All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [45]
Nobody would listen to the speeches, including me. They were awful. They were full of facts and figures he had dug up about running the state. He would say, “Now, friends, if you bear patiently with me for a few minutes, I will give you the figures,” and he would clear his throat and fumble with a sheet of paper and backbones would sag lower in the seats and folks would start cleaning their fingernails with their pocket knifes. If Willie had ever thought of talking to folks up on the platform just the way he could talk to you face when he got heated about something, leaning at you as if he meant every damned word he said and his eyes bugging out and shining, he might have swayed the constituency. But no, he was trying to live up to his notion of a high destiny.
It didn’t matter so much as long as Willie was playing the local circuit. The carry-over of the schoolhouse episode was still strong enough to mean something. He was the fellow on the Lord’s side and the Lord had given a sign. The Lord had knocked over the fire escape just to prove a point. But when Willie got down in the middle of the state he began to run into trouble. And when he hit a town of any size he found out that the folks didn’t care much which side of a question was the Lord’s side.
Willie knew what was happening, but he didn’t know why. His face got a little thinner, and the thin skin seemed to draw back tighter over the flesh, but he didn’t look worried. That was the funny part. If ever a man had a right to look worried, it was Willie. But he didn’t. He just looked like a man in a kind of walking dream, and when he walked out on the platform before he began talking his face looked purified and lifted up and serene like the face of a man who has just pulled out of a hard sickness.
But he hadn’t pulled out of the sickness he had. He had galloping political anemia.
He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He was like a man with a chill who simply reckons that the climate is changing all of a sudden, and wonders why everybody else isn’t shivering too. Perhaps it was a desire for just a little human warmth that got him in the habit of dropping into my room late at night, after the speaking and the handshaking were over. He would sit for a spell, while I drank off my nightcap, and not talk much, but one time, at Morristown, where the occasion had sure-God been a black frost, he did, after sitting quiet, suddenly say, “How you think it’s going, Jack?”
It was one of those embarrassing questions like “Do you think my wife is virtuous?” or “Did you know I am a Jew?” which are embarrassing, not because of anything you might say for an answer, the truth or a lie, but because the fellow asked the question at all. But I said to him, “Fine, I reckon it’s going fine.”
“You think so, for a fact?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He chewed that for about a minute and then swallowed it. Then he said, “They didn’t seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program.”
“Maybe you try to tell ’em too much. It breaks down their brain cells.”
“Looks like they’d want to hear about taxes, though,” he said
“You tell ’em too much. Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys, and forget the rest of the tax stuff.”
“What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that–”
“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ’em cry, or make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak and erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and