#166 Truman Campaign

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2022/08/166-blog-post-tuesday-30-august-2022.html

 

#166 Blog Post -- Tuesday, 30 August 2022

Posted by Denny Hatch

 

Direct Selling an Underdog Candidate  —
America's Greatest Data-driven Campaign

  In 1945, Sen. Harry S Truman — product of the Kansas City Democratic machine of notorious Boss Tom Pendergast — had been the Vice President of the United States for 82 days. 

 

Suddenly, on April 12, 1945 — after an unprecedented 12 years in the White House dealing with the Great Depression and World War II — the beloved terminally ill and tired paraplegic President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.

 

Truman came into power knowing nothing about national politics.  For example — astonishingly — this Vice President of the United States assumed office never having heard of the TOP SECRET atom bomb.

 

Truman presided over tumultuous times—Civil Rights, Russian expansionism, Korean War, Berlin Airlift, China going Communist. He was vilified, sneered at and ridiculed by the media, Washington's elite and an obstreperous Republican Congress.

 

In 1948 Truman was nominated for re-election and his candidacy was considered dead on arrival by every big city newspaper, pundits and pollsters alike. New York Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey was considered a shoo-in.

 

As the campaign got under way, Dewey was leading Truman by double digits in the polls. At that point, Elmo Roper ceased all polling, because he knew Dewey’s win was a foregone conclusion.

 

A Presidential Campaign by Railroad
Unlike Any Other in American History 

 

The great whistle-stop campaign tour was completely Truman's idea. From July to October the President traveled 31,000 miles by train across the country. He made 352 speeches. Often starting a 6:00 a.m. in his pajamas and bathrobe — he might speak to 22 people from the rear platform of his special train and go on to make 16 more stops that day, often ending at midnight. He also spoke to a crowd of 80,000 at the National Plowing Match in Dexter, Iowa and 125,000 on Labor Day in Detroit. More than 3 million Americans saw and heard the President live and in person during the tour.

 

Truman’s Secret Organization

• The campaign had a private group of 7 brilliant researchers/writers back in Washington.

 

• These faceless wizards planned the schedule of stops and then sent a 12-point questionnaire to Democratic officials at every one of the scheduled 352 campaign stops.

 

• The replies and resultant individual speeches were assembled and flown out to the nearest airport and delivered to the campaign train every other day.

 

• When the train pulled into a little town or a giant state fair, the President appeared and started by acknowledging the local movers and shakers by name — their politics, individual history, gossip, the town's main businesses, restaurants, problems and news of local economy.  He related to his listeners in an intimate, personal way.

 

• Thereafter he would launch into a blistering attack on the “Do-Nothing Congress” and promise to make the audience's lives — and the country — a better place than ever before.

 

    "All Politics Are Local.” —Tip O'Neill

Right up to Election night the pundits, pollsters and newspapers  had Truman losing the election to Dewey by a huge margin. The reason: the campaign was a series of local stops and local stories. The media did not send their national reporters out to the boonies to cover the president. Gallup's polling operation had gone dark. Nobody in the country had a clue what was happening nationwide. The entire presidential campaign was under the radar.

 

Phillip White's WHISTLE STOP ­— the insider's account of that revolutionary campaign — is delicious reading. It's a rip-snorting page-turner you won’t be able to put down. Guaranteed!

 

Takeaways to Consider

 

• In marketing, the key copy drivers—the 7 emotional hot buttons that make people act — are fear, greed, guilt, anger, exclusivity, salvation and flattery. Truman pulled all of them out his bag of tricks—at once folksy and upbeat, snarling and passionate.

 

 • Unlike today's campaigns, these were not e-mails in teensy-weensy type from a political headquarters showing up on your computer or smartphone that you could delete with a click.

 

• Here was the real-life President of the United States... right here in your very back yard... in the flesh (and sometimes in his PJ's) talking directly to YOU all about YOUR town, YOUR neighbors, YOUR mayor, YOUR economy, YOUR hopes and dreams. This direct intimacy enthralled listeners in 352 towns and cities, whether the population was two thousand, twenty thousand or 2 million.

 

• This was the pre-television and pre-Internet.  Today, when a TV appearance is scheduled, talking heads discuss what's about to happen... the candidate is introduced and speaks. Whereupon he/she leaves the scene and a group of know-it-all smarty-pants pundits take over to belittle the candidate and the enthusiasm.

•  For all intents and purposes Truman's secret presidential campaign caused the entire country to focus on municipal, state, House and Senate candidates.

 

• To everyone's astonishment in the media and politics — especially to Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey — Truman won re-election by 2.1 million votes (Electoral College Votes: 303-189).

 

• An aside: It was Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, the acerbic Alice Roosevelt Longworth (a great friend of my father's) who savaged the slick, smug New York Governor Tom Dewey saying he "looks like the bridegroom on a wedding cake." Dewey never was able to escape the appellation.

 

 

• Most astonished of all were the editors of The Chicago Tribune who bought into the inevitability of a catastrophic loss for Truman and ran the huge front-page premature ejaculation, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." It was a hoot.

 

• This was the ultimate direct marketing, data-driven campaign. The President's team had the precise measure of every town, city and state as "Give-'em-hell Harry" talked directly to the voters (buyers) offering features, benefits and guarantees. 

 

• Nothing like this had ever been done before and could not be done today. In 2022 every local yokel media organization can go national with 5G networks, mini-cams and drones and be instantly on the air with the news, gossip, dirt and lies, lies, lies.

A personal digression...

 

 

In 1947, my father, historian Alden Hatch, was signed by Liberty magazine to write series of monthly articles on all the presidential candidates. He interviewed all the Republicans — Harold Stassen, Robert A. Taft, Arthur Vandenberg, and Thomas E. Dewey as well as President Truman.

 

My father's final question to each of them was, "From one poker player to another: When do you draw to an inside straight?” All the Republicans — Dewey, Stassen, Vandenberg and Taft — solemnly shook their heads and said “Never.”

 

In the Oval Office, my father asked the President if he ever drew to an inside straight. Truman broke into huge grin. “Always!” he said gleefully.

 

P.S. The bourbon flowed, poker games were the entertainment. The private dining car had superb cuisine with white linen table cloths and polished silver. In short, it was a workaholics' grand stag party on wheels where a good time was had by all.

P.P.S. Might not this unique campaign model work for folksy Uncle Joe Biden in 2024? 

 

###

 

Word Count:1937

#165 Auto Insurers (2)

 http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2022/08/165-auto-insurers-2.html

#165 Auto Insurers (2) — Tuesday, 23 August 2022

 

Posted by Denny Hatch

 

 

Can You Trust Your Auto Insurance?
Uh-uh. A Lesson for Direct Marketers.

May 12, 2005. A 75-foot stone retaining wall built in 1908 collapsed onto Riverside Drive in the Bronx burying everything in sight.

 

The crash happened at 4:00 p.m. Immediately emergency crews rushed to the scene and worked through the night with heat-seeking probes and rescue dogs.

 

“There are no reports of anyone missing," said a reassuring Mayor Mike Bloomberg at the scene, "and the dogs don’t seem to think anyone is under the rubble."

 

Local television and newspaper coverage was vast and filled with outrage at neglected infrastructure. The wall had been buckling for months and repairs were scheduled to commence the following Monday.

 

"A Wall Fell on Their Cars. Then Bad Luck Set In."

"Denise Jack and other car owners thought they had it bad when a 75-foot retaining wall in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan collapsed on May 12, burying their parked vehicles beneath untold tons of debris. But their ordeal was actually just beginning. Their cars remain buried there today, and none are expected to be unearthed until the rest of the wall is stabilized and the rubble removed — up to a year from now. Until then, they are caught in the world of insurance limbo."  —Anahad O'Connor and Rachel Metz, New York Times, one month later (June 11, 2005)

  

The car owners immediately contacted their insurance companies and were blown off by the corporate adjusters. Since they had no way of proving their cars had vanished, the insurers were off the hook and not required to pay anything. 

 

Worse news, the car owners were forced to continue paying their insurance premiums that were buried under tons of debris and never again drivable.

• New Jersey medical student Steve Wang, who used his Ford Taurus to commute to New York, had no choice but to move to Manhattan.

• Nursing Assistant Denise Jack, who lived in Queens with her two young children, was forced to spend five hours a day commuting to and from her job in Manhattan on two buses and a train.

• Anthony and Joan Donovan, whose Nissan Altima disappeared in the detritus, were given car rental payments by Geico. That largess soon ended. Their car remained buried for months.

Insurance Industry Definitions: The Difference
Between an Accountant, Actuary and Adjuster

• An accountant is the person who goes onto the field of conflict after the battle and bayonets the bodies.

• An actuary is someone who does not have the personality to be an accountant.

• The only job in this world that is worse than being an actuary is that of an insurance adjuster. Imagine spending your entire life facing financially hurt, scared people and explaining to them why the insurance company does not have to pay a claim in full — or at all — because the small print says so.

Most astonishing was this quote by St. John's University law professor, Michael Sabino:

"These people have a bit of an uphill battle. If an insurance company tells them they have to wait it out for a year to see that the cars are excavated, and to see their vehicle identification numbers, then technically speaking they have a decent argument."

"An uphill battle?" "Wait it out for a year?" "Decent argument?" BS!!! Thus spake a sphincter-tight law professor whose business philosophy was above all, CYA. Professor Sabino proves the old saw that "People who can... do. People who can't... teach."

 

A long-time colleague of mine was the late Bob Doscher who came up with the term: "Catalog Bandit."

 

An example of catalog banditry was Doscher's saga of the woman who is invited to a fancy gala. She shops an upmarket fashion catalog and orders three expensive dresses for delivery the week before the party. After trying on the gowns, she selects one and wears it to the affair.

 

Whereupon next morning she returns all three dresses for full credit.

 

Do You Trust Your Customers?

First off, a client who has faithfully been paying you several thousand dollars a year for car insurance is not likely to be a bandit/rip-off artist.

 

Further, if a paying client were to falsely claim his car was buried under a hundred tons of rubble, the crime of insurance fraud would kick in and be punishable by serious fines and jail time.

 

In short, it's common sense to give your customers the benefit of the doubt unless you have an iron-clad reason not to.

 

I stumbled into direct marketing in 1962. I went to work as a cub copywriter for Grolier Enterprises, publisher of the Dr. Seuss children's book club. In a routine sales meeting, the president of the company, Elsworth Howell casually dropped a 7-word business rule that became etched into my DNA:

 

"Always convert a disadvantage into an advantage."

 

An Old-time Marketer's Obvious Solution

1. Pay off the claim immediately. Keep a happy customer.

 

2. It's a few thousand dollars — a teensy weensy fraction of your media advertising spend.

 

3. You'll have a satisfied customer who'll continue to pay you thousands of dollars a year.

 

4. That customer will be dining out on this story for years, resulting in new business referrals for you.

 

5. Look on this disaster of the buried cars as a marketing bonanza — the basis of a nation-wide PR/publicity/advertising campaign that will set you apart from your deadbeat competitors who screwed their clients.

 

6. If I were in charge of corporate PR, I would relish the opportunity to honcho this campaign that touts my wonderful company and dumps on all my competitors without having to mention them by name.

 

Takeaways to Consider

• What triggered this blog post was my column last year about sheer silliness of auto insurance ads on TV.

• Most car insurance ads are designed for (1) instant name recognition by consumers, (2) lowest price and (3) cutesy-poo buffoonery for name recognition by robotic web crawlers to guarantee the company name high placement on the Google/Bing lists when auto buyers come looking.

 

• I have owned automobiles all my adult life and been required by law to carry full insurance as a pre-requisite to car registration.

 

• All my life when paying for insurance I have worried less about price and more about the back end: imagining the horror scene of a crash or hurting someone when I was behind the wheel of a car. Would my car insurance keep me whole whatever happens?

 

• This 2005 Bronx avalanche showed the typical car insurance companies assume all their customers are rip-off artists and deserve to be screwed.

 

• What's more, we customers are too stupid to think through the penalties for potential insurance fraud.

 

• "The large type giveth and the small type taketh away." —Tom Waits

 

###

 

Word count: 1098

 

#164 Stork Story

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2022/08/164-stork-story.html

#164 Blog Post - Wednesday, 10 August 2022

 

Posted By Denny Hatch

 

News About the World's Richest Family  
Plus Denny's 45-Year-Old Bawdy Novel

Left: 76-year-old Errol Musk surrounded by portraits of his son, Elon. Last month Forbes magazine declared Elon Musk (founder of Tesla and SpaceX) to be the Richest Man in the World. (Net worth: $264.9 Billion.) Right: Denny's third novel published in 1977.

 

Personal Note: This blog post is entirely about laffs. It has nothing to do with making money or how to write great copy.  

These are miserable times — COVID, Ukraine, every woman losing the right to her own body, 53 million Americans (including 12 million children) go to bed hungry and desperate for handouts from food banks, outta sight gas and grocery prices and half the country raging mad the other half. I wake up every morning with a renewed sense of dread. 

 

Hey! Let's pause for a few giggles.

 

Below: Three Unbelievable Headlines and Lede Paragraphs from the Worldwide Media, Mid-July 2022.

 

SEED THE WORLD
Errol Musk says he’s been asked to donate sperm to impregnate high class women in bid to create new generation of Elons
ELON Musk's father has claimed he has been asked to donate sperm to impregnate high-class women and create a new generation of Elons. Errol Musk, 76, previously said in an exclusive interview with The Sun that he welcomed a second child, now three, with his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, 34. Errol was married to Jana Bezuidenhout's mother Heide for 18 years. In 2018 it was revealed that he had welcomed now five-year-old son Elliot Rush, nicknamed Rushi, with Jana, who is 42 years his junior and he had raised since she was four. Now the Tesla CEO's father claims he has been offered the chance to donate his sperm by an unnamed South American company.
—Alex Diaz, The Sun (UK). 18 July 2022

 

Elon Musk’s dad, 76, ready to donate sperm to 'high-class’ women: ‘Why not?’
• Errol Musk told The Sun (UK) newspaper that a company has asked him to donate sperm.
• We are on Earth "to reproduce," he said when revealing he had a child with his stepdaughter.
• Insider recently revealed Elon Musk had twins with one of his top executives last year.
The 76-year-old told The Sun: "I've got a company in Colombia who want me to donate sperm to impregnate high-class Colombian women because they say, 'why go to Elon when they can go to the actual person who created Elon?'.
—Andrew Court, The New York Post, July 19, 2022

 

Elon Musk’s Dad Reckons A Company Wants His Jizz To Spawn Even More Elons & Isn’t One Enough?
Greetings to everyone on God’s green Earth except Elon Musk‘s dad. Why? Because he claims a company wants to use his cursed cummies to create a brand spankin’ new generation of Elons. It was only a few days ago we learned Errol Musk had a secret child with his step-daughter and if I’m being honest, that was enough information about the bloke’s reproductive capabilities to last me a lifetime. But no, apparently the spotlight on this man’s sperm has not simmered down because he’s gone and told The Sun that his nut is in high demand in South America.
—Isabella Corbett, Pedestrian Daily, July 19, 2022 
 

A Tale From My Oh-so Checkered Past
In 1977 I wrote and published a dark comedy — The Stork. It was the wackadoodle saga of two young bachelors who started a bank. Not just any bank, but rather a frozen sperm bank for childless couples.

 

This was not the about frozen output of the usual donors — young men in college or starting out in business who need to earn some extra money by selling their sperm.

 

Rather, these donors would be passing along genes guaranteed to have come from descendants of the richest, most powerful, most successful, most charismatic men and women who ever lived in the annals of finance, business, military, politics, sports, theater, film, opera, royalty, the church, arts and sculpture, writers, and scientists. 

 

Average fee for a guaranteed healthy live birth — the purchase price of a distinguished ancestor and those genes: $10,000. 

 

The book was published by William Morrow. It got five marvelous reviews. Just five. No reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker or The Washington Post. The only large circulation paper that wrote it up was The Los Angeles Times.  (See below for that review, which is funny as hell.) Who knew William Morrow's publicity people were weak piss? 

 

Film rights were optioned by Warner Brothers.

A year later it came out in paperback from Jove/Harcourt Brace and was published in the UK.

Whereupon — alas, with no movie having been made — it died.

Several years ago I gave CPR to The Stork. I self-published it on Amazon.com in Kindle format. Not interested in making money, I priced it dirt-cheap  at $2.99. This was my baby, and I wanted to give it another shot at life.

Okay, the $64,000 Question: Is The Stork Funny?

 

When someone named Denny Hatch writes a spoof called "The Stork (A Novel About Breeding)," the reader is entitled to know eggsactly what's going on. Briefly, this: Tim Smith is 30ish, fed up with playing cupid at his father's Aberdeen-Angus stud farm and eager for a little pocket money—his tax-wise, curmudgeonly sire has all his possessions listed in the name of the farm, and although Tim drives a car and any oil sheikh would admire, he rarely has much more than parking-meter change in his Bill Blass suit. He decides to split, to make it on his own as a consultant on human artificial insemination using a knowledge of genetics gained down on the farm.
 

It's a bummer. All across the country gynecologists are content with the contribution made by their anonymous donors—mostly medical students in need of a few dollars—and unanimously turn him down. Tim's sophisticated computer dating system is designed to produce perfectly matched-up zygote. The whole program is bailed out by an opportune arrival—one Mike O'Shea, leprechaun-of-all trades, who hits upon the supreme finishing touch to Tim's human mating scheme: promising parent that their artificially induced offspring will bear genes of distinguished ancestors.

O'Shea, that elegant elf who claims to know everyone who's anybody, is to supply the donors of pedigreed seed.  Authenticity and effectiveness of the of the donations are guaranteed to each recipient. The service is confidential—only the parents know their little darling is a byproduct—several generations removed, of Napoleon (even Josephine)—and anonymity of recipients is stringently maintained. 

 

With the aid of a gynecologist who supplies professional respectability and plenty of persuasion, whose efforts are abetted by a field sales force that also functions as an acquisitions team, Tim and Mike thrive mightily. The cash rolls in by the tens of millions. Can anything go wrong? Of course it can—everything can, and will. The pace quickens nicely at this point, and the resolution of the book's many threads into one outrageous, coincidence-supported Götterdämmerung is one of the thigh-slappingest scenes I have ever read. It is also gross beyond words. But by this time the reader has either become toughened to the author's raunchiness or put the book down, period. 

 

After all, a story whose central theme involves the onanism of various quadrupeds and bipeds can hardly maintain the tone of Little Women. So let us forgive the author his sins (after all, he's probably willing to forgive us our sins—anybody who'd have his dust-cover picture taken with a parakeet on his head is in no position to cast any first stones) and lean back for some hearty laughs. 

The story is certainly original and even though easy to find Comstockian fault with, it has some wondrously funny scenes. —Benjamin Marble, —L.A. Times

Excerpts from Other Four Reviews
Hatch is described as a direct- response advertising specialist. He writes as though under the influence of Thorne Smith, H. Allen Smith, O. Henry and Bob Hope’s stable of writers. —The Jersey Journal

 

When he isn’t regressing into the sophomoric and the freshmantic (“seed money,” “notary pubic," "El Seed”), Hatch unreels this fantasia with approximately the right mix of slapstick, word-play, and documentary mock seriousness. He also decorates the doing with many irreverent au-courancies that the stork is not one for the ages, or even next year, but for the moment and for those uninterested in real people doing vaguely real things, The Stork makes a lively enough delivery. —Kirkus Reviews

 

The text is larded with atrocious puns and far-fetched headings, but it all makes for enjoyable if sophisticated reading. —Library Journal

 

One definition of “ribald” is possessing rough convivial wit.” That’s Hatch for you. Some readers will find this a riot. Others will not. —Publishers Weekly

 

You Are Invited to Have a FREE Peek at The Stork.
To read the first few chapters of The Stork — FREE — go to the Kindle edition and click on "Send a Free Sample." If you find it amusing, the Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook Book edition is available for $2.99. I honestly believe you'll find it to be a hoot.

My wonderful Hollywood agent, Marvin Moss, died a number of years ago. At that point in my life, I quit writing novels and stumbled into the junk mail business in order to pay bills.

 

Dear Readers, The Purpose of This Blog Post:
I Come — Hat in Hand — Asking for Your Advice.

I have not had an agent for years. I have no connections to the literary world or the entertainment industry. I can offer a wild, very funny story based on a premise that has suddenly come alive thanks to the world's richest family. It's a fun read. I honestly believe it would make wildly amusing feature film (or tv series).

Any ideas?

Thank you.

 

Takeaways to Consider

• I'm not asking for free advice.

• Whoever comes up with the connections that enable this eccentric — and, at the moment, very relevant — bagatelle to have a new life is eligible for a hefty part of all royalties. —dennyhatch@gmail.com

 ###

Word Count: 1673