From Horse Manure To Horseshit - An Iowa Farm Girl Goes To Washington

Mabel Hitchens ran for office in a rural district of Iowa, a more cows than people kind of place, a place laughed at by the coastal elites, flyover country they said ignoring the rock-ribbed family values that had been the core of the nation since its founding. 

Mabel Hitchens had grown up in the very county she wanted to represent and was known to just about everybody for her grit and proud farmland heritage.  Her father was a farmer, and so was her grandfather and far back beyond that. She grew up with pigs and chickens and milked the cows before she was six, walked the three miles to school and back when she was little, helped out at home with her five brothers and sisters and never complained, just took life in stride. 

She got a gumption when older, a discipline problem in high school, showing spunk and independence unusual for a girl of her age; but it was never irritable unpleasantness.  She was only angered that after walking all that way to find the watercooler broken and half the lockers swinging on their hinges and couldn't keep it to herself.  

'It's a disgrace', the young outspoken Mabel shouted at a school assembly one Thursday morning where she, through pure doggedness got the principal to let her speak.  A mistake, the administration soon realized, because this little farm girl let 'em have it, not stopping at the water fountain or the broken lockers but to the insulting curriculum - a dead thing never reviewed and updated since McGuffey's Reader and consigning students to See Spot Run lessons and consigning them forever to the ignorance they were born with. 

She retracted that last bit - 'born ignorance'.  All she meant was tabula rasa at birth, and since she understood how it could be interpreted as the clodhopping ignorance of farm families (which was, to be honest, true enough), she retraced her steps, issued a a correction which wasn't necessary because the student body and the administration only heard her condemning, righteous words about the plumbing, the hardware, and the books. 

It was a good lesson for Mabel - the essence of politics really, a silver tongue, some animation and hyperbole, ways to insinuate ideas and then backtrack - one she never forgot. 

She was quite happy to stir the pot at the local level - head of the PTA, member of the school board, appointee to various citizen committees on community welfare, public safety, and parks, lobbyist in the state capital for better signage and road maintenance - but never had electoral ambitions.  Besides, she had married and had children of her own, still worked the farm, provided well for her family, and had no intentions of leaving the life. 

Yet she had been bitten by the political bug.  The sway she held over audiences, her ability to turn them around with a well-timed phrase, the growing sentiment of crowd loyalty which implied responsibility but gave her license, the cheering and recognition were all signs that pointed to a political future.  You can't fool all the people all the time, she chuckled, but most of the time nyway; and with that minor epiphany, she set her sights on Washington. 

At first the political establishment dismissed her - a woman with not much more public experience than school board and bailiff - but they soon realized that this woman was exactly what the voters, sick and tired of Washington shenanigans, wanted.  She was known as a woman of deep moral principle and intellectual honesty, and would legislate on principle not re-election.  

She's a 'tough bitch', said Tommy Evans at The Watering Hole after a hot day in the cornfields, high and healthy thanks to good rains.  There was no patriotism like cornfield patriotism, said Tommy, and he would be honored to send a patriot like Mabel Hitchens to Washington. 

Mabel had learned her lesson well.  There was no difference between local politics and national politics.  Both were ruled by insatiable self-interest and punishing ambition on the one hand; and credulousness and passionate loyalty on the other.  Anyone who understood that calculus - the formulae at the heart of the electoral process - would be a shoo-in anywhere an election was to be held. 

Cynical perhaps, but true. The 'fool' adage of Abraham Lincoln and its old English corollary, 'A fool and his money are soon parted' were never more relevant.  Alexander Hamilton was right when he argued with Thomas Jefferson about the nature of majority rule. Fools, brigands, and ne'er-do-wells, he warned his colleague.  Not to be trusted, not in the least; so Jefferson configured an intermediate body like the House of Lords to filter the demands of the rabble and transform them into reasonable legislation. 

 

Hamilton, if he were alive today, would not be surprised at the wild political sideshow of our era.  The same rubes, ignoramuses, self-deceiving arrogant fools of his day are still in office put there by naive, credulous ignorant bunch of intellectual backwoods crackers. 

Be that as it may, Mabel saw it as an opportunity. She understood the calculus and would work it to her advantage.  She learned quickly how to whip up crowds to a fever pitch, calm them with platitudes and nostrums, cajole them with sweet talk, incite them with hyperbole, encourage them with patriotic hymns, lead them wherever she wanted whenever she wanted.  She was a master. 

Election was easy and re-election even easier.  From horse manure to horseshit was a smooth, uninterrupted ride.  She repaid her constituents manyfold and thanks to her canny understanding of fragile male egos and the insatiable desires of ambitious women, she made waves in Congress.  She could interest, charm, and convince, and before long she was known as that strange, valuable, unique commodity, a political fixer.  One went to Mabel and never returned emptyhanded. 

'Don't you miss the farm?', asked a colleague from a rural district in another state. Mabel thought for a moment, thinking back on her pig-and-chicken, up-at-five, pot roast and mashed potato supper life, and replied that yes, of course she did and instinctively (once a politician always a politician) went on to paint a Norman Rockwell portrait of the idyllic life of the farm, a wholesome, God-blessed, place. 

Her colleague smiled, almost tearful and the memory, and gave Mabel a hug. 'We are so lucky', she said, 'to have you here'. 

Mabel was no Einstein, no Kant, Feynman, or Voltaire.  She was simply a woman of uncanny instincts for human frailty - the heart and soul of politics - and on that alone she made her way up and down the corridors of power.  

You don't need to know much to be a Washington politician, just the right things.