There’s an old and utterly unverifiable story about a certain speechwriter who worked for the president of the United States. The story is old enough that no one is even sure which president the speechwriter worked for, but the specific details don’t really matter.
The story goes that in order to impress women, the speechwriter would ask them a question about themselves. What’s your favorite flower? Who is your favorite poet? That sort of thing. He would then tell them to listen to the next presidential speech.
“I can get the president of the United States to say the name of your favorite flower, and when you hear him say it, it’ll be like I’m talking to you through the most powerful man on Earth.”
It was never one of the “big” speeches, of course, but one of those Welcome-to-the-Rose-Garden-fine-people-from-the-Dairy-and-Cheese-Institute type deals. But still.
No one can say for sure whether this tactic worked with the ladies, but presidents give an awful lot of speeches every week, and if you’re a clever enough speechwriter, you can probably get the president to say the word “rhododendron” or mention “Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” So, my guess is that it worked, especially in Washington, which is filled, as everyone knows, with very cheap dates. Of both sexes. Wait: of all sexes.
Ethics aside, which is my very favorite place to put ethics, there’s something inspiring about that kind of scheme. Today, we’d call it a “hack,” in which a clever engineer figures out a way to break into the mainframe of a system and bend it to his will. If you think of a speechwriter as someone who writes code for an inanimate machine, which isn’t really a stretch, then you have to give the guy credit.
A hacker can only be successful if the system he’s corrupting is rickety and porous to begin with. The entire seduction strategy of the White House speechwriter, in other words, depended on the huge number of daily scripted presidential remarks and the relative unimportance of most of them. It’s easy to slip Sylvia Plath or daffodil into a speech that nobody really cares about.
So, if you want to hack a system, look for the weak spots.
Once, not too long ago, I had a television show on the air. And as it happens, through a series of complicated events, I found myself making the acquaintance of four young men in their mid-twenties who shared a house in a university town.
I’m being deliberately opaque here. You’ll understand why in a moment.
We had a mutual friend, these fellows and I, and one day, I was in this university town on a speaking engagement, and the guys and I got to chatting. It came up that the guys had been approached by the largest audience measurement company in the world — I’m being opaque because I don’t want to be sued — to see if they’d be willing to have a “ratings box” attached to their television to monitor their viewing habits.
Audience measurement companies get a lot of their data this way, even now. They identify key representative audience members across the country, attach meters to their televisions, and keep track of what they watch and when. The result: national television ratings.
The other result: me, up early every morning after my show aired, logging into the ratings service website with prayerful concentration.
The other other result: If the number is high enough in a key audience demographic, a whole lot of money goes in my pocket.
That’s the system. Here’s the hack:
I had just met four young men in the 25-40 demographic who were about to determine the national television ratings for a key demographic group. Their specific viewing habits were about to be extrapolated and treated as representative of their cohort as a whole.
“If you guys promise to watch my show,” I said, “I will pay you each $10,000.”
Actually, I didn’t say that. I thought about saying that. I framed the sentence in my head. But I didn’t say it. Somewhere in my dim memory, I vaguely recall signing a paper promising not to do that very thing, swearing some kind of contractual oath not to game the system were I unexpectedly presented with the opportunity to do just that. And now, here I was, facing some very alluring temptation.
An “ethical dilemma” is what I’d call it. That is, if I hadn’t put ethics aside.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
