Money and Politics: Aw Right Awready!

I've had more than enough remonstrances about my late discussion of money and politics--and awright awready, I know that money has been "the mother's milk of politics" for longer than I can remember. What about Harding (in a satchel, Mr. Doheney?)? Grant? Come to think of it, how about those sturdy Roman republicans (small-r) who scratched and clawed for high office at Rome so they could get the opportunity to go pillage a province?

In particular the Kentucky memorialists bring me back to the 1963 Kentucky gubernatorial campaign, between A. B. (“Happy”) Chandler and Edward T. ("Ned") Breathitt. Happy was one of the last of the old-time stem-winder country pols, but oddly enough it was Breathitt, the forgettable and colorless technocrat, who got to claim the most memorable mot of he season. Okay, not Breathitt; rather, the mmorable d Prichard, who served as Breathitt’s Karl Rove. Prichard himself was at least as colorful as Chandler. Apparently Chandler had a son-in-law, one James J. Lewis, whose job was to work the campaign fuunding sources. The chronicler takes up the story:

This was surely no novelty in Kentucky, but the charge took on a comic character when Prichard shouted that Chandler was riding the state insisting that people “fill the sack for Jimmy Jack!” It became one of those campaign gimmicks which … could be counted on for a laugh, and the Breathitt speakers never missed a chance to “Fill the sack for Jimmy Jack!” … It was part demagoguery, part buffoonery, part hyperbole … it was also … effective.

--John Ed Pearce, Divide and Dissent: Kentucky Politics, 1930-1963 213 (available (here))

Footnote: It doesn’t seem to be in Pearce’s book, but as I recall, there was a minor candidate in the same race whose slogan was “Put the jam on the lower shelf, where the little guy can reach it!” We just don’t make voters like that any more.