By Mark Rhoads –
Politics is often about serious policies but there is also a funny side to politics. Here are a few of my favorite anecdotes.
In 1958 New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. ran on a platform to clean up corruption in City Hall. The only problem was that Wagner himself was the incumbent for the previous four years. An older lady in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire was the last of only 14 registered voters in town and she refused to come to the polling place after midnight so the town could be the first town in America to report its election results.
Reporters and the town clerk rang her doorbell, woke her up, and asked her to come to vote so the polls could close. She said, "Sorry, I never vote, it only encourages them."
Film producer Ron Newcomb last week was trying to play peacemaker between his Republican and Democratic friends on his Facebook page. He said the best way to humanize political opponents was to find something good to say instead of something negative. So he challenged all his friends to say three positive things about the candidate of the other party. His first reply came from a cousin who said, "Ron I can't even think of three positive things I want to say about my own candidate let alone the other party candidate."
When he was in the House, Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois was heckled by a labor leader in Peoria who did not like Dirksen's stand in favor of the Taft-Hartley Act. He shouted out, "Dirksen you are a bum, I wouldn't vote for you if you were St. Peter." Dirksen replied, "Sir if I were St. Peter, you wouldn't be in my district."
Fiorello La Guardia was another legendary Mayor of New York City who once said, "Yes I have the proof that my kind of city government is the kind of city government that the people of our city want. Isn't it grand that there is not one county chairman of either party who will endorse my administration?"
The great New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith once said, "I can run on a laundry ticket and beat these political bums anytime."
When Boston Mayor James Michael Curley lost a Democratic primary, he told reporters, "The people have spoken, the lousy jerks."
