“Facts? Sonny Boy, in politics the facts don’t matter. In politics, what matters is the names you can manage to impose upon the facts.”                               —The original Ray Mosby
ROLLING FORK—The metaphor of “smoke-filled rooms,” so overused as to now be cliché in describing the supposedly bad old days of politics in this country is starting to look a lot better to me these days.
Fact is, I spent a lot of my youth in some of those smoke-filled rooms, courtesy of the deference that his 1960s contemporaries extended to my grandfather, and it was within them that was born and nurtured what would become my lifetime fascination with politics.
During those years, Ray Overton Mosby, my grandfather, was something of a political power-broker in Coahoma County, Mississippi — one of the dozen or so men who decided the people who were (and weren’t) going to be elected to this office or that. Oh, there were elections, of course (primaries, actually, because in those days there was really only the Democratic Party at the county level), but, the real truth was that if the original Ray Mosby and his cronies didn’t endorse a candidate for something, the odds were downright overwhelming that he was not going to be elected to that something.
And so it was that the fates, good and bad, of many an electoral wannabes were decided within the walls of the Elks Club, a once stately, grand old building in downtown Clarksdale where a bank now sits. And, because that establishment for many very sound reasons had a tacit no kids allowed policy, there were none—except me. Due primarily, I believe to a most memorable steely stare that my grandfather extended to a group of fellows the first time he took me to a “politics meetin,’” there was unwritten, unspoken sanction given to the reality that when “Big Ray” showed up, “Little Ray” was more often than not going to be accompanying him.
And that’s just the way it was and that was all right.
The only instructions my grandfather—I called him NanDad—ever gave me was to be still, be quiet, listen to what was being said and pay attention to who was saying it. If I did that, he told me, I would learn more about politics than anybody would ever teach me in any school.
And he was, of course, right.
On many a night as the bourbon and branch water flowed and the cigarette and cigar smoke swirled, I learned how to read faces, voices, what we now call body language. I watched the way that some men could impose their wills upon others and paid attention to the ways in which they did it. I learned that the most powerful words usually came not from the men who spoke the most of them, but from the ones who spoke the fewest.
I learned to recognize a lie, even as it was being uttered. An invaluable lesson, that, and one that has served me quite well through all the years of plying this trade.
I learned to separate the verbal wheat and chaff, what to retain and what to discard. Sitting at NanDad’s knee one night, when one exceptionally consistent blowhard finished with one of his far too frequent pontifications, I softy whispered “bull,” to which my grandfather responded with a pat, a wink and a wry smile, that combined to say “you’re learning, Sonny Boy.”
In addition to the observation quoted above, which remains to this day the single most salient political truth I have ever heard or read, my grandfather imparted a great many of what I later was to recognize as great wisdoms in the car rides home after those meetings. On one of the rare nights in which “his man” was passed over in favor of another for sheriff, I allowed as how that just wasn’t fair. “Fair,” he said with a chuckle, “A fair is something with rides and clowns. Life isn’t fair, Sonny Boy, and politics sure as hell isn’t.”
Were he alive today, my grandfather would be the highest paid political consultant in the country.
And as I watch the political campaigns of today, caucuses and primaries and super PACs and polls and focus groups I can’t help but sometimes muse that despite their warts and absence of “democracy,” there is something to be said for those long ago smoke-filled rooms.
They may not have always produced “good government,” but the notion that a young man stood to gain a lot more knowledge from that process than the current one is a truth of which I am most certain.
(Ray Mosby is publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork. Contact him at deercreekpilot@bellsouth.net).