And thus began long political career of a cunning child who aspired not to serve, but to be served
The Seeds of a Southern Statesman
“Addison, wake up!” shouted Julia McConnell from the far end of a hallway outside the boy’s bedroom. “Breakfast will be ready in twenty minutes!”
Mitch McConnell sat up in bed and looked around the dark bedroom. The nine-year-old boy couldn’t see much without his glasses, but he could make out the morning sunlight that stabbed through the cotton print curtains beside a window and threw golden slats of light on wall posters of Talleyrand and Boss Tweed.
“Addison!” Julia shouted a second time. “I’m up, Mother,” responded Mitch, as he hoisted himself out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom. He climbed onto a stool, so he could look into the mirror above the bathroom sink, then washed his face and combed his hair before adjusting his owlish horn-rimmed glasses; but his mind was far away, nervously anticipating the election of a class president that he and his fellow fourth-graders would hold later that morning.
Mitch finished dressing and tied his Buster Browns before shuffling down the narrow hallway to the kitchen, where he sat at a wooden table and stared at a plateful of hominy grits and grapefruit. As he gulped down a glass of warm orange juice, his mother sat beside him and read aloud a passage from a morning devotional. “A reading from The Prince, by Machiavelli,” she intoned. “Chapter Nine, ‘Men judge more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Everyone sees what you appear to be. Few really know what you are. Hence, a great man cannot be a good man.’”
Mitch usually drew inspiration from these table readings and listened to them with keen interest, especially when his mother read from Robert’s Rules of Order. But this morning his mind was already counting ballots, and he heard scarcely a word.
Julia noticed her son’s distraction and asked, “Have you fed your fish this morning?” “Not yet, Mother,” he replied before climbing down from his chair and walking across the linoleum floor to the refrigerator. He opened the door and pulled out a cellophane bag with two small goldfish. The fish swam in circles as Mitch carried the bag to his bedroom, where he unsealed the top and poured its contents into a nine-gallon tank that rested on the back edge of his desk and housed his two piranhas. The pair of predators stripped their prey with such rapidity that the water danced with bubbles as tiny bones floated to the surface. Mitch watched the carnage and wondered to himself if this was what Alabama politics was like.
Julia drove her son to school, where he made a beeline for the classroom and arrived in time to pass out campaign fliers to most of the other students as they straggled to their desks. For months he had schemed and labored to become class president, an ambition fueled by his many personal limitations. He was too short to join the baseball team, and his acute myopia prevented him from becoming a patrol boy. His grades were not high enough to impress the teacher, but he had managed to become a lunchroom monitor for two months in a row; and he extorted dimes and quarters from the children who misbehaved in the cafeteria, in exchange for a promise not to report them to the principal.
Mitch turned the modest revenue stream into a campaign fund, which he desperately needed in order to stand a chance of winning. He wasn’t as popular as his opponent, Sally Newman, a charming cheerleader with curly hair, a peach complexion and beguiling freckles, who had a line of boyfriends that stretched around the block. Mitch didn’t have the athletic prowess to win the jock vote, and he lacked the charisma to excite the masses; but for all his trouble with basic math, he had long since learned how to divide the children against each other.
He had nothing positive to offer the students, so he craftily tied his opponent to the unpopular president of the United States. “A Vote For Newman Is A Vote For Harry Truman” warned his campaign banners. Mitch also sidled up to Minnie Taylor, the class gossip, and began a whispering campaign against his opponent, alleging that her father was a socialist and her older sister Martha had been caught matriculating with thespians at Vassar.
One afternoon Mitch had feigned an ankle injury in order to stay in the classroom during recess, when he rifled through the teacher’s desk until he found Sally’s conduct reports for the past two years. When she was seven, she had been assigned two days’ detention after a teacher caught her trying to remove a copy of Teen Magazine from the school library. Mitch fed this juicy factoid to the other students in time to make a last-minute surge and win the election by two votes.
He grinned dutifully as the other children applauded and the teacher handed him the president’s gavel; but his mind was already far away, hatching a plot to have the flagpole in front of the school named after himself.
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