If you’re thinking of running for public office, first book a week-long cruise. There is no better boot camp.
Politics and ocean cruising bring the promise of spectacle burdened by the weariness of process. It was never clearer than on our recent cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage as to how voyaging has slipped into a scarcely muzzled dog fight mirroring American elections.
Cruises were once a petri dish for the refined. The slinkiness of Carole Lombard, the peregrinations of Agatha Christie, the skullduggery of Humphrey Bogart, the world reshaping of FDR and Churchill, all draped in waves of rhetorical or other inebriation.
The fancy people bathed in perfumes, Johnny Walker, winks, nods and Vaseline promises, and dirty deeds done (maybe not so) damn cheap.
On my first cruise, a 1972 honeymoon to Bermuda, the Holland America captain sat with us for dinner. Off the stern, you smacked golf balls into the Atlantic or shot-gunned clay pigeons. Earth Day had barely registered its arrival, and happy hour was a competitive sport.
Forty-five years, more voyages and uncounted elections later, cruises and politics are a fool’s gold of coarse ordinariness.
Cruise cities, as they are that, have become showcases of socioeconomic schmearing. Here, there is a forever high tide of pretension. Facts, like dollars, are shaken off like sudden salt spray.
Here, you test regional humor -- “He stinks worse than a foggy outhouse.” Religion and sarcasm – “Bless her heart, she’d better save me than last slice of chocolate cake or there won’t be anything left to bless.”
Shipboard as in American politicking, what matters is Hot ‘n Now. You vie to become Buzz Lightyear -- first in line for infinity. Acquaintances are played like party balloons: extend, fill and release. Test every water, set it afire, walk on it, bottle same.
This is a vetting of your political platform. On a recent Princess cruise, chance encounters offered these supporting-cast opportunities:
A meat market manager from southeast Wisconsin was just back from trophy hunting in Africa. His seatmate was a Californian extolling the spread of state-legal marijuana. Jaws tensed in the cliché. A middle ground was brokered: both reveled in the joys of morel hunting. New office-seeker, these could be your regional campaign managers.
A former teacher from Arizona wore a saggy, anti-Trump T-shirt. She also voiced disdain for teachers, students, administrators and her onetime union. She sampled and dismissed every purple gourmet cookie at a British Columbia tourist spot. Her selective candor was refreshing and off-putting. Found, a potential high court nominee.
A disembarking tour was delayed by bum directions from a ship bureaucrat. Another official, a young woman from South Africa, took to the theater loudspeaker, deflecting a peppering of nasty shouts. “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how these mistakes were made but I know how to control a crowd. I will get you off the ship in a timely way but only if you listen to me.” Mmm, a potential chief of staff.
Your teething political chops might observe how tired hucksters and adventurers dive for the wallets of the bored. I tinker with the actual themes, but hear now sound of their lures: Art auctioneers, “Four hundred years in 40 minutes.” Outdoorsmen, “Solo kayaking the Passage with breaks for beer and ice cream (but no sex).” And bartenders, “Mimosas and margaritas at dawn as glaciers die before your eyes!”
This is a PG-13 Las Vegas, leagues away from a Madison Square Garden balloon drop. Cruising is political training wheels, a gateway to yelling “Mouse!” in a Michelin-rated eatery. Nowhere will you likely eat worse Baked Alaska than offered on an Alaskan cruise – how better to serve a stump speech?
At journey’s end, I joined most bestowed with coffee-break fantasies explaining belt-buckle spillover.
But someone aboard this odyssey of the ordinary may have gleaned a recipe for earning a campaign check and a check mark on an absentee ballot. If I could only persuade two such newly minted visionaries to climb aboard, we’d create a killer reality show.
(Also published as an op-ed in the August 25, 2017 edition of The Fresno Bee.)
John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company LLC. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.