171: Election
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As we head into the final days of this presidential race, consider this story. Matt Futterman was running for student government in Maronite High School in New York in 1985. He ran a campaign that changed electoral politics in the school, at least for a while. Here's the way the race lined up. My opponent was a guy named Dave Levy, who was a year older than I, who was going to be a senior and he was running for this position. So he had to figure he was going to win that class, I was going to win my class, and then it was up to the freshmen who were going to decide the election. And it was not looking good for Matt, with those key swing voters, the tough to please freshmen. And they came to the final days before the election, just as we are now with this presidential race. And Matt turned to his best friend's brother, Bennett, for advice. And Bennett came up with this campaign slogan that turned the race around. Here's Bennett. Vote for Matt, he is good, he'll give you wood. Right. Essentially Matt would walk around Maronite Public High School with an arm full of various types of wood, twigs and sticks and lumber and such. And anybody who wanted wood would get a free sample of wood. Then Bennett had another idea. They could make a TV commercial. That's right, a TV commercial. Nobody had ever done a political TV ad in a high school race. They were school anyway. The school had TVs in every room. The school's morning announcements were done on these television monitors. They could play their ad during the morning announcements. The next day I met Bennett at the beginning of lunch and we went to the video room and he signed out the cameras and tripod. And we went out back to the parking lot and I think he had brought some logs for me to hold. And the whole thing took about 15 minutes to film. I'm standing there with wood. The shot opens. I'm there. I say, "Hi, I'm Matt Flutterman. I'm running for corresponding secretary of the executive board." I think maybe Matt said, "Vote for me. I am good. I'll give you wood." Bennett has his arm around me. He's got a microphone in his hand. He pulls it back to his mouth. He looks very seriously into the camera. And he says, "What do you mean you're going to give it away for free?" He says, "That's right. Bennett for absolutely for free. You want birch. I got birch. You want oak. I got oak. You want pine. You want twigs. Oak. Beach.
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