I managed to reconnect with some of the rescued POWs and explained the situation. There were all eager to help and offered to write testimonials on my behalf. No act of kindness, however small, is wasted. That's the moral of the story of the mouse and the lion's paw, though in my case, the events were sort of reversed. I had been the lion and now they were pulling the thorn out of my paw.
We were lucky in the sense that the district was heavily Democratic, so we only had to worry about candidates from one party. We had four rivals to contend with. This was tricky even for me. I had only ever had to deal with one opposing force at a time. It was an exciting challenge. They were all men, and none were military veterans.
Three were lawyers and the other was a businessman who had inherited a lot of money as a young man. There is nothing inherently wrong with those occupations, though I always found it suspicious that so many of them ended up in politics.
The focus needed to be on our own campaign and to let our rivals attack and sabotage each other. They would all be reluctant to criticize a woman in public. If sexism is acceptable, then it is fair to use it to your advantage. In my own experience, the same behavior can be called chivalry, sexism, or fairness. The only difference is how the woman on the receiving end feels about being treated differently than a man.
We still needed a slogan. I initially favored something like "the real deal" because it rhymed and was similar to the successful "fair deal" and "new deal" slogans. Alexandra hinted she wanted something with "she" or "her" in it. That could help us get more of the female vote, but it could also backfire and seem as patronizing. A focus group would help us decide. It would be sort of an informal process. We'd put four or five slogans on notecards, with a prompt to rank them in order of best to worse as well as a space where the respondent could state their gender. Whichever slogans were hated the most by men and women could then be discarded.
We handed out a few hundred notecards in churches, grocery stores, and elsewhere. About 100 people in total responded, and we saw that slogans most favored by men and women were different, but at least we knew that #1 slogan for women was merely the #3 slogan for men. That slogan was "Murphy: She's Our Her-o". It's hard to go wrong with a rhyming pun, and it was easy to fit on a sign or a button.
Political signs usually go up near busy intersections, and they also frequently get torn down. For that reason, we decided to display signs only on the inside of windows on private property. The value of buttons is greatly underestimated. We made sure to hand them out at local schools. Very few people are petty enough to accost a student over a button displayed on a backpack. Long story short, we got the word out about our campaign.
My attention turned to psychological warfare. We needed to plant some rumors in the newspapers to shape public opinion the way we wanted. The basic idea was to get our opponents to attack each other instead of us. The best way to do that was to plant a rumor that one of our opponents said something nasty about another one of our opponents. Those two would start trading blows, so to say, and meanwhile we would look above the fray and morally superior. It was a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. This was all underhanded of course, but perfectly legal and a common practice in politics. Anyway, it's a lot cleaner and gentler than actual war, which was what I was used to. I wasn't a fan of dirty tricks or any of that Lee Atwater stuff, though I must admit it's impressive he got someone as slimy as Nixon into the White House.
Do the ends justify the means? Often in practical terms, might does in fact make right, at the very least, it settles the question of who gets what they want. It's a moral dilemma I struggle with sometimes: the desire to win but also to win the right way and for the right reasons. The attempt to be honorable is itself honorable, even though no can achieve perfection in it.
I decided to use a proxy to plant a rumor that one candidate said another was soft on communism. The target took the bait, and for a time, all our opponents were forced to fight on terrain unfamiliar to them. They all wanted to talk about social programs and issues, which was their interest and strength, and I tricked them into arguing about military matters, and they were all dumb as a bag of hammers when it came to that subject. It's always good to lure the enemy onto ground they're unfamiliar with. It's sort of like the way a spider builds its web to draw in prey. Again we see how the study of nature contributes to the science of victory. The Science of Victory is a Russian war manual written by a general named Suvorov in the 1700s. I continue to be amazed by the number of American strategists who have never heard of him.
At the same time, I arranged a photo-op with me, Binh, two the POWs we rescued and Alexandra. It was front-page news. At the event, we lined up with Alexandra in the middle of and we all held hands and raised them in the air in triumph under an American flag and a POW-MIA remembrance flag. That was the moment I was sure she would win the election. The timing was deliberate as it was a subtle way of telling our opponents not to even try accusing us of being soft on communism.
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