Tea & Crackers Campaign, Chap. 16: Debate Fallout & The Slander Speech

Coming out of that first debate, Tugg must have felt scorched by DuPry, because he took to the airwaves and slammed DuPry hard on the radio for July and most of August up to the primary. He had professional commercials that waved the flag, quoted the Bible and championed his record of achievement. Most of it was a lie, but skillfully told.

It’s hard to call someone a sinner and then have to prove it, but Tugg managed to do it. He found a few customers that felt victimized by DuPry’s paycheck loan business, and all the interest they had to pay, and the fact that they could never catch up. And then one woman told the story of losing her house and having to move back in with her mother and live with her babies all in one room. She painted Bobby DuPry as a nasty skin-flint with no heart at all. No one wanted to suffer that. It was like he stripped the woman of her decency. Cracker Pride does run strong.

Tugg’s radio commercials played hot and heavy in the farm towns for six weeks, especially in the mornings and evenings, and on Cricket’s radio show. DuPry never came up with a decent reply, either that or he didn’t have the money to defend himself. He tried press releases and did a couple of local newspaper interviews, which got lost except he posted them on his website.

From his base in Live Oak, DuPry got quoted while speaking at a tea party rally for about sixty voters. It was held in the Veterans’ Hall in town, and the radio reporter got into the room and captured DuPry’s diatribe against Tugg. The locals took him seriously and I was shocked at how poorly educated they were. Even I would have known better. The intellectuals and those with a college-educated vocabulary in Gainesville got the best laugh. Here’s what DuPry said.

“I’m here to testify about some of the dirt we have learned on Earl Tugg after going to Washington DC as our Congressional representative for the last two years. And if you hear me, then you’ll want to join me and vote for me, as I’m a God-fearing patriot loyal to tea party principles and the US Constitution. Here’s what we have learned about Earl Tugg.

"Are you aware that Earl Tugg is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his son and sister-in-law. And he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens. And he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York City. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Earl Tugg, before his second marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”

Even I know what celibacy means. And for some of those other words, well, I looked them up on the Internet. I played the sound bite for Indian John, who I don’t think has that much school education, though he retired as an Army staff sergeant after twenty-five years. He heard all the scurrilous undertones in DuPry’s slam of Tugg. His response, “If he said that about me or my family, I’d kill him.”

To that I replied, “No need. DuPry is killing himself when he says stuff like that. It’s a slander attack with a bunch of made up words that paint a terrible picture for the uneducated.”

“Don’t ask. Don’t tell,” was Indian John’s reply. “But I’d kill him anyway.”

DuPry wasn’t accusing Tugg of anything significant, but he made it sound scurrilous and prurient. I imagine that his audience that night was too busy trying to sell DuPry t-shirts or collect names for email marketing to do anything but fan themselves and feel flabbergasted. Now if I’d been Tugg, I would have turned that into an endorsement that might swing some votes in Gainesville’s liberal theatrical community, but Tugg didn’t. He didn’t even reach for a dictionary. Instead he doubled down and spent more money on radio attack ads.

I played DuPry’s redneck speech at the meetings of several Democratic Clubs. In the suburbs of Gainesville, Ocala and Jacksonville, it was considered a fine piece of humor. However, Dr. Spector said we should leave it alone and let Tugg and DuPry hammer at each other.

We left the farm belt heartland for them to fight out their fisticuffs until the primary was over. Instead, we worked the suburbs of the major cities in the district. Veda played well there, speaking about core issues like government support for home loan refinancing, loans for a quality education, the importance of schools and health services.

Time and again she was asked to support a raise in the minimum wage. We met too many families that had both parents working two low-paying jobs to make ends meet. Above that segment of society were the young professionals, lawyers, doctors and medical workers that had secure jobs. They took to Veda’s message as they were raising kids and playing Monopoly with their home purchases, working to move up the economic ladder to earn entry into gated communities.

These folks were good campaign donors. As one young lawyer said to me, “The government is going to get it anyway. But by donating to Veda’s campaign at least I get the benefit of seeing my money go to support someone that is willing to work to help me build a better life.” I held out the ice bucket so he could deposit his check, and smiled.

Veda always sat in the back seat with me now as Indian John drove us home. We had many long chats about the campaign. She was of the opinion that the District was divided into two segments, the core and the fringe. The core was the farm belt, and the fringe were the bedroom communities around Ocala, Gainesville and Jacksonville.

The farm belt folk had issues with a woman in a leadership position; the fringe didn’t. The farm belt hated Obama and big government while the fringe wanted to leverage government services for their ability to rise in society. I understood the polarity, and Veda and I talked long and hard about how to bridge the gap. The fringe folks liked the Cincinnatus model immediately, as they aspired to be gentlemen farmers. Owning land was a magic bullet everywhere in the district.

The heartland folk thought Cincinnatus was some kind of historical icon. If he’d been a founding father, we might have stood a better chance. Best would have been if he’d signed the Constitution, but he hadn’t. The fringe folk were willing for government to be a balance and a trade-off with active negotiation. The heartland and especially the tea party folks wanted it their way all the time. They had an emotional purity to their arguments that sounded pretty close to Bible-thumping to me.

I sat through so many meetings and made so many phone calls into tea party homes, I began to feel for them. They wanted to believe in their government like they believed in their church. They didn’t care about issues, but stuck to principles. And they hated Obama. But I listened anyway, and let them rattle on about everything wrong with the country. Sometimes it sounded like the dirt-poor were angered that the city-poor might be getting a better deal out of job programs and family assistance.

“I want to get me mine,” one tea party leader once said to me, “and I don’t want the government getting between me and my tax dollars. The government is robbing me.” Then he was off on another rant that only Ted Cruz or Rand Paul could cure. I marveled at his willingness to put his faith in untested leaders, but politics is like religion in that it has its blind spots.

While Tugg and DuPry were slugging it out among the faithful, we used the time to get Veda organized. She had active committees and phone trees operating in all the heartland communities, and several for each fringe section of the District. Dr. Spector and Marge were fully occupied running the campaign. Dr. Spector trained a core group of students on issues management, voter registration, and how to run a turn out the vote initiative. Every weekend they’d move out to Jacksonville or Ocala to train volunteers and register new voters.

Dr. Spector called them ‘our ground troops.’ He said once the primary was over, and we expected Tugg to win, then Tugg would begin his air campaign of radio and TV commercials against Veda. We didn’t have the money for that, and would have to rely on holding the ground gained by our volunteer troops. “Instead of us convincing people, it’s better for neighbors to convince neighbors to vote for Veda. That’s the strongest endorsement we can get,” Dr. Spector kept reminding Veda’s volunteers.

His analogy played like the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, and the Gainesville political science volunteers seemed to understand that. God bless the exposure to football they’d gotten growing up in the Gator Nation. God knows what other volunteers imagined, but it felt to me like Veda was up seven points. Tugg would hit with his air attacks, long aerial passes of radio and TV commercials that we hoped would become dropped ‘Hail Mary’ passes. And if we survived that, then we’d win.

That’s how Dr. Spector wanted the campaign to work out on paper. He had the flow charts, polling profiles, hot issues lists, voter interviews, and questionnaire responses to back up his argument. Trouble is, I didn’t expect what he’d worked out on paper would stand up under one hard rain of tea party negativity and verbal abuse. Tugg had a big war chest and I guessed he was getting expert campaign advice from a Republican think tank somewhere.

Anyway, I went back to making my phone calls for Veda, letting families know we cared about their opinion and their vote. Sometimes the mothers would say to me, “You got my vote, but I don’t know about my husband. He’s probably with Tugg.” My favorite call was when someone would say, “You got four votes here. We’re behind you. No need to call again.” Then I’d take their email and see they got the twice monthly newsletter. The campaign was getting good at electronic communications. The email list was up to over fifty thousand names. If they all made it to the polling booth, we had a good chance of unseating Tugg.