PERHAPS IT IS UNFAIR, but I’ve always regarded politicians as I regard lima beans, jazz fusion, and Dr. Phil–as unnecessary evils. For what kind of half-man/half-freak spends his entire life suppressing his true self to ask strangers to embrace a false one? Besides writers, I mean.
But then I met Mike Benton. Or actually, I already knew him. He’s my former brother-in-law, and this year, he ran for clerk of the circuit court of Calvert County, Maryland.
The clerk’s race is not a sexy one, not a bellwether. Nobody goes around saying, “As clerk of the court goes, so goes the registrar of wills.” But you have to start somewhere, so this Election Day, Mike and I started at the bowling alley, where he picked me up in his Ford Explorer so that we could work the polls in what we liked to call “Road to the White House 2016.”
I first met Mike in a college human sexuality course, and we formed the indissoluble bond men share when listening to 20-year-old coeds talk about the Gräfenberg spot. Around the same time, we began dating a pair of comely sisters. One sister is now my wife. The other is now his ex-wife. But though it’s been years since he signed his walking papers, Mike has remained an in-law-at-large, showing up when most needed to help us put up swing sets or install garage-door openers. The least I could do, I figured, was to offer some helpful campaign advice.
“Mike,” I wince, surveying his mustard yellow signs at a polling place, “Colorologists say yellow is associated with sickness or alarm.” “With me,” Mike answers cheerily, “you pretty much get both.” He is pleased with his signs’ prime positions, since he didn’t plant them until the wee hours the night before. “I accidentally moved a couple to get mine in better locations,” he confesses, “but after midnight, anything goes.”
A former Marine with nearly superhuman physical strength (he once ripped a gear shift out of a floor in the normal course of driving), Mike has always had a bull-in-the-china-shop quality, which he tempers with charm and good looks (he was voted Northern High School’s “Best Looking, 1984”–his only prior political experience). A realtor and small-business owner–this year’s Chamber member of the year–Mike is a respected burgher and compassionate conservative who has made great inroads with female voters by dating roughly half of them. But he’s still in a dogfight.
While his looks are obviously an asset, he failed to get a photo into the Washington Post’s local voter guide. Likewise, he told the paper that he viewed the paper-pushing clerk’s job as a “steppingstone” to becoming county commissioner. “Mike,” I cautioned, “This is a campaign–it’s no time for honesty.”
I always love the sweaty desperation of small, local elections. I love when the Joan Jones for School Board sign mistakenly bears quotation marks around “elect”–as if Joan is being facetious about the whole endeavor. I love that our county commissioner David Hale isn’t too timid to flash the boldest campaign slogan in America: “Hale Yes!” But our struggling last-minute campaign push becomes a little much even for me.
Mike’s best poll-workers–his parents–get lost, and then go home. When I follow Mike into an Elks’ lodge as he votes, one of the “Benevolent Elks”–obviously living a lie–chases me out, afraid that I’ll commit voter fraud. At a Giant grocery, as Mike is handing out literature, a surly cashier on smoke break tells us to scram, even though Kathleen Kennedy Townsend had campaigned inside the store just a few weeks prior–an injustice conveniently overlooked by the liberal media.
When we get to the Republican election party at the Masonic lodge that night, we are surrounded by cheese. There is cheese on celery and cheese on crackers, solid cheese, liquid cheese, and some combination of both. The election results pour in, and precinct by precinct, Mike is getting smoked. I try to be a pal, to buck him up. I tell him it doesn’t matter until his hometown of North Beach comes in. He owns North Beach. He is the mayor of North Beach. I wouldn’t even think of going to North Beach without his permission. But the North Beach returns come in, and he’s still behind.
Out in the hall, we sit dejected next to an electric chair-lift used by weak-bladdered Masons. Mike nurses his wounds, while I nurse a Budweiser. “I just want it to be over,” he says, and it pretty much is. Not for long, however. The commissioner’s race is only four years away, and with all this new name ID, Mike has already settled on a slogan. This year, locals are saying “Hale Yes.” In four more, with any luck, they will be “Bent on Michael Benton.”
–Matt Labash
