A Case of the Blues
By BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS
New York Times
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
The Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole is 58 years old, but he has never been famous before, and after this year, he will most likely never be famous again. Even this kind of fame, brief and slight, is uncomfortable on him. Cole is a party man, a lifelong Republican consultant, campaign worker and politician whose career, like that of a typical European Social Democrat, has recognized only a fluid and fungible line between political operative and elected official. It sometimes seems an accident he’s in Congress at all. He is tall and slightly formal, and slightly awkward; people who meet him casually describe him as cordial or gentlemanly. The Republican Party, in its current uncertainty, might have chosen an ideologue to fill Cole’s post or, as is its habit, a money man. Its choice of Cole, an operative, was the establishment insisting that its own learned habits were enough to save itself. “Right now, with where we are,” Ken Mehlman, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me, “Tom Cole is the perfect leader.”
Cole is a year into his term as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group charged with managing the party’s simultaneous campaigns for 435 seats in Congress, and this role has made him responsible for rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up, and for mounting a defense of the political map. All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.
Early in December, I met Cole for the first time in the N.R.C.C.’s offices on Capitol Hill, in a building it shares with the R.N.C. The building has small cubbyholes like telephone booths, from which representatives make fund-raising calls, and a sleek phone bank in the basement that is populated, election nights, by the party’s interns and operatives. His own office walls are crammed with so many tribal curios — Cole, who is part Chickasaw, is the only registered member of a Native American tribe in Congress — that it can seem as if they are being offered for sale.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
The Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole is 58 years old, but he has never been famous before, and after this year, he will most likely never be famous again. Even this kind of fame, brief and slight, is uncomfortable on him. Cole is a party man, a lifelong Republican consultant, campaign worker and politician whose career, like that of a typical European Social Democrat, has recognized only a fluid and fungible line between political operative and elected official. It sometimes seems an accident he’s in Congress at all. He is tall and slightly formal, and slightly awkward; people who meet him casually describe him as cordial or gentlemanly. The Republican Party, in its current uncertainty, might have chosen an ideologue to fill Cole’s post or, as is its habit, a money man. Its choice of Cole, an operative, was the establishment insisting that its own learned habits were enough to save itself. “Right now, with where we are,” Ken Mehlman, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me, “Tom Cole is the perfect leader.”
Cole is a year into his term as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group charged with managing the party’s simultaneous campaigns for 435 seats in Congress, and this role has made him responsible for rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up, and for mounting a defense of the political map. All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.
Early in December, I met Cole for the first time in the N.R.C.C.’s offices on Capitol Hill, in a building it shares with the R.N.C. The building has small cubbyholes like telephone booths, from which representatives make fund-raising calls, and a sleek phone bank in the basement that is populated, election nights, by the party’s interns and operatives. His own office walls are crammed with so many tribal curios — Cole, who is part Chickasaw, is the only registered member of a Native American tribe in Congress — that it can seem as if they are being offered for sale.
(Continued here.)
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