Real Men Use Sheep
CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg sorrowfully notes the pitiful decline in the quality of campaign pranks and writes of a bygone golden era of animal props and elaborate hoaxes.
A recent AP dispatch from the Gore for President bus gives us some idea of the kind of devil-may-care, road warrior mentality that has overtaken Campaign 2000. According to this report, filed from a campaign stop in Detroit, Chris Lehane, Gore's press secretary, did a gotcha' on campaign staffer David Morehouse by clandestinely tying the belt loop of his jeans to a stack of folding chairs, leaving him temporarily immobilized. Subsequently, a photographer covering the campaign - and obviously caught up in the zany spirit of the moment - gotcha-ed Lehane by tying his belt loop to a folding chair at a town meeting where Gore was speaking. Isn't that the wildest, thigh-slappingest stuff you've ever heard? No.
At the risk of sounding like an old, ready-for-the-glue-factory warhorse, I must proclaim, using the Detroit episode as the crowning piece of evidence, that the era of great campaign pranks is over. The people who travel with presidential candidates this year, from luggage handlers to political reporters, are no longer pulling the kind of memorable practical jokes that once made a seat on a campaign plane roughly equivalent to initiation in Animal House.
| Check Out |  | Reality Check |
A Sheep In Sheep's Clothingsize>color>
Say the word "sheep" to any political writer above the age of 40, and he or she will immediately respond, "Tom DeFrank ... Illinois primary." They'll probably tell you they were there - even if they weren't - that night in Peoria, Illinois, when the legendary sheep stunt went down.
DeFrank, now with the New York Daily News, was in 1976 the White House correspondent for Newsweek, covering the bitter, close race between President Ford and Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination. In Illinois, inspired by extensive bus travel through the farm country, the Ford traveling press, assisted by White House staffers, rented a sheep from a local farmer.
At the end of a campaign day, Ford's press secretary lured DeFrank from his hotel room o the bar with a telephoned promise of a news tip. The pranksters then wrestled the sheep into an elevator, up to the 11th floor and into DeFrank's room. They then hid in closets and the bathroom to catch his stunned reaction. Then, proud of their contribution to the history of campaign levity, the conspirators filed out, telling DeFrank they could understand how he wanted to be alone with his new companion. The president, fully briefed, got a big kick out of it.
Happy Birthday, Lusty Jimmysize>color>
After candidate Jimmy Carter gave a controversial interview to Playboy magazine in 1976, admitting that he had occasionally felt "lust in his heart" toward women not his wife, the press corps decided to celebrate his upcoming birthday with a special song.
The campaign was over-nighting in a Pittsburgh hotel. Columnist Jules Witcover, a parody songwriter whose abilities were legend, worked for days with his colleagues on a song to be sung to the tune of the old barber-shop ditty, Heart of My Heart. Jim King, the candidate's veteran trip director somehow found five straw boaters for the singing newsies to wear. Carter and his wife Rosalyn were given seats of honor as the reporters tiptoed onto the floor, doffing their boaters at appropriate moments. The song contained such lyrics as:
Lust in my heart, it's bad politically;
Lust in my heart, but it brings publicity.
When I grew up, I ran for president;
A bunch of women I did screw -
But, in my head, so no one knew....
Witcover, who escaped treason proceedings when Carter took power the following January, remembers he kept smiling throughout the entire rendition. His wife did not.
Cluck, Cluck Mr. Presidentsize>color>
The next to last Sunday of the 1976 campaign, when everyone covering Ford had gone around the bend from exhaustion, New York Times correspondent Jim Naughton bought the head of a chicken costume from the chicken's owner in San Diego. At a late night press conference in Portland, Oregon, while other reporters scribbled in notebooks and asked questions of the president, Naughton suddenly appeared at the rear of the hall wearing the chicken head. An alarmed Secret Service agent rushed over and confronted the chicken. He checked the White House credentials hanging from the chicken's neck and said, "Okay, you've got your credentials. Go ahead."
To Ford's great credit, he went right on answering questions, and never blinked, even when a couple of network techs hoisted the chicken to their shoulders. Naughton, who was also the instigator of the Great Illinois Sheep Affair, went on to a distinguished career as newspaper editor and journalism educator. It was show business's loss.
Oinksize>color>
In 1988, attending a campaign evnt at Disneyland, George Bush the First was taken by an actor in a Porky Pig costume. "I just love that pig," he was heard to exclaim. Reporters on his plane made plans for Halloween accordingly. Pig masks were ordered from a Washington area toy store and shipped to the campaign plane in network shipping bags.
At Bush's first campaign event on Halloween morning, he was greeted by reporters and camera crews wearing little pig faces. He laughed uproariously, but did not approach the Piggies. Wouldn't be prudent. Aides warned that he would look ridiculous in photos standing next to a pig. So he admired the gag from afar.
All In All, I'd Rather Be In Philadelphiasize>color>
(Full disclosure statement: This incident involves this reporter, playing the key role of The Dupe. If you think that, by ranking my own dup-ism in the pantheon of great stunts is self-serving, check with plotters who organized this embarrassment. They all think it was the funniest thing ever. They talked about it for what seemed to me like months.)
It was 1984, near the end of an exhausting six-month contest between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart for the Democratic nomination. Hart's chartered plane was flying from California to Philadelphia when the pilot decided to add a refueling stop in Columbus, Ohio, that was not included on the schedule handed out to the press. Informed of the change while in the air, CBS Producer Randy Wolfe got the idea of fooling his correspondent, soundly asleep in his seat, into believing that the next stop would be, not Columbus, but Philadelphia, just like the schedule said.
From there, as other collaborators whispered in the airplane's aisle, the plot thickened exponentially. The Dupe would be told that the candidate's events in Philadelphia (Columbus) had been canceled because of some political crisis, and that the next stop (Philadelphia) was an unscheduled trip to Washington for an emergency staff meeting at the candidate's home.
Forty or 50 supposedly adult people on that plane quickly organized this complex fraud against an innocent. They carried it off with a precision and dash not seen in their real jobs. In the Columbus airport, some positioned themselves in front of the newspaper street boxes so The Dupe would not see the telltale Columbus Dispatch newspapers inside. Others dashed to pay phones to pretend they were calling their offices to inform editors of the abrupt, ominous change in Hart's plans. TV producers from all the networks screamed into phones that microwave units must be rushed to the senator's suburban home to "cover" the crisis meeting.
The senator's press secretary, the normally unflappable Kathy Bushkin, her face drawn and serious, declared, "No coverage will be permitted at the meeting." The Dupe, the only person in the group who took this as a real challenge, shot back the requred response, "You don't tell us what we can cover." The Dupe's colleagues, seemingly stirred by his First Amendment message, shouted a chorus of feigned agreement. There was glaring back and forth. The crisis atmosphere grew. It was Oscar winning stuff.
(Hart, a candidate who in a subsequent campaign was to develop a burning distaste for the press, was the only wobbler in the conspiracy. Up at the front of the plane, he confided to his staff, "This seems a little cruel, doesn't it?" The conspirators, true to the traditions of The Road, scoffed at his concern as they readied the next act.)
When the plane hit the tarmac in Philadelphia, the Dupe was primed. He sprinted to the waiting motorcade and jumped into the camera car marked "CBS." Quickly taking a back seat in the station wagon as his camera crew jumped on the tailgate, he screamed at the driver, "I don't care what you've been told, you're going to take us right now to Senator Hart's house. It's in Bethesda, Maryland. Take the Parkway."
The driver was a well-dressed, 40-ish woman, a volunteer in the Hart campaign's local office. She greeted The Dupe's explosion with a look that he had seen before - the look that normal citizens give to raving lunatics on the street. It was starting to dawn. Then this driver spoke: "But we're in Philadelphia."
The next sound the Dupe heard was laughter. Mighty, continuous laughter. The stationwagon he occupied was surrounded by guffawing colleagues and campaign staffers there for the kill. He looked around. There was no place to hide.
Don't talk to me, you youngsters out on the trail, about tying belt loops to chairs and such Kids' Stuff. There was a time when the comedic Road Warriors were creative and bold. As others have noticed, the Boys on Bus have turned into Dweebs on the Bus.
And by the way, am I in Philadelphia yet?