Rule Book

Tonic to voters who have gone often to the polls, sedative to voters who have never gone before, is a book, published last week, by Frank Richardson Kent, eminently readable political pundit of the Baltimore Sun.*

Mr. Kent's daily column, "The Great Game of Politics," is a sort of scorecard by which to tell the players. Political Behavior is a rulebook telling, for the benefit of a people whose political illusions are many, the rules by which the Great Game is played on a national scale.

Mr. Kent has been so enthusiastic, or so hurried, that he has by no means compiled the fully-detailed lexicon that he might have made, considering his powers and experience. He is repetitious. But he is trenchant, illuminating, entertaining. Items from the actual, continual, successful life and credo of the experienced national officeholder:

P: Politics is a concrete profession, practiced for livelihood by men who, for the most part, train themselves as consciously as do lawyers, doctors, dentists.

P: There is virtually no such thing as a "political genius," in the sense of a crafty wight who calculates moves of extreme subtlety and adroitness far ahead.

P: The Art of Seeming to Say Something Without Doing So must be practiced, no matter how it bores or shames you. Candid candidates lose. It is folly to discuss live issues unless forced to do so.

P: Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago is a supreme example of the importance of not being earnest, of "giving a good show." (In this connection, Mr. Kent makes the astonishing statement that President Coolidge has "a profound distaste" for fishing.)

P: "Corruption is not a party liability"--if you can ignore your accusers long enough, or play martyr.

P: "You can't win on a shoe-string." The decisive vote is the "floating" vote which can be polled only by distributing, or allowing to be distributed, money for the precinct organizers. The money does not actually "buy votes." It is paid to venal "runners" or "workers" on Election Day to fetch their relatives to vote. Estimating that there are 150,000 precincts in the U. S., each averaging 400 voters of whom perhaps two-thirds vote, Mr. Kent reckons that that party wins which has the money to employ ten "runners" per precinct at $5 or $10 for the day. Each "runner" fetches about ten votes, or 100 per precinct. The cost between 7 1/2 and 15 million dollars for all 150,000 precincts, is recorded locally as "current expenses" or is never recorded at all.

P: "When they stop writing about you you're licked." U. S. pundits, star-reporters, reporters, news-rewriters seldom realize this fact.

P: Politicians hand out humbug to the voters--but so does lawyer to jury, doctor to patient, actor to audience, salesman to customer, parson to parish. The politician's condition is that, though human and with himself to care for, he is also the public's servant, subject to idealized standards and extraordinary publicity.

P: "It is a tribute to public life," says Mr. Kent, than whom no pundit is more alert and merciless in exposing public villains, "that governmental graft is bigger news than any other kind."

* POLITICAL BEHAVIOR--Frank R. Kent--Morrow ($2.50).