Never ask for less than it's worth

“You’re not going to vote for that gay marriage, are you?”

I probably rephrased the question in my mind, but that’s pretty much the way I’ll remember it. The candidate was bragging, and his boast took me back about 20 years.

The occasion then, 20 years before, was a phone call from an excited news source who wanted to share a big story with me, a hard-working young reporter. Sort of young anyway, although at 28 I was a few years older than most of the other reporters. They tended to come in at 22 and leave by 25. My extra years meant a few extra dollars a month, with the understanding that I wouldn’t discuss my salary with my fellow reporters.

That’s a compromise with truth for money that I probably should have thought more strongly about. I didn’t. I’m just like everybody else. I never see these things coming.

I had another advantage in being a few years older than the other reporters. I didn’t make a lot of the same mistakes, so I didn’t piss off a lot of the same people. Sources who didn’t even like to be in the paper came looking for me.

Like Big John. I don’t even remember where I’d met him and that wasn’t really his nickname. But, hey, it was twenty years ago. I think I’d given good coverage to a charity event he helped organize, and I spelled his name right. Later I wrote about some minor problem at the company he worked for and left his name out of the story. I left it out because I had no idea John was involved, but that didn’t stop him from believing he owed me a huge favor.

After that I’d see him at Chamber events or charity barbecues and he’d throw his arm over my shoulder and tell anybody who’d listen about what a big favor I’d once done him. I would just smile and take it, although I did take advantage of it once. I was assigned to cover the speaker at a private Chamber breakfast, and solved the problem of lacking an admission ticket by sliding into the scrambled egg line behind Big John. A few people looked at me and thought about asking me to leave, or telling me the breakfast was off the record, but they figured if I was there with John I must be OK. At least they weren’t going to say otherwise.

John didn’t know he was going me a favor though. He was just enjoying the buffet with his reporter friend, and as far as he was concerned he still owed me. And in late October of 1984, he saw his chance. He called me one morning to tell me that a right-wing letter-writer from out in one of the surrounding rural counties had a scoop for me: he had been doing a lot of research in support of his man, Big John told me, adding, “He’s got proof Walter Mondale is one of these secular humanists we been hearing about.”

I don’t remember how I begged off the story, although I sort of remember pointing out that Mondale was pretty sure to lose about 45 states and the tiny paper I worked for wouldn’t change that outcome very much. I do strongly remember the feeling that I had missed something in the world. Secular humanism, I thought, ranked as a threat somewhere around fluoridation. Big John’s last name wasn’t Birch, but for a moment I wondered. Years later I can see how much an attitude like mine would contribute to the myth of a biased liberal media. It wasn’t necessarily that I was liberal, I just couldn’t understand how otherwise rational, decent, good people could so easily accept the vapid loony-tune horseshit that passed for truth in their threatened universe.

And somehow, 20 years later, when I heard about the political contributor insisting that the candidate not vote for gay marriage, my head immediately rewrote the quote to come out in Big John’s voice warning me that Mondale was a secular humanist. Because apparently gays are what’s threatening the universe now, much as the humanists and the fluoridaters used to. On the one hand, the constantly menaced among us deride gays as being too effeminate to be taken seriously, but a moment later those same maligned and marginalized brethren are seen to be recruiting in the elementary schools. Talk about having it both ways.

The candidate was bragging about the check he’d just received, and he mentioned the gay marriage issue almost in passing, gushing through a replay of the conversation he’d had with the contributor. He mentioned a public works project the contributor supported, and said he couldn’t promise to openly back it during the campaign. Not as a matter of principle, mind you; he’d acknowledged before that the project was necessary. Rather he hedged because it was an unpopular project and backing it might cost him votes. And gay rights were something else he’d previously said he’d hedge about. But with $1,000 on the table, hedging apparently went out the window.

No names here, because there was an implication of confidentiality in the conversation. Writing about it is how I salve my conscience. But there’s an old joke about the woman who’s offered a million dollars to sleep with a man. She readily agrees and he just as readily drops the offer to 50 bucks. “What kind of a girl do you think I am?” she asks.

“We’ve already established that,” he replies. “Now we’re just haggling about the price.”

I have to wonder how much haggling goes on inside somebody like the candidate, or if it’s all over and done with the day he decides to run for office. This same candidate had a half-dozen or more openly gay well-wishers at one of his campaign events -- that's who I thought he was hedging for. He’d certainly collected more money from them than he had from the fellow who slid the check across his walnut desk in return for a promise that didn’t seem to bother the candidate at all as he went out scrambling for a few more checks before the cock crowed.

Last Revised: 10.18.06    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald