promptly doubled their purchase orders on Congress.
Jim, now practicing law in Sioux Falls, mostly on behalf of a Yankton Indian tribe, has one failing: a loyalty to the Democratic Party that is invulnerable to the repeated rebukes of history. He’s a lesser-of-two-evils man and when driven into a corner starts the traditional keening about appointments to the federal bench.
Jim nourishes a particular contempt for Pressler, partly because this nincompoop took over the Senate seat Abourezk had held throughout the 1970s. Mentally frail and morally inert, Pressler is a man long and widely derided in Washington as an imbecile of fantastic proportions. Jokes about Pressler have haunted him from the beginning of his congressional career, when he bucked the Watergate crash for Republicans and won a House seat in 1974.
All the above facts about Pressler—ranging from his incrediblestupidity to speculation about his supposedly meandering sexual preferences—have for many years been a source of ribaldry and gossip in Washington and South Dakota. Only the ordinary voters have been spared the truth, with newspapers, radio and television respectfully displaying the words and deeds of their senior Senator.
Hence Jim Abourezk’s plea that I hurry east.
I did his bidding. On the appointed day in Sioux Falls, September 19, I faced a grueling schedule of two morning radio shows, an address to the City Club, a speech at the University of South Dakota’s Vermillion campus, addresses at two bookstores—Zanbros and Barnes and Noble—plus sidewalk encounters. At each opportunity I derided Pressler. On one radio show a listener called in to ask whether the fact that my father Claud had once written for the English Daily Worker might perhaps have affected my view of the Senator.
At the City Club Mrs. Pressler’s daughter by a previous marriage rose to denounce my treatment of her stepfather. The local newspaper reported that she quavered words of denunciation of my brutality before sitting down “amid stifled sobs.” That may be but she was seen ten minutes later clambering into her car with a Pressler supporter, roaring with laughter. Kevin Schieffer, Pressler’s former Chief of Staff, exhibited the imbecility of his boss by insisting on a lengthy exchange—carried on public radio—about the substantive evidence for my allegations. Pressler rushed out a statement saying that I was trying to ruin his life and that I was a tool of the Johnson campaign.
When it was all over, the local Gannett paper, the Argus Leader , carried the charges and editorialized that I had failed to prove them. But perhaps … out there my words will have found their mark, sufficient to make the difference. Jim Abourezk pronounced himself satisfied.
October 2
Like a death ship, its sails hanging limply off the spars, Campaign Dole drifts ever deeper into a Sargasso Sea of disaster. Dole campaigns on the crime issue and the Justice Department reports that violent crime is down 10 percent. He hammers the Clinton economyand the Bureau of the Census announces that real income for the average American went up for the first time in six years, and that the number of Americans living in poverty dropped from 36.4 million—a tidy total, to be sure—by 1.6 million.
Things are so bad for Campaign Dole that the columnist Mary McGrory reckons its shining moment came when Bob fell off a platform in California.
October 4
Ever since leaving South Dakota, I’ve been moving westward in the ’72 Imperial, noting the effects of political campaigning on the landscape. Bad. Driving into Yellowstone from Cody, the road was ripped for sixty miles, with several hundred bulldozers, loaders, oilers, dump trucks and graders massed along terrain that looked like the Plain of Jars after four years of American bombing in Laos. This is Senator Alan Simpson’s annual contribution to the economy of Wyoming, with millions poured into the effort to build something resembling the
Jim, now practicing law in Sioux Falls, mostly on behalf of a Yankton Indian tribe, has one failing: a loyalty to the Democratic Party that is invulnerable to the repeated rebukes of history. He’s a lesser-of-two-evils man and when driven into a corner starts the traditional keening about appointments to the federal bench.
Jim nourishes a particular contempt for Pressler, partly because this nincompoop took over the Senate seat Abourezk had held throughout the 1970s. Mentally frail and morally inert, Pressler is a man long and widely derided in Washington as an imbecile of fantastic proportions. Jokes about Pressler have haunted him from the beginning of his congressional career, when he bucked the Watergate crash for Republicans and won a House seat in 1974.
All the above facts about Pressler—ranging from his incrediblestupidity to speculation about his supposedly meandering sexual preferences—have for many years been a source of ribaldry and gossip in Washington and South Dakota. Only the ordinary voters have been spared the truth, with newspapers, radio and television respectfully displaying the words and deeds of their senior Senator.
Hence Jim Abourezk’s plea that I hurry east.
I did his bidding. On the appointed day in Sioux Falls, September 19, I faced a grueling schedule of two morning radio shows, an address to the City Club, a speech at the University of South Dakota’s Vermillion campus, addresses at two bookstores—Zanbros and Barnes and Noble—plus sidewalk encounters. At each opportunity I derided Pressler. On one radio show a listener called in to ask whether the fact that my father Claud had once written for the English Daily Worker might perhaps have affected my view of the Senator.
At the City Club Mrs. Pressler’s daughter by a previous marriage rose to denounce my treatment of her stepfather. The local newspaper reported that she quavered words of denunciation of my brutality before sitting down “amid stifled sobs.” That may be but she was seen ten minutes later clambering into her car with a Pressler supporter, roaring with laughter. Kevin Schieffer, Pressler’s former Chief of Staff, exhibited the imbecility of his boss by insisting on a lengthy exchange—carried on public radio—about the substantive evidence for my allegations. Pressler rushed out a statement saying that I was trying to ruin his life and that I was a tool of the Johnson campaign.
When it was all over, the local Gannett paper, the Argus Leader , carried the charges and editorialized that I had failed to prove them. But perhaps … out there my words will have found their mark, sufficient to make the difference. Jim Abourezk pronounced himself satisfied.
October 2
Like a death ship, its sails hanging limply off the spars, Campaign Dole drifts ever deeper into a Sargasso Sea of disaster. Dole campaigns on the crime issue and the Justice Department reports that violent crime is down 10 percent. He hammers the Clinton economyand the Bureau of the Census announces that real income for the average American went up for the first time in six years, and that the number of Americans living in poverty dropped from 36.4 million—a tidy total, to be sure—by 1.6 million.
Things are so bad for Campaign Dole that the columnist Mary McGrory reckons its shining moment came when Bob fell off a platform in California.
October 4
Ever since leaving South Dakota, I’ve been moving westward in the ’72 Imperial, noting the effects of political campaigning on the landscape. Bad. Driving into Yellowstone from Cody, the road was ripped for sixty miles, with several hundred bulldozers, loaders, oilers, dump trucks and graders massed along terrain that looked like the Plain of Jars after four years of American bombing in Laos. This is Senator Alan Simpson’s annual contribution to the economy of Wyoming, with millions poured into the effort to build something resembling the
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