The Bellwether of Ballyhoo

Demonizing campaign sausage makers is nothing new, it’s low-hanging fruit.

But any bad apple still hanging from a branch is sure to entice the drove of media already gormandizing campaign staff shenanigans. I’m speaking of course of the recent revelations of Herman Cain’s mustachioed-Marlboro-maverick of a campaign manager, Mark Block.

Side note: An old friend, who is currently entrenched with a certain North Carolinian Evangelist, once gave me a book on the logical shortcomings of atheism. The only part I remember— i.e. read—was an anecdotal narrative on the existence of god/creationism in which a man standing under a tree was struck on the head with an apple. He quipped, “thank god it wasn’t a pumpkin.”

Anyways, Cain, or maybe Block himself, opted to put his grizzled mug, and “checkered past,” all up-on-that-internets, in a video that can only be described as an ill-advised attempt to reconnect with the Joe Six-packs and Main Street(ers) of America, assuming there ever were any.

The video is a “call to action” to put the “united” back in the “United States of America.” It’s a repetitive sequence of close-ups through a soft-edge effect that awkwardly showcases Block’s head ticks like a metronome to party rhetoric. Ironically, at one point Block boasts, “we’ve run a campaign like no one’s ever seen.” Sure it’s a poor choice of grammatical tense, but more than that, it’s the worst person possible to utter it.

Since this screen gem was posted last week, the Cain camp has done it’s best to deflect media criticism and endure the nightmare that is the candidate playing second fiddle to a staffer. If it isn’t the fact that Block wraps up his “call to action” with a rather weak drag and exhale of a cigarette while staring intently into the camera, it’s his “checkered past” that includes being banned from campaigning (if that’s what filming yourself smoking passes for these days) in Wisconsin, that dominates the Cain media landscape at the moment. And the damage control isn’t helping.

As far as the media is concerned they’ve had a lowbrow, backwoods Lee Atwater dropped in their laps, only less effective (for the time being) and more contributory to his own fate.

There’s always baggage, from questionable practices, to the legality of the actions and lengths staffers go ‘unbeknownst’ to their candidates or affiliates. And while those actions range in severity, cause or even concern, at no time should you draw undue attention to them. If you operate in the shadows, remain in the shadows. Ideally, you shouldn’t be the person for the job anyways. But if by chance a candidate is willing to look beyond—way beyond—your past transgressions, don’t willingly step into the Youtube-spotlight an arbiter elegantiae of the everyman and blow smoke.

Ballyhoo.