The 1960 Campaign

THE GOLDEN KAZOO (246 pp.)--John G. Schneider--Rinehart ($3.50).

The simple thesis of this book is that tomorrow's President will not be elected by the people, nor by old-line machine bosses like The Last Hurrah's Frank Skeffington (see above), but by slick advertising boys on Madison Avenue. A candidate will be pretested and merchandised like "a can of beer, a squeeze tube of deodorant, a can of dog food."

This would-be satire, by an ex-adman turned novelist, is set in the political outer space of 1960. The book's hero-heel is Blade Reade, a middle-aging boy genius who tries to keep his ulcer quiet and his three telephones busy. Blade paces the "deep veldt" of his office carpet during "Thinktime" and his mind crackles with "hot intuitive ideas busting loose like popcorn over a fast fire." As chairman of the Voters' Service Committee of the Republican Party, Blade needs a hot intuitive idea that will elect an amiable Midwestern boob named Henry Clay Adams.

The idea comes to him as he chats with his "irrefragably feminine" mistress, TV Star Flaire Daire. It is a "big 1960" idea: voters love babies. After a bit of coaxing, Mrs. Adams agrees to spill some pseudo pregnancy news over Flaire's national TV hookup.* Unfortunately, a makeup artist named Jacques Mario Jean Petrovich goes into a dither over Mrs. Adams' "firm ample tummy [which] was shaped like the underside of a round 15-inch skillet." The pair are about to start cooking with gas when Blade starts playing Bogart with Jacques's face ("Slap, r-r-rap").

What with hushing up the scandal, and the phony baby ploy, Blade finds that Adams is gaining ground. Still he needles his staff with the first law of gimmickry: "There ain't any highbrow in lowbrows, but there's some lowbrow in everybody." Where is the golden kazoo/- that will pied-pipe the voters into the Adams camp? Before Election Day rolls around, Blade finds the kazoo and a tune to tootle on it.

Like any satirist, Author Schneider also considers himself a moralist. Yet his moral is perhaps the worst thing about the book. The old machine boss grew out of the necessities of ward politics and immigrant life, just as the new TV-conscious politician is shaped by the realities of mass education and mass sophistication. Both types can be corrupt, but the most corrupt thing in politics remains the destructive, naively cynical idea that all politicians are crooks--or admen.

This would matter less if the book were really funny. It isn't.

* A switch on Of Thee I Sing (1931), in which John P. Wintergreen is elected President on an all-out love platform, and later saved from impeachment by the First Lady's announcement that she is going to have a baby. As Vice President Throttlebottom tells the Senators: "Gentlemen, this country has never yet impeached an expectant father."

/- A toy musical instrument that makes a buzzing sound when one hums into the tube.

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