Word: chamberlaine
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People, One by One. A new congressional campaign, Chamberlain thinks, begins the day an old one ends. "You can't campaign openly that early," Chamberlain says. "It would be like saying 'Merry Christmas' on the Fourth of July. But you think hard about it. You look at an auto plant and tell yourself: 'Next campaign I will be at the gates to meet the workers as they arrive at 7 a.m.' And they will think: 'This guy had to get up as early as I did-he must really mean business...
...Again, Chamberlain has no time for the formal political rallies on which many candidates depend. "I think rallies are useless," he says. "The people who show up at rallies are already on my side, and I'm just plowing the same field over again. I have to spend my time just talking with people, one by one." Laying out his campaign, Chamberlain figures that he can meet and talk to some 200 voters a day and, allowing for 50 days of active campaigning from Labor Day to Election Day, reach 10,000 people...
...Customers. To meet 10,000 voters one by one, Campaigner Chamberlain travels through the Sixth District in a red-white-and-blue campaign trailer ("The mortgage on it." says Chamberlain, "is as long as the trailer itself"), complete with loudspeaker and the recorded works of John Philip Sousa. When the trailer pulls up in a Sixth District town, Chamberlain scrambles out, sets up a sign proclaiming: YOUR CONGRESSMAN is HERE NOW! Then he goes back to his trailer office to await the passing parade of every sort of voter with every sort of problem...
...Chamberlain's visitors sign a register in the trailer's reception room, and thereby automatically put themselves on the mailing list for Chamberlain's congressional newsletter. When the stream of visitors slows down, Chamberlain jumps up, stuffs shopping bags ("How could that printer be so stupid as to print my name on only one side of the bag?") with emery boards for the ladies, matchbooks for the men, comic books and balloons for the kids. Then he hurries off ("When there aren't any customers, I go out and find them"), making the rounds...
...Dinner. A typically breathless campaign day for Chamberlain began at 7 o'clock one morning last week, found him still going hard in the Genesee County town of Grand Blanc at 7 that night. He suddenly realized that he was already go minutes late for a dinner date with his wife Charlotte, even then waiting for him in front of the Durant Hotel, in nearby Flint. Chamberlain leaped into his red-white-and-blue Chevrolet station wagon, which he uses along with his trailer, and sped toward Flint at 60 m.p.h. His pace had been exhausting, but Chuck Chamberlain...