)

“As president of the United States of America,” Grohl says, “I promise to rock the . . . house -- and everyone’s invited.”

Grohl, a native of Springfield, Va., is the frontman of the Foo Fighters and the former drummer for the band Nirvana. Now he feels he’s ready to lead the free world.