Lately a couple of secondary stories from the presidential campaign have kind of combined to jog my rusty memory, causing me to reminisce about my slight involvement in a campaign many years ago.
First, there's the attention being paid to the music played at the candidates' appearances — what used to be called their theme songs. Apparently the McCain camp has stopped using a John Mellencamp tune because of criticism from the liberal-leaning musician and others, and are now using something from ABBA. Meanwhile, Obama's people pretty much have their pick of about any musician around.
The second type of story has to do with the history of negative campaigning, and it always uses the 1964 election as an example. That was the one which featured Lyndon Johnson's TV commercial showing the little girl being obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and it pretty much did the same to Barry Goldwater's chances for election — although as I recall the odds were against him anyway.
During that election, I was working as a DJ at a small-town radio station. We were a tiny operation, but when we heard that Goldwater's campaign train was going to make a brief stop in a nearby larger town, we were determined to be there. Since I was the closest thing we had to a newsman, I was elected to make the trip.
We didn't have the remote broadcasting capabilities of larger stations, so I had to lug a big reel-to-reel tape recorder into the train station and find an outlet to plug it in, well in advance of the train's arrival. (This was the same recorder that I sometimes dragged to small-town basketball games to tape the play-by-play for later broadcast — another example of our makeshift way of doing things.)
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