Word: crooking
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Before the presidential campaign goes ballistic, a modest piece of advice for George Bush and Michael Dukakis: Fire your pollsters, banish your gurus and spend a week in Crook County, the crystal ball of presidential politics. Since this isolated county was created in 1882 in sagebrush-strewn central Oregon, its inhabitants have successfully picked 26 consecutive winners, from Grover Cleveland to Ronald Reagan...
That makes Crook County (pop. 13,500) the nation's last bellwether county. (Bellwether, literally, means the lead sheep in a flock.) The nation lost its other remaining perfect prognosticator in 1984, when Walter Mondale edged Reagan by 303 votes in Iowa's Palo Alto County. So this fall the pressure is on in this sparsely populated high desert, where cows outnumber residents and crew cuts never went out of fashion. "I don't know whether Crook County has some rare substance in the air that causes people to think like the average voter," muses County Judge Dick Hoppes. Jokes...
...They're uncomplicated people," says James O. Smith, publisher of the Central Oregonian and the closest the county gets to a political scientist. Unlike Iowa's activists, Crook County's blue-collar residents resist single- issue appeals. Farmers have not fallen prey to the farm movement, and unions have not taken over the mills. Most important, no vote is predictable. Although 51% of the 7,090 voters are registered Democrats, they consistently defy party lines. "They vote the way they think," explains LaSelle Coles, 81, a Democrat who typifies this independence: he is heading up Bush's campaign...
Publisher Smith has never endorsed a candidate in his newspaper, and he does not plan to begin doing it now. "That'd be pretty arrogant, wouldn't it?" Instead, he will respect the independent minds of the prophets of Crook County. And, if history is a guide, Bush and Dukakis would be well advised to do the same...
...Checkers speech effected not Nixon's disgrace but his political rescue; and we did have Nixon to kick around some more; and if one reviews the tapes, it is easy to conclude that he actually won the TV debate with Jack Kennedy; and he was a crook. So there. With Nixon, every circumstance eventually turns out to be funnier than he is. The nation he has trod these 75 years, the framework for his antics, is itself a dark and serious comedy, simultaneously rejecting and accepting everything in its midst; a riot, a scream. Sometimes (rarely) Nixon laughs aloud...