I have been saying that every election for years. There are all sorts of polls of course and some, like say in health care, can be good, good for all of us.
But think about it, are those done by candidates used to find out what you think so they can thoughtfully represent you, or are they used to learn what you want to hear and tailor messages to fit?
If you think those polls are not used to manage you, manipulate you, well then, you are in the modern La La Land of every disingenuous candidate’s dream.
So, I say, lie to political pollsters! What fun it would be if they couldn’t finger who you are and were forced to be what they are?
A bit of time and patience and they will learn, and you will have what we all crave in life: loyal, devoted, adoring, loving friends. Even if others think you an ass.
The well-educated, compassionate, loving are always the least likely to defend themselves, throw a punch, and fight.
With heads in the warm comforting sands of the way they wish things would be, should be, they succumb to a beckoning dreaminess that somehow things will be made right. Somehow?
It is a rare, glorious moment when the meek turns and stands. It takes the greatest of evils: The Revolution, The Civil War, Women’s Suffrage, Hitler, Civil Rights, all brought a divided country together by the quietly hopeful finally deciding to stand.
Now no one knows that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” more than the Grand Old Party gone under the foot of a strong man.It would be hard to miss the truth of that old 19th century axiom as we witness the GOP’s leaders abandoning their principles and falling like dominos under the weight of a single boot.
Absolute corruption can subdue the entire known world when the meek fail to stand up. My favorite example: Genghis Khan, another megalomaniac who essentially rode into a town one day with his friends and said, “Give me everything you have.” When they refused, he and his friends slaughtered every man, woman and child and rode off to the next town. Again, he said, “Give me everything you have.” When they refused, he hacked them to death and rode on. Eventually towns got the message and had readied for him all they possessed. It was just in that way the largest contiguous empire ever known was made. In his homeland they still find in him a source of adulation.
Is it too early to dread the day when that coiffured, self-obsessed effigy is towering over the Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson monuments?
The truth is I think everyone else is cuckoo, but I am the one taking the pills.
When that thought hit me, now 36 years ago, in that palapa in Yelapa, it was a jolt of reality I was certain everyone would be able to see.
I felt like Moses on the mount only my burning bush suddenly revealing an obvious solution sure to defeat the conquering hordes of self-serving killing our democracy.
All that needed to be done was to create a source, devoid of and protected from partisanship, one definitive source for the relevant facts that would be expected from any applicant, by any employer, for any other job. In politics that meant the creation of one at least one secure source that could be turned to by any thoughtful citizen, conservative or liberal, wanting the facts about any political applicant. I thought it a given that actual histories and factual records would be used by a relieved citizenry. They then could make knowledgeable judgements on what would be done for them or to them by those applying to for the job of ruling their lives.
Now the world has changed, major information outlets have all lost the people’s trust and the adventure of creating something new and necessary like Vote Smart has ended. As one major Vote Smart supporter wrote about what remains of my idea: “There wasn’t the friendly were-all- in-this-together excitement of what was being achieved.”
More importantly, as I described in the prologue to this book: I and you have been given such a fantastically improbable chance of being alive for such an infinitesimal amount of time, in time, you would think we would make more of it.
I don’t think I wasted my time. The idea was worth a shot but better perhaps from a lesser dreamer, one whose passion did not drive him and everyone around him to distress.
So now I take my daily lobotomy pill. It makes me less passionate about everything. My interest in politics gone, as with my interest in most other things, all now cloaked in a kind of fog. I am thankfully subdued and resting in peace.
Hardly a day has gone by these past nine years when I haven’t gotten up in the morning, opened my computer and hoped to hear news of Trumps fatal heart attack or brain aneurysm. He has represented all that I have opposed in life – honor, truth and decency.
He is a danger to all that I believe. I can’t say that my feelings do not border on hate, which is exactly what he has generated, not just against him but against each other, which for me is unforgiveable, both for him and for me.
OK! I have given myself something to do with this writing about my life. It has entertained me most, but also been a kind of therapy that works about as well as the “lobotomy pills” I now take each day.
I have enjoyed my life. It’s adventures always exciting to me, at least in hindsight. I haven’t written about my two stepsons because they think so little of me, much the same as that wonderful love of my life has recently revealed about her feelings.
But those things as disappointing as they would be, should I write about them, would simply give evidence and I guess rightful cause to all about their ending of my life’s passion, Vote Smart.
I began seeking applicants to replace me but the difference between the salary our board approved for me so long ago, that I never took and my insistence that we were all essentially volunteers caused many candidates with substantial fundraising experience to turn away. So, I recused myself from any involvement in the Executive Board’s selection of my replacement. Then my full-blown liberal, giving, trusting, dreamy La La Land I wanted for everyone and Vote Smart came into full bloom. I decided to announce I would drop off the Board for one year to help build confidence in whomever replaced me. After all, I would be remaining on staff for that year to train and advise.
I then let the board know I would not withdraw the $1.7 million owed me in back wages but instead donate it to Vote Smart. I only requested $30,000 annually for my retirement, that could be easily paid from returns on a small endowment a foundation had created, decades earlier that could not be used for operations thus holding Vote Smart’s funds and my contribution unaffected. They all said that my proposal was much too generous, but agreed since that was the only way I would take it.
Then one of our Board members who was leaving his academic position suddenly announced that he was interested in taking over for me. He was a good guy, someone I had selected earlier to serve on the Board, someone who had done good work for me in one of our research departments two decades earlier before entering academia. I was excited about the possibility and strongly supported it.
But then, over some days it became known that he had no intention of moving to Vote Smart’s offices but instead would operate it from his home in Pennsylvania. He also wanted twice the actual salary that I had been taking.
I was certain that the Board would not accept either condition. It had taken me 30 years of living at Vote Smart’s offices, leading staff, implementing programs, guiding, course correcting, hiring and settling and raising some $50 million to learn all that I knew. Turning Vote Smart over to someone managing from afar would be like hiring a brain surgeon to operate on cancer without ever taking the trouble to attend medical school. His fellow Board members, knowing him, liking him, as I had hired him anyway.
I remained hopeful, but knew that such distancing and that salary increase for a single administrative position would place administrative costs at well over a fourth of Vote Smart’s entire budget. Without some plan to make those cost up could be lethal to major givers, while also killing one of Vote Smart’s key legs (no one is here for the money).
To alleviate the issue, that liberal, trusting, goodie two shoes of my nature chose not to complain but simply go off salary for my last year and donate my time instead.
THE LOCK OUT
The day my staff position changed to teacher/advisor I was gone in every way my replacement and Board could make me gone.
I was kept from participating in every important decision. At first, I was just fuddled, but soon panicked. New budgets were being created with plans to spend but not to raise. The fundraising plan so successfully tested was retired in exchange for one created on a whim that I knew was certain to fail and they would have zero experience to tell them why.
I wrote long emails to the Board, reminding them of how we had accomplished what we had, particularly with fundraising in step-by-step, how to’s, in hopes of getting through. Not my replacement or any board member would respond, nor a thanks for my having donated my final year’s salary.
I never had the chance to introduce my replacement to some members of the full Board (who weren’t members of the Executive Committee), a few of which contacted me with concerns about decisions the Executive Committee was making which they were no longer party to, causing some, since I was gone to simply drop away.
With the new leader’s decisions to ignore the past, I was certain that what I and my wife had created would simply bleed out the money I left them and die. So, I did what I do. I EXPLODED!
My anger was blistering, particularly against the Alpha on the Executive Committee, a Viet Nam war pilot and longtime personal friend who I called a coward for his unwillingness to respond to any of my concerns.
Over the days ahead they cut me off from any contacts with staff, all current financial information, and they refused to approve the tiny retirement package I requested, deciding to keep all the money for themselves. I threatened to sue–my legal counsel was sure it would force them to accept my modest terms of retirement, but I had no stomach for suing what I had created. In the end they offered me a pittance if I signed this:
You will not at any time discuss or disclose … the substance and/or nature of any dispute between Vote Smart and any employee or former employee, including you.
You will not at any time directly or indirectly make, or induce any other person to make, derogatory or disparaging statements (whether or not you believe the statements to be true) of any kind, in any manner or by any method – whether oral, written, electronic (including but not limited to social media), or otherwise.
They all knew me, I had selected each to serve on the board, I would never sign away my rights in return for money, no matter how deserved.
In the year that followed, I would get zero information. When the year I agreed to stay off the Board to support my replacement was up, the Board refused to let me back on the organization I had created. After two years of pleading with them to let me know their condition and their refusal to give me any information the organization I birthed and loved, and had continued to support, lost my support, which I informed each Board member in a personal message.
The only response from the Board was from the Alpha who wished me well with one word: “Hooray!”
So, it ended. The organization I bet a life on withered, I never existed and was a nobody after all.
Drake University came with heavy burdens. Drake is a small liberal arts school with only a few thousand students, but they promised Vote Smart 40 interns a semester–a promise they could not keep. Efforts to attract students from surrounding schools were of little success, and the great National Internship Program we had built at our Montana Ranch evaporated. Turns out that neither members nor students excited about seeing snow-covered mountain peaks, pristine lakes and streams, bears, moose, beavers, elk and such, felt much the same about watching corn grow or hog slaughtering.
Securing enormous amounts of factual data and maintaining public trust and open records all voters, journalists and academics could depend upon, was never a problem. Exacting standards had been set since inception and were easily maintained.
However, replacing the losses in interns and member volunteers would be difficult. The loss would not be so much in labor as in cultivating lifelong supporters, financial and otherwise, along with the kind of income-generating mystique that comes with the public’s knowledge of so many selfless people working on their behalf.
For a time we could afford to patch things together by simply increasing paid staff. But each year’s loss of development through National Interns and member volunteers would be permanent if we stayed in Iowa.
There were three immediate concerns, the first being the Board:
Our board members, anchored in the principle of political opposites, were dying. How could we maintain political balance on the board when conservative vs. liberal no longer represented the national divide? Our board could not be a balance between truth and lie, fact and fabrication without becoming a ridiculous comedic farce.
Maintaining public confidence in integrity had but one answer: balancing the board with well known, articulate, respected representatives on opposing sides of major national issues like immigration, taxes, crime, health care, abortion, education, guns, and foreign policy. Many such leaders were willing, if not anxious to join the board, but the selection should not be up to me, but to whomever replaced me as I grew closer to retiring.
The second concern was money. With all our efforts advertising Vote Smart in major news organizations and web sites, little was accomplished. Trying to blurt out what we were doing in a few ad lines to a cynical public hardened by politicians and their operatives endlessly pitching swampland was a waste of time. We needed to earn more time from those that might consider helping us. The only time we ever got that kind of time from media was the day, years earlier, that the PBS NewsHour covered us swamping our Voter’s Research Hotline for days and generating tens of thousands of supporting members.
Emailing voters was like sending a rain drop to fall on the sun–it never got there. National news editors were never going to let our database, no matter how important, beat out a news story of the stark raving mad that was becoming the message of the day and every day.
So, our focus would be on personalized direct mail riveted on the facts in opposition to the new grotesque slathering’s of anti-factual nonsense abducting every major news outlet.
If I had a fundraising talent, it was talking to citizens directly about our idea in personal letters. Writing a personal letter to thousands at a time takes some considerable thought and testing. Over the years I had tested every imaginable tiny permutation that might impact, first the opening of a letter, then the reading of a story that would hit them in the gut with relief. I could tell you why not to use a window envelope, why to use a personal stamp, why putting “IF YOU WERE A FISH, YOU WOULD READ THIS,” gets a much better response than the nambie pambie, “YOUR VOTE YOUR RIGHT.” Why using a paper clip instead of a staple increases a reader’s interest, why personally signing a letter, which I learned to do a thousand in 20 minutes, will get you twice as many readers, why, if you can get them to open the envelope, that envelope is key and must be instantly tethered to your first sentence and then paragraph.
Most importantly why writing passionately, exposing who you are as if you were writing home to Mother, rather than “I want to get into your purse or wallet,” was everything at Vote Smart.
Now, with a Buffoon-in-Chief and without ever mentioning him, we had the perfect vehicle to get out our message about reality, truth and the essential facts necessary for successful self-governance. As always, I sent various drafts to friends, members and sometimes staff to meter possibilities.
Then I began the expensive testing, first sending out a few thousand to known involved voters, which got the hoped for positive reaction since the loss of the GREATEST GENERATION. I read every response, tweaked the letter again and tested again. The response was better with a few mailing lists making more on the first sending than they cost, which is unheard of.
A key was to know that the value in a return was not so much in what they gave initially but how much, now that you found another friend, they would give over time. Turned out that it was the perfect message to get us moving forward with a future that could only grow with a dangerous Buffon leading every news story with seismic waves of bull shit.
The third concern was Google. Artificial Intelligence (AI), used to inform and misinform, would shape democracy’s future. If there were any chance that self-governance could anchor itself in a future of reality in AI’s new world, there would need to be at least one trusted source for the facts that any voter could turn with confidence.
So, I cultivated contacts at Google with the notion that Google and Vote Smart could become that source. Vote Smart could provide the crucial component that protected the data under the controlling management of our staff and board, consisting of key figures representing every side of major issues, while they supplied the ability to provide even greater specificity tailored to the interests of every user.
It was a shot in the dark, but they were interested–only I hesitated, wanting to turn over its potential implementation to whomever would replace me.
Then the person I agreed to as my replacement, and those whom I had chosen to hire and supervise him turned my 30-year passion for the cause, and me, into what I had feared most since childhood: a nobody.
Ah, for that time when people sought their elders, not because they ran fast or thought fast but because they were contemplative, thoughtful and steeped in a long life of experiences that nurtured a thing called wisdom.
Lots of older people have it. You likely have some in your neighborhood. I remember one living next door named Jack. He had led a Forest Gump life, only with a brain. Starting with nothing, as a kid he shagged balls for Babe Ruth and Lou Gerig. Then later when hitchhiking to Washington DC, he got picked up by Eleanor Roosevelt. Working his butt off, he got degrees from two universities, practiced law, served in the Maryland state legislature, and eventually became Dean of George Washington University School of Law. That was just after his Marine days were over, where there was nowhere to sit but on the dead body of Japanese he had killed. Then a guy named Earl Warren asked him to come straighten out the administrative mess at the Supreme Court as the Clerk, where a painting of him still stands in thanks.
After that he became president of two universities, while also serving as chairman of the boards of three of the world’s largest corporations.
One day, after one of my program directors took a swing at me because he had been fired, I retaliated with a left directly on the nose.
An hour later, I saw Jack working on the pool pump behind his house. Very upset, with my heart still pounding, I walked over to Jack for some wisdom. “Jack” I said, “You have been so successful in life, how did you handle it when you had to fight?”
He thought for a moment, then looked a bit confused and said, “I don’t think I ever fought with anyone.”
