To: Members of the Kachina Round Table, Hôtel Adiós, Small Southwestern City, Large Southwestern State
Re: Advice to Candidates
Having encapsulated and considered the results of Ms. Horney’s analysis, I have determined the following:
The candidates might want to initiate their campaigns w/ a short, comprehensive statement of the major events and accomplishments of their lives, following the stock yet effective formula, “from rags to riches.” These statements should begin w/ an account of a humble birth, move on to describe the travails suffered along the way, and end with an account of eventual success, achieved through heroic and/or audacious expedient. Nothing is more important to a successful campaign than a candidate’s “story.”
Both gentlemen must furnish full, candid, reliable, scrupulous statements re their war records.
Though it might appear to some that both should furnish full, candid, etc., statements re other matters—major policy points, histories of the aborning political party under which the two are purveying their ideas, notions, etc., answers to scurrilous charges, family trees containing diversity re ethnicity, gender, etcetera, religious beliefs, sexual history—my counsel is that these statements, though on the whole necessary to any successful political campaign, should be apportioned logically, i.e., according to the principle of relevance. That is as much as to say that each candidate should give statements on matters of their own choosing.
Following this principle, and after my interviews w/ both gentlemen, I propose, in nuce, the following.
As the head of the ticket, Mr. Ennis might wish to answer scurrilous charges by persons, named or anonymous, whose “opposition research” has been biased, faulty, or otherwise fallacious.
As the running mate in this election, Mr. Slack should be content to “fill in the gaps,” so to speak, that have been left to him. He might, for example, choose to give an account of his religious beliefs (if any); and/or “come clean” on the matter of his sexual indiscretions, real, imagined, or, not quite impossibly, nonexistent.