February 25, 2012 06:38 PM UTC

"You've Made Your Last Advance"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Photo by Byron York, via Twitter

The Washington Post reported yesterday afternoon, you’ve by now seen the photos:

[Mitt] Romney’s policy address to the Detroit Economic Club was a chance to claim momentum for his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, but the optics of his highly anticipated event may have undercut his message.

The candidate, who was born and raised in the Detroit suburbs, spoke to more than 1,000 suited-up business leaders who bought tickets to sit in folding chairs at the 30-yard line of an empty football stadium.

Romney began by telling his captive lunchtime audience: “This is not exciting and barn-burning, but it’s important.” And indeed, his audience’s polite applause was buried by the silence that filled Ford Field, where some 65,000 blue stadium seats sat empty…

Folks, possibly the most important of all of the many rules governing the planning and organizing of political events, traditionally known as “advance work” in the business and its practitioners as “advance men,” is to never, ever book a venue for your candidate’s appearance if you can’t fill it to capacity. If you only expect a thousand people, a room that can barely hold that thousand people is infinitely preferable to one that seats ten thousand people, because the larger venue will make your crowd look small no matter how objectively “big” it might be.

And of course, as soon as we start comparing crowd photos, somebody’s going to pull out photos of all those truly packed stadiums to see Barack Obama in 2008, and, well, you can get pretty easily why this just isn’t a good road for Mitt Romney to head down.

Honestly, it’s one of the oldest dirty tricks in politics–we’re not saying this was done intentionally, but as soon as we read this story, we were reminded of one of the greatest political pranksters in American history. From the biography of Dick Tuck, among our personal heroes:

In 1950, Tuck was a G.I. Bill student at University of California at Santa Barbara and a part-time worker for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in her U. S. Senate campaign against Congressman Richard Nixon. Tuck says an absent-minded UCSB professor asked him to do the advance work for an upcoming campaign speech by Nixon at the University. Tuck was all too willing. He hired the biggest hall, scheduled the slowest day, and neglected all the usual efforts at public awareness. On the big day, attendance was sparse. Tuck provided a lengthy introduction. The event was a total bust. On his way out, Nixon stopped the car and called Tuck over to ask his name. It would be the first of many times he would hear “Dick Tuck.”

“Dick Tuck,” Nixon told him, “You’ve made your last advance.”

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Perhaps somebody in Romney’s campaign needs to read their history books; or maybe one of them is reading their history after all…