I didn’t have the heart tell her that it’s only half my desk.  It’s a small office and we have to share.  But it’s cool.  I have a system.   Got things stashed where I can always find them. Knowing where to look is the key, so I don’t have to worry about some intern or volunteer that’s just in for the day poking into something they shouldn’t. 

The Gotham Post ran this unbelievable photograph it CLAIMS was circulating on the internet.  Now first, the photo is a total fake and I’ll get to that next.  But the thing that really has me steamed is that the Post are the guys making this stuff up.  I’m the one in charge of sweeping the net twice a day and if this picture was “circulating,” believe me, I WOULD HAVE KNOWN ABOUT IT BEFORE THE GOTHAM FRIGGIN POST RAN THEIR PICTURE!

They totally made it up.  I can’t believe how gullible people are!  How can they not see what’s going on here?  How can they not see the agenda that paper has?  It’s not like they’re being SUBTLE or anything! 

Sigh.

So, there’s nothing I can do about the Post at this point, but the picture itself, that’s right out of the Dirty Tricks playbook.  It purports to show Harvey meeting a pair of "unidentified" lobbyists who aren’t all that hard to identify.  Anyone willing to Google for 5 or 10 minutes can easily come up with the names Polly Bailey and Bobby Jay Bliss from the Moderation Council and the Society for the Advancement of Firearms & Effective Training of Youth (S.A.F.E.T.Y), respectively. 

Then they feel so clever for figuring it out, they go off believing that really is Harvey sitting there getting cozy with the alcohol and gun lobbies.

Phone.  Gotta run.  To be continued...

The guy bears a ballpark resemblance, sure, but that’s mostly the haircut.  He’s a well-known spin doctor for big tobacco.  In other words, exactly who you’d expect to be having lunch with Miss Moderation Council and Mr. Stop or I’ll Shoot.

So I’m the hero of the hour.  I was gonna take Ma out to celebrate, but Mr. Daniel said I should stick around for the night.  Harvey and Gilda are going to stop in before the fundraising shindig at the circus and “want me to ride out in the car with them.”  I guess that means I’m going to wind up out at the circus grounds, and I’ve got NO idea how many trains that’s going to mean getting home after, but I’ll be damned if I’ll miss a chance to schmooze the candidate.  Celebration dinner with Ma will have to wait.

The multi-face thing is pretty generic.  It’s really something you could hurl at any politician.  I mean, why pick on Harvey?    The bat thing is kind of puzzling too.  Harvey hasn’t declared any position on Batman yet, but he has said a lot about the police, naturally.  Everyone knows by now that good, honest cops can look forward to a real partnership with Harvey Dent’s DA’s office, like they never had with the current one.

Harvey, Mr. Daniel, and the others had a quick huddle about it this morning.  Richard especially was surprised it didn’t touch on his resignation.  That’s the attack they all expected.  Why did Harvey leave as ADA after only a few months?  Was he just so bloated from a few high profile wins that he decided to take his boss’s job? 

Instead, we get some fat, balding caricature of a politician.  Looks nothing like Harv.  Richard says they probably want to downplay his good looks.  

Anyway, the rest of the office was pretty hohum about the whole thing, but I clipped it out.  It’s the first political cartoon of a candidate I’m working for. 

Somebody from the Gotham ElectionBoard better look into this pronto.  I don't know when I've been so steamed.

Garcetti responded to our vibrant, hopeful ad if the very idea of a hero was some silly outdated notion.  It's not.  And he should burn if he convinces one would-be hero otherwise. 

Anyway, we had to respond, so we made up this response ad real quick.  It's not nearly as good as the first.  I'm afraid the opening montage plays in to EXACTLY the attitude we want to wipe out.  Harvey heard me out, but he said it's okay to show that view of Gotham as long as we're saying it's Roger Garcetti's Gotham, and it doesn't have to be that way. 

Maybe he's right but I have my doubts.    I really like the first ad better.

I also can't believe they made me work out how to put it up on MySpace and YouTube.  I said surely we've got the web designers to do that.  Mr. Daniel said the web people said EVERYBODY can do this stuff.  I said "you can't" and Mr. Daniel checked his watch and said he's meeting Bruce Wayne for lunch.

He's having lunch at d'Annunzio's with Bruce Wayne.  I'm banging my head against YouTube. But  the ad really does look great, doesn't it?  Starts airing tonight on GCN.

Anyway, the TV spots are going to be super but we still needed to pick a tune for the public appearances:  speeches, rallies, and especially election night. 

Harvey wanted to use the Charlie Kane song from Citizen Kane!  You know, “you buy a bag of peanuts in this town, they write a song about you”?  That.  I couldn’t believe it!  Harvey says it’s a catchy tune, which okay, yes it is.  He said it doesn’t sound like a Sousa march, and yes, I agree.  That’s a rare feature in any tune played by a brass band behind a podium where a political candidate is about to make a speech.  But the thing is – and I couldn’t believe I was the only one pointing it out – Charles Foster Kane LOST.  He’s a TRAGIC figure.  He had all that promise, and look how he wound up. 

Is that really the image we want for Harvey Dent?

Yikes, gotta pick up the lunches.  To be continued...

So Harvey takes me aside, arm on my shoulder, and he gets that little hint of Harvard in his voice that never comes out in public but it creeps in when he wants to remind you that he’s Ivy League and you’re not.   He said that I raised some very interesting points, but after all, we weren’t going to be using the lyrics of the song. (“He loves a joke, HA HA HA HA” Oh yeah, that’d go over really well right now.)  We’d just be using the tune, which wasn’t written for the movie at all.  This is when he really turns up the Harvard accent as he tells me the Charlie Kane tune was taken from  "A Poco No" by Pepe Guízar.

“Well that’s real interesting,” I told him. “I didn’t know that, Mr. Dent, but then again, I don’t think any of the voters will know that either.  Anybody recognizes the tune, it’s going to be from Citizen Kane.  Anybody that doesn’t recognize it and just registers it subliminally, it’s going to be ‘He doesn't like the Mister. He likes good old Charlie Kane’.”

He gave me a really searching look then, maybe ‘cause I can’t sing for shit but probably because there really is a rule about disagreeing with a candidate and I not only broke it, I was breaking it twice.  Ma always says “in for a penny, in for a pound” so I took a deep breath and added that Harvey himself had asked for the Citizen Kane song, not “A Poco No” by Pepe whatever.

He laughed at that.  Maybe it’s okay to break that rule after all.  He asked if I’d heard the story about when he resigned as ADA.  Of course I did but I said I hadn’t.  He said it was true and he reached in his pocket and pulled out a quarter.  Tossed it to me and said I should do the honors.  Heads, I had to use A Poco No, like it or not; tails, it’d be the Harvard Fight Song.

The Post ran this puff piece over the weekend about the anniversary of Robinson Park.  They took a quote out of context about Harvey going after corporate polluters that made him sound like some anti-business zealot. 

They made Gilda out to be some trees-before-people nutjob too, but unless and until she becomes Mrs. Harvey Dent we're not going to worry about that.  At this point, she's just a devoted campaign worker, she doesn't speak for the Dent campaign.  The anti-business thing was a problem, though, so we've been putting together a nice collection of endorsements from corporate leaders.  I'm working on the photo montage, trying to make sure it's a culturally diverse crosssection and not "Middle Age White Men for Harvey Dent."  It was going fine, except we had to put Bruce Wayne front and center.  He is Mr. Daniel's boss, after all, and a big supporter.  Apparently a personal friend of Harvey's to boot.  Add in all that the Foundation is doing with the ACCA thing, he's got to be there.  Fine, one more white guy isn't the problem.  The problem is the man won't smile.  I've been through two dozen of the officially sanctioned photos from WE and there isn't a grin to be had.

So there he is, going up on the webpage with this scowl that says "I'm endorsing you and then I'm taking an antacid because those oysters at lunch didn't agree with me."