LET ME SAY THIS ABOUT THAT

Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 16, 1983
Author: KEVIN HALL Herald Tropic Editor

Try to imagine, just for a minute here, what it would be like if you were somehow forced -- by some wild kink in the great flow of history -- to become a politician, perhaps even a governor.

You'd surely have to change your ways.

Right away, you'd have to hide the gin; buy an American car; get rid of the yellow rubber sandals; and remember always to order the vanilla.

And never scratch your itches.

That is, you will need to drop your good old American eccentric individualism and take up an image something like a boiled potato's.

Because otherwise you're going to offend somebody and you're going to become unpopular pretty quick and you're not going to be invited back by the party.

It's not how wonderful you are, but how awful you're not, that counts. So you will learn fast to be as boring as possible.

Now, before anybody gets the idea that I'm down on politicians, I want to say this about that right here at this point in time: It's not their fault.

We make 'em that way. We hound them and poke them and prod them and, if they do anything at all so's you'd notice, we screech in indignation.

It's maybe just a little ironic that we seem to want our leaders to be a crowd of smiling robots, leaders scared stiff of the followers. And then we're annoyed when they turn out to be so damn dull.

As a reporter, I used to interview this or that politician quite a lot. I'd know his answers, and he'd know my questions, before they were ever spoken; and we'd shuffle feebly through this dull routine like two exhausted sleepwalkers in a marathon dance contest, each clinging hard to his job.

I would of course wish that just once he would jump naked into the town-square fountain, but of course he wouldn't.

And the story, whatever it was, would generally say, "The matter is under review."

But now along comes Governor Bob.

He's your governor, folks, whether you've been paying any attention or not.

Over the years he has proven to be as good as anyone in the world at dourly playing the required boiled potato.

See, we thought -- in our impishly perverse way -- that it might be amusing to send a loony comedian who knows nothing about politics up to Tallahassee to interview the stuffy old politician who knows nothing about humor; the idea being that if you put two people together who know none of the rules that the other plays by, the result would be that they'd have to agree on a different game to play and we might therefore get a result in which we see two fairly baffling human beings behaving comprehensibly.

Or some such thing.

At the very worst, the politician would insist on being dull and the humorist would have a very fine foil with which to give us all a little chuckle.

There was another possibility.

But we didn't know it.

And, good grief, it came to pass.

Your governor refused to play the potato.

Instead, he took a risk. He showed us something special.

He showed us a good time.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC MAG
Copyright (c) 1983 The Miami Herald