Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [48]
We kicked off the campaign the following month in Boston. Mackenzie sent a group of volunteers to assist me, a crazed bunch, former Nam vets who had clearly absorbed way too much Agent Orange. They dressed in paramilitary-style black T-shirts and fatigues and acted as though we planned to overrun some enemy position rather than capture the White House. These men did not do advance work; they ran reconnaissance. They did not set their watches; they synchronized them.
They never mentioned their war experiences. But you could tell Nam had not ended for many of them. I heard the sense of betrayal in their voices when they railed against the U.S. government and its policies. These men expressed joy over the end of Reagan’s presidency, but they did not trust Bush or Dukakis or any other representative of the major political parties. They would have supported Daffy Duck had the Rhino Party designated him as its candidate. Most of them just wanted change, any change—a chance to rattle the establishment and challenge the status of the status quo.
We drove through the heart of Boston in an open-air limousine. Several drinking buddies, acting as Secret Service agents, ran alongside my car. My campaign manager had selected brawny linebacker types dressed in Bermuda shorts, black tuxedo jackets, and wraparound shades. I asked their leader if any of them would be willing to take a bullet should some crazed assassin try to end my campaign prematurely.
“Don’t see how we could,” he confessed. “We’d be too busy ducking.”
“But you guys are supposed to be my bodyguards.”
“Right, and if something happens, we will guard your body until a reputable undertaker shows up to claim it. And don’t forget there are six of us. You won’t be lacking for pallbearers.”
That thought comforted me.
As our limo slowly rolled from the Bull and Finch Pub to my old Red Sox haunt the Eliot Lounge, we handed out plastic rhino noses to the nine or ten people who lined the streets to cheer me on. At least two of the spectators mistook the rhino noses for pig snouts and thought I was Jimmy Dean on a promotional tour for some new sausage.
A crowd of fans waited for us at the Eliot Lounge. Our volunteers sold Rhinoceros T-shirts, buttons, and party membership cards to raise cash for the campaign. We also solicited contributions from everyone in the bar but I limited each donation to a quarter. I considered the presidency a two-bit office and therefore deemed it unfair to accept more than that. This was some ten years before Senators McCain and Feingold introduced their campaign finance reform bill. It is obvious they stole the idea from me.
Our efforts raised about $36.45 in three days. Since $25 of that went for beer, this left very little for advertising, transportation, staffing, office supplies, or other necessities. We could not buy anything in volume so buying smart became the key to our campaign. For instance, we had no funds to promote voter registration. The Democrats had already launched a mammoth campaign to register drivers who applied for licenses at motor vehicle bureaus across the country. The Republicans employed a similar strategy only they restricted their efforts to Ferrari and Maserati dealerships.
I decided to outwit both parties by pursuing a bloc of the electorate neither side courted: voters who could not vote. We scheduled a series of no-cost campaign stops at several New England prisons. That may sound strange, but if you examine the Florida results for the 2000 presidential campaign, you will see that soliciting votes from people who could not cast ballots because they were either felons or dead was another strategy way ahead of its time.
At one prison, we heard about a convict who had created a corporation that sold no products, performed no services, employed no people, and annually took in nearly a million dollars in pure profit but paid no taxes. I told my aides to get his name. He sounded like just the