Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [119]
With Wendell out of the race, Pete Wheeler was a shoo-in. Or so they thought.
To Earl Finley and the boys, Hamm Sparks was a man they had never considered as anything more than a joke, some pie-in-the-sky candidate thinking he could fiddle his way into the governor’s mansion, running around the state with his half-baked, pseudo-cracker-barrel philosophy and hillbilly singers. But during the weeks they had been concentrating on getting rid of Wendell Hewitt and pushing Pete Wheeler forward, the Hamm Sparks dog-and-pony show had crisscrossed the state and hit every small town, farm community, creek bed, and railroad crossing with a vengeance.
Hamm more or less did the same speech everywhere he went but it seemed to hit a nerve with the farmers and with the people in the country towns he spoke to. As his numbers started to rise, Earl Finley started to wonder about him and sent out a man with a newsreel camera to see just what in the hell he was doing and saying. The man caught up with the Sparks campaign, such as it was, at a stop outside of Cooter, Missouri, close to the Tennessee-Arkansas border. What the big boys saw on film later was a shot of a dirt-road farm town where about seventy-five to eighty country people had all gathered around the back of a flatbed truck where Hamm stood speaking into a bad microphone. Every time he made a point or told a joke, someone in the crowd rang a cowbell. The audience seemed to be hanging on to every word he said. The men in overalls and John Deere caps, the women in cotton dresses and bonnets laughed and nodded and seemed to agree with what he was telling them.
“Now, folks,” he said, “I’m not gonna get here and try to fool you with fancy language. First of all, I wouldn’t know how, you have to be a lawyer to do that, and second of all, I think every American deserves the truth in plain English and I trust the people to know it when they hear it.
“Make no mistake, the big mules want your vote. Oh, they smile and grin at you and promise to love, honor, and obey. Trying to get you to the altar. But you should hear how they talk about you behind closed doors. . . . They think you’re stupid. They think you’ll fall for anything they tell you. They think they can just do anything they want up there and get away with it. It reminds me of when I was a boy growing up out in the country. My mother would open up the pantry and here would be all these mealy worms and moths eating away at our cornmeal and flour. And she would yell out, ‘Daddy, we’ve got pests in the pantry.’ Now, I’ve been up at the state capital for a few years and I’ve seen how that bunch up there is stealing the taxpayers blind, and folks, we’ve got pests in the state’s pantry right now and if you elect me I’m gonna get rid of every one of them. I’ll chop all that extra fat right off the budget and put that money back in the workingman’s pocket, where it belongs, not to pay the salaries of folks in the governor’s mansion to cook up lace-panty lamb chops and serve a lot of little sissy food on silver plates. Good old American hamburger is just fine with me.
“Now, I know my opponent, Mr. Peter Wheeler, claims his family goes way back. And that’s fine. But I ask you, whose family don’t? Oh, I may not have the poodle-dog pedigree behind me and I may not get invited to their little high-society pink-tea affairs. But I’d stack my momma and daddy and your mommas and your daddies right up there with the best of them. I know that bunch up in Kansas City, all dressed up in their furs and diamonds, driving in fancy cars to their million-dollar brick churches. But let me tell you this: A vote don’t care if you’re fat or skinny or if your socks don’t match or if you smoke store-bought cigarettes or roll your own. A vote don’t care if you listen to the Grand Ole Opry or sip your coffee out of a saucer. . . . Why, it don’t even care if you’re wearing silk drawers or flour-sack skivvies.” By this time he had the audience laughing and cheering.