The Personality of a Politician

I don't think you have to be crazy to be a politician, but a little screwball logic can solidify your base. On the other hand you don't want voters suspecting you might be completely loony. And navigating a path between those two alternatives can be tricky at times.

For example, in the 1980's a 5'1” tall combative obsessive/compulsive fire cracker named Ruthann Aron (above) dreamed big dreams.  Always big. She earned advanced degrees in both microbiology from Cornel and a law degree.  A college boyfriend remembered, "If she was angry, you knew it... There was nothing left to the imagination."  

Ruthann was even admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court - although she never did. Instead she took a quicker route to wealth, earning millions by developing shopping centers. She didn't make a lot of friends, of course. Just a lot of money.

Her urologist husband Barry (above), the father of her two children,  admitted at the time, “She gets in people’s faces in a very straightforward way and doesn’t tap dance too much.”  

But Ruthann's story really begins in the “Washington, D.C.” adjacent enclave of Montgomery county, Maryland (above), one of the richest and best educated counties in America. Everybody here, it seems came from some place else – the county was even named for a Revolutionary War hero who never set foot in the state. This is one of those big ponds where little fish either get eaten or grow big  And in 1994 it had not voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan retired. 

As Barry Rascovar noted for the Washington Post in mid-August of 1994, “...the last time there was a truly contested GOP Senate primary was in the early 1960s.”  It was here that our diminutive mother of two faced her first public test when, after just two years on the County Planning Board, Ruthann Aron decided to run for the United States Senate. She was a pro-choice member of the John Birch Society, who boasted, "I'm not a career politician. I'm a businesswoman."

It was a clever move. The dysfunctional Maryland G.O.P had little hope of beating the popular Democrat, Paul Sarbanes (above) who had held the Senate seat since 1976 and seemed a shoe-in for re-election. Even if she lost the primary, Ruthann could still lay a foundation for a future in politics.

The only drawback was that there were seven candidates vying for the Republican nomination, so Ruthann decided to stand out, by attacking her best known fellow Republican opponent, the  multimillionaire candy heir, ex-Senator from Tennessee, and ex-GOP Chairman, the handsome Bill Brock III.

Ruthann spent nearly a quarter of a million of her own dollars buying radio ads, in which two “hillbillies” laughed about the way Maryland voters were being fooled by the “tax-raising, carpetbagging, career politician”, Senator Brock (above).   The ex-Senator chose to not even mention Ruthann in his few radio ads. No since giving the little lady free publicity. 

Then, a poll released Labor Day weekend found Brock leading, as expected, but with just 23% of the vote. And in second place and well within the margin of error for a tie was Ruthann, at 20%.

With just two weeks to go before the primary, Brock decided he could no longer ignore the tiny upstart, and called an afternoon press conference for Thursday, 8 September, 1994, on the Rockville courthouse square (above). His stated intention was to attack his female opponent. That was sure to draw the media.

As the Baltimore Sun noted, “The minutes preceding yesterday's news conference had the feel of a mock thriller....About 2 p.m. the (Ruthann) Aron camp entered...About 10 minutes later, Mr. Brock arrived with his contingent of sign-wavers.” 

Neither Senator Block (above), nor his supporters had expected Ruthann to make an appearance. The Washington Post observed, “As reporters and photographers soaked up the awkward silence, the two camps stared mutely, and the whirring of (film) cameras was all that was heard.”

With the "little lady" just a few feet away, Senator Block decided to tone down his attacks, but retired Congresswoman Marjorie Holt (above), fired the shot across Ruthann's bow, describing, “...the aura of fraud and breach of contract that constantly surrounds the other candidate.”  After that,  the press conference devolved into two competing impromptu verbal slug fests,  during which Brock built on Holt's charge. According to the Post, Brock said, “She has been convicted by a jury of fraud, more than once," 

The reporters were having a ball,  bouncing "between the two candidates like pin balls.” Brock backed up the theatrical press conference with $220,000 in new radio ads, 800 ads in just 5 days, claiming that Ruthann had been convicted of fraud “more than once”, and had to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines”. Said his narrator in the ad, "Before Ruthann Aron starts attacking anybody, maybe she ought to look in the mirror.”

On Tuesday, 13 September, Ruthann lost the primary by 50,000 votes. Even worse, a poll released just before the election showed that rather than laying a foundation for her future, her campaign style had raised her negatives within the Republican Party to 16%.  Her reputation was not even helped when Block was easily beaten by the Democrat Sarbanes in the November general election. So, finding herself in a hole, Ruthann decided to keep digging.  She sued Brock for defamation of character. No politician had ever done that before.  I wonder why?

It took over a year for what the Baltimore Sun called Ruthann's “frivolous lawsuit” to work its way to trial, which it did in early 1996. “Jurors have been schooled”, wrote the Sun, “in subliminal suggestion...the role of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in an effective campaign commercial....harked to the tonal difference between a major chord and a slamming jail door, listened again and again to the definition of "Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment" (Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican) and been told that staff members look at members of Congress the way undertakers look at corpses.”

Chief witness for Brock was Arthur G. Kahn (above), a lawyer in a 1984 suit against Ruthann's real estate company, Research Incorporated. And he compared Ruthann to an octopus. When it was attacked, he said, "... it emits a dark fluid, a black fluid,  and it escapes in the darkness and muddies the waters." More specifically, Kahn testified that Ruthann had betrayed investors in one of her shopping malls. 

The mall had never been built, because Ruthann sold the rights to the project to a third party for $200,000. And kept that money. The jury decided she  had violated her agreement with the investors and awarded them $175,000, which Ruthann paid only after Arthur Kahn agreed to request the judge wipe the verdict from the record.  Which the judge had done.  

It had been a civil suit. Ruthann had lost it, but there had been no conviction, and the civil verdict had been wiped away, so technically what Senator Brock had said at the press conference had been a lie. But ...

....this new jury decided that was splitting hairs, and, besides, my bet is they just did not like Ruthann very much. Who did? Her own father, who had died during her campaign,  had written Ruthann out of his will. "I specifically and unequivocably leave absolutely nothing for my daughter...and direct my executor to reject any claim that she may make..."

The new jury found for Brock. Ruthann's claims were denied. That made two defeats in one election. Now she was really, double-dog-done in politics And that should have been the end of Ruthann's political dreams,  unless she had thrown herself into charity work or earned a Nobel Peace Prize or saved a sinking sack of kittens. Instead she switched to the Democratic Party and raised the curtain on Ruthann, act two. 

On Saturday, 7 June, 1997, Ruthann Aron was arrested for hiring a hit man to murder her old nemesis,  Arthur Kahn. And, as an afterthought, her own husband Doctor Barry Aron, who had finally asked for a divorce. 

The little lady had walked into the lobby of a Marriott Hotel, disguised in a trench coat, a wig, a floppy hat,  dark glasses and carrying the $500 down payment for a double murder. She must have looked like a munchkin spy. On tape she spelled out the names of her intended victims. "B like in boy, A-R-R-Y", she was heard saying.  The hitman/cop asked if Ruthann wanted her husband's death to look like a suicide.  Ruthann replied, "If it would pass muster".  It was an open and shut case. Mostly shut.

Ruthann insisted at both of her trials (the first jury hung, 11-1 for conviction) that she was crazy. Nine doctors argued she had a borderline personality disorder, had suffered a brain injury as a child, had 

been molested by her father.  But explaining her vindictive personality did  not justify her maniacal approach to politics and interpersonal relationships.  Let's just say she was nuts and let it go at that.

All 12 members of the second jury found Ruthann guilty of all counts. At her sentencing Ruthann's lawyer pointed out what her brief career in politics had cost the little lady. "She's lost her credibility, her reputation, her family as she knew it, her dignity, her lifestyle, her husband, almost everything she had”, he said.  She still got three years in jail,  with a suspended sentence of ten more years hanging over her head. Barry the urologist not only filed for divorce, he sued Ruthann for $7.5 million. So she counter-sued him for $24 million. Some people never learn. 

After she got out of jail in 2001, Ruth Ann moved to Florida, and changed her last name to Green.  And then she wrote her autobiography, in which she blamed everything on Barry. She called her self-published book, “Corrupted Justice: A Killer Husband,”   The jury didn't buy it, why should anybody else? 

And that is the end of the sad story of Ruthann  Aron-Green, She is still worth between $1 and $5 million. Her son died in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.  Her daughter no longer speaks to her. The lesson from our little tale of this little lady is that if you sleep with a politician, you may or may not find love, but you will defiantly get screwed. Those people are nuts.

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POLITICAL SPEAK

 

I wonder how many of you know, dear readers, that the word “Gobbledgook”, meaning a nonsensical word or phrase designed to imply importance has an actual birthday? The word was born on Sunday, 21 May, 1944,  in the pages of “The New York Times Magazine”. And it is just one of the many new English words born out of American politics. For example...

In 1812 the Massachusetts’s legislature contrived, with the help of Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced "Jerry"), to redraw the lines for the Essex County Congressional District, to insure a Thomas Jefferson Democratic-Republican won the elections there. 

According to legend it was famed painter Gilbert Stuart who first examined the twists and bends and curves of the new district (above) and observed that, to him at least,  it resembled a salamander. But whoever said it first, it was Benjamin Russell, editor of the Boston Sentinel, who renamed the proposed district a Gerrymander, after the Governor. 

So Elbridge Gerry (above), a man who signed the Declaration of Independence,  is remembered not for the good he tried to do but for his most blatant act of gaming the democratic system - cheating to win an election, It was an act so damaging to democracy his name now describes  used as a verb, (Gerrymandering), to the redrawing of congressional district to insure the election of one particular candidate or party. And allowing politicians to control the drawing of districts has Gerrymandered all negotiations out of American politics.

Almost as old is the word “Bunko”, meaning a fraud or a fraudulent spiel used by salesmen to sell bad or fake products.  Police departments around the nation still have squads of officers assigned to uncovering fraud and cheating scams, named “Bunko Squads”.  Originally the word was used to describe a speech by Felix Walker, a congressman from North Carolina.

Walker was born in 1753 in the mountains of western Virginia. He worked as a store clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, and tried homesteading with Daniel Boone in Boonsboro, Kentucky. He fought in the American Revolution, and served in the North Carolina House of Commons, the state legislature. In 1816 he was appointed to Congress, to represent the Blue Ridge ‘hollars’ and the French River valley of Buncombe Country.

The county was named after American Revolutionary War hero Colonel Edward Buncombe (above), who had been wounded and captured at the battle of Germantown, in 1777. Recovering from his wounds in occupied Philadelphia that May, Colonel Buncombe was sleepwalking when he fell and bled to death when his wounds reopened. The new county named in his honor was so large it was locally referred to as “The State of Buncombe.”Expecting a contentious re-election in 1818 and again in 1820, Felix Walker quickly learned the value of a well publicized and well received speech. And on 25 February, 1820, while the House of Representatives debated the crucial issue of the “Missouri Compromise”, deciding whether or not to take the first step that would lead to the Civil War, Congressman Walker arose and began to pontificate about the wonders of his district. 

The leadership were eager to put the matter of the Compromise to a vote, and after listening to Walker’s rambling speech for several minutes, they urged the Congressman to stop wasting time and sit down. But Walker explained that his speech was not intended for the benefit of the congress, but for the "simple folk of Buncombe County back home". And then Walker returned to his endless platitudes.

Almost overnight Walker’s speech was transformed from being about Buncombe to being “pure Buncombe” itself. And, with a little modification in spelling, it changed from "Buncombe", to "bunkum", and then to "bunk", as in a useless, pompous and empty speech, or "bunko" a false promise intended to further a fraud: an entirely new word had been added to the English political language.

Gobbledygook is a 20th century invention, and first appeared in an article about an internal government memo. The author of that memo and that article, and the inventor of the word, was Texas Congressman Maury Maverick (above), who was one of those rare politicians who actually believed that politics was a form of public service. He won a silver star and 2 purple hearts in WWI. And then he ran for Mayor of San  Antonio, Texas

He was limited to one term because during his service a communist rented a meeting room in the Civic Auditorium (above, left) . Legally Mayor Maverick could not refuse to rent the room. But his opponents were able to rabble rouse a little Texas-Hysteria, complete with demonstrations that grew until tear gas shells were lobbed back and forth in front of the auditorium. After that panic, he was defeated for re-election.

Maury Maverick later won election to Congress, where, in 1944,  he was named chairman of the "Small War Plants Committee" -  overseeing and coordinating the work of thousands of small factories all across the United States, seeking to avoid duplication of their efforts, causing shortages of raw materials and general waste.

Being a man interested in results,  Maury (above) quickly grew frustrated with the growing complexity of official language which prolonged the already almost endless committee meetings he had to attend .

He defined his new word as a type of talk which is long, vague and  pompous,  "…when concrete nouns are replaced by abstractions and simple terms by pseudo-technical jargon…".  It all made him think of the wild turkey’s back home, and their conversations which sounded like,  "gobble, gobble, gobble, gook".

In his memorandum (above) Maury ordered, in pure Texas style, "Anyone using the words “activation” or “implementation” will be shot”. The sorry state of affairs is substantiated because those very words have burrowed their way into our language and are now passively accepted. Perhaps this is because, despite Maury's protests, no one was executed. But perhaps because no one was, the continued human attraction to verbosity has since produced such nonsense such as "Pentagoneze", "Journalize", "circumlocution", and other such gobbledygook phrases used to describe Maury’s gobbledygook.

In an interesting (I think) side note, gobbledygook was the Maverick family’s second addition to the American lexicon. The first was their family name. There was a Maverick aboard the Mayflower. And 17-year old apprentice, Samuel Maverick, was shot down by 'lobster backs' at the Boston Massacre (above). But the most famous Maverick of all was another Samuel, born in Pendleton, South Carolina in 1803.

This Maverick, Samuel Augustus Maverick (above), graduated from Yale in 1825 and was admitted to the bar in 1829. A year later, he ran for the South Carolina Legislature, but his anti-secession and pro-union opinions contributed to his defeat.  

In 1835 Samuel Maverick moved to Texas. He was one of two men the rebels in the Alamo elected to the Texas Independence Convention, and he thus missed being butchered when Mexican troops captured the mission.   

He was elected Mayor and then Treasurer of San Antonio, and later served in the seventh and eighth Texas Congresses. He also dabbled in East Texas land speculation, and sometime in 1843 or 1844, as payment for a bad debt, Samuel Augustus took possession of a ranch around Matagorda Bay, Texas, on the Mexican border.

The only problem was that Maverick had no experience in ranching and no interest in learning. When he saw that every other rancher had branded their cattle, Augustus decided there was no need for him to bother.  In 1847, when Samuel moved back to San Antonio, he left his cattle under the care of his ranch hands, who saw no reason to pay more attention to their jobs than their absentee boss

They let the animals wander the open range. Cowboys who found unbranded cattle thus identified them all as the property of "Mr. Maverick", and mavericks thus became any unbranded cow or horse.

Samuel Augustus Maverick favored Texas annexation by the United States. And after it was, he opposed  secession from the union until he realized there was no stopping it.  When he died in 1870 he left holdings of over 300,000 acres and a reputation for independence - not being branded by any special interests. His son, Albert, fought with distinction for the south in the Civil War and was promoted to second lieutenant. After the war Albert Maverick  helped preserve the Alamo, donated "Maverick Park" to the city and lived to swear in his own son, Fontaine Maury Maverick (above), as Mayor of San Antonio - and later inventor of the term gobbledegook.  Albert Maverick died in 1936 at the age of 98. Maury Maverick died in 1954. He was not yet 59 years old.

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