Conservatism never got anywhere without a decent sales force. Considering the product..how could it?

[marmar]

from TomPaine.com:


By way of Steve Benen at Crooks & Liars, Steven Thomma of the McClatchy newspapers made an important observation yesterday, more important than he knows:

President Bush now has what he asked for — time to sell the people and the Congress on the Iraq war.

But an extra 60 days from Congress, the addition of the talented Ed Gillespie to run the White House communications strategy, and a newly ramped-up sales pitch cannot change the underlying fact: George Bush is a poor salesman.

He’s never really sold the country or Congress something it didn’t already want. And when he’s tried to sell something the people or the politicians didn’t want, he’s fallen flat.

That brief passage encapsulates today's lesson in the hidden history of conservatism: nearly all its important foundational figures have been salesmen, good ones—some not merely figuratively but literally. Barry Goldwater never exercised any genuine managerial leadership in the department store empire in Phoenix that bore his family's name; he was mostly a glorified drummer, and, as a politician, remained one. He never passed legislation before running for president; he went around the country giving pep rallies. "Salesman for a Cause," one early profile in Time called him: good enough for the conservative movement.

Want more? As a Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan never broke out of the middle of the pack. It was as a full-time salesman (for G.E.'s corporate brand) that he came into his own.

Another 1960s right-wing impressario was no mere salesman—his gig was in the candy business—but that accursed trade's evangelist. Robert Welch's first book, before founding the John Birch Society, The Road to Salesmanship, proclaimed selling a more important profession than law or medicine. The National Review considered Welch a creep, and attempted to rule him persona non grata in the conservative movement (that was part of the sales job), but it was assuredly not for his advocacy of the drummer's art: William F. Buckley's first, and more formative, job was as a traveling salesman, for the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, where the journeyman unloaded conservative bromides on unsuspecting college students, which turned out to be apprenticeship for his hardest job of all—his cross-country trek selling investors on National Review (he failed; his oil tycoon dad had to bail him out). Honest work, not quite hucksterism, to be sure. The huckster in the National Review circle was Marvin Liebman, a full-time publicist whose special gift was bamboozling reporters into believing the supposed "committees" 'wingers drummed up were more than mere letterheads. With the aplomb of Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success, his boldest bluff (besides keeping himself in the closet) was the Committee of One Million to keep the People's Republic of China out of the United Nations. The million petition signatures were all there, you see, out in a warehouse in New Jersey. No one ever managed to inspect them. Did the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross every show buyers the swampland they were selling them in Florida? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/death_salemsan?tx=3