There’s lots of real, serious news going on in the world. (There always is.)
But last week, the Internet was galvanized — or, if you like, set abuzz — by “Fangate.” This saw former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist alone onstage with an electric fan for several minutes at Wednesday night’s gubernatorial debate, while his opponent, Rick Scott, either fumed or waited patiently for further instructions from debate organizers backstage, depending on your source. Crist insisted that the debate rules allowed him a fan. Scott thought they didn’t. It turns out that Crist and this fan travel everywhere together and have made something of a life with one another, even going on radio interviews, where a constant whirring noise is generally frowned upon.
The fan is less an electronic accessory to Crist at this point than a friend and confidant. As Molly Ball pointed out, in his years since leaving the governor’s mansion, the fan has been his only pet.
Fans make admirable companions. They do everything a politician could possibly want: turn on a dime, generate buzz and blow hot air. And unlike more traditional pets, they never whine and whine until you succumb and take them for walks in the middle of a rainstorm, when they decide to just sit there and stare at a bush and do nothing.
“Thanks for sticking up for me, Charlie,” the fan murmured to Crist, during the ride home. “It means a lot.”
“Are you kidding?” Crist replied. “Of course I would. You are my number one fan.”
How often in your life do you get the chance to write fan fiction about an actual fan? Not all that often, as my eighth-grade livejournal can attest.
Bizarre requests for accessories at debates have a long history.
Back in the Lincoln-Douglas days in 1858, Stephen A. Douglas always requested a footstool so that he could be seen over the podium. He never got the footstool, which explains his performance. Lincoln always requested the opportunity to wear a different face, but he never got this either.
The fact that there were no official presidential debates until 1960 actually stemmed from the demands made by the candidates. Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden both requested electric fans at the debate in 1876, then both refused to take part after the organizers denied their request on the grounds that electric fans would not be invented for another six years.
At the debate between Wendell Willkie and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Willkie made an outrageous request: that Roosevelt show up. Instead, Roosevelt refused but said that Willkie could have as many fans onstage as he wanted.
John F. Kennedy refused to debate unless Nixon didn’t have a fan.
During the vice presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle, Quayle requested a fan, but this request backfired when his responses could still be heard over the noise it made.
Both Clinton and George H.W. Bush requested a fan onstage, but debate organizers put Ross Perot there instead.
Al Gore asked for a large hand-fan with a poem written on it made in the traditional Japanese style, so as to avoid causing the earth any undue discomfort by plugging something into her, and so he could have a poem to read during commercials. This request was denied. Every time Gore thought of his missing fan, he sighed loudly. George W. Bush, meanwhile, asked for “lots of fans, yeah, let’s pack the whole debate with fans and give them big foam fingers that say ‘W!'” until someone took him aside and explained what people were talking about.
In 2012, Mitt Romney asked that he be replaced onstage with a fan on the grounds that the fan seemed comparatively warm and human and polled better with female voters, but this request was denied.
It seems like a lot of fanfare over something so small. “Are we,” as Charlie Crist asked, “really going to debate a fan?” But especially with debates, you never know what’s going to seal the deal. These things always seem trivial right until the moment they aren’t. It’s not enough to win the debate. You have to appear to win the debate. In the battle of appearances, is it better to be onstage with a fan or not onstage at all?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
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