Word: blissfulness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...margin in the lower house of the state legislature, won decisive control of the state senate. As always, the winning candidates posed for pictures and gave interviews. Yet almost all of them would readily have admitted that the man most responsible for the victory was State Chairman Ray Charles Bliss, 54, a "politician's politician" who avoids the limelight as though it were a death...
Nuts & Bolts Approach. Bliss's success can be measured by the contrast between November 1948 and November 1962. In 1948 Harry Truman carried Ohio, and the G.O.P. lost seven of the eight statewide offices that were at stake. With the party demoralized by defeat and torn by dissension, G.O.P. leaders asked Bliss, longtime chairman in Summit County (Akron), to take over as state chairman. Bliss was far from eager for the job: he had founded his own insurance agency only a few years before, and he wanted to retire from politics. He agreed to serve as chairman only after...
...nuts-and-bolts approach that he had learned at the precinct, city and county levels. There are, he says, two kinds of state chairmen-the "road chairman," who goes around expounding his party's philosophy, and the "office chairman," who plans and executes practical programs of political action. Bliss is very much an office chairman. "I'm not going to waste my time making speeches," he says. "There's a million guys who can make a better speech than I can." He normally spends his working day, from 10 a.m. to about 1 a.m., seated...
...election-day success, in the Bliss system, is a permanent party organization that keeps on working between elections. Issues come and go, elections are won and lost, but the organization, says Bliss, "must be a continuous thing." And the key to effective organization is getting a lot of people working enthusiastically at unglamorous precinct-level chores. One reason he avoids publicity, says Bliss, is that he does not want anybody to "get the idea that all I have to do is push a button and we've got the election won. Politics just doesn't work that...
Among the many things that annoyed Di Salle in 1962 was his inability to come to grips with his gubernatorial opponent, State Auditor James Rhodes, 52, who was backed by a highly efficient organization under State Chairman Ray Bliss. As mayor of Columbus from 1943 to 1953 and as auditor ever since, Rhodes was widely known to Ohioans as an able administrator who knew the value of a buck. In his campaign against Di Salle, he advanced no adventurous new programs, declined to debate or even discuss specific issues. That left Di Salle a roly-poly mass of frustration...