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Author: Richard Kimball

THORNS CAN BECOME ROSES   CHAPTER 39

Published by Richard Kimball on October 4, 2023

 The election was still some weeks away, but the race was over. I continued to go through the motions, giving little club speeches and media interviews but it was a hapless time for me.  Knowing that I owed it to my supporters who were hoping for a miracle that would never come and to other Democrats running for other offices, I submissively marched on.

 Although it would have no impact on the race or even be apparent to me at the time, the most fortuitous event of the campaign was yet to come.

 It was not long before the election when I had to fly back to Washington for an evening fundraiser held for me by Arizona’s Democratic congressional delegation.  It was not much of an event. Maybe a hundred people, mostly lobbyists, along with a few other dignitaries, thinking it party obligatory to show up. It was becoming clear to most in the know that I was going to go down hard.  

 That evening my mind was not on shaking more hands or raising money.  My thoughts were entirely of the person I had met with earlier that afternoon.

 I had walked into Barry Goldwater’s office just to see if he was in and say a quick hello.

 He had been friends with my dad and since then had become Dad to the entire Republican Party, a thoughtfully conservative party, not the one that has him spinning and thrashing in his grave today. Despite our political differences, I admired him greatly.  He had somehow been able to survive election after election saying any damn thing he wanted, to anyone he wanted, on any subject he wanted, and that had become unique in politics.

 As I walked into his office he stood up, not to greet me, but to shoo his staff out. He then told me to sit down and walked over to his door and slammed it shut.  I thought I was in for it, but the next few minutes were a revelation. Agitated, he began recalling his early days in politics when he was running for a city council seat in Phoenix.

 He had thought he saw a better way to manage the city, he wanted to have his say and did, but had not been able to do that kind of thing for many years, because he was now spending all of his time raising money to defend himself from well-healed Democratic challengers viciously attacking him with commercials that spoke nonsense to people by the thousands. Then he got to his point: he started talking about my closing debate remarks.  It was as if he had spoken every word himself.

 He talked about how politics had changed during his life, that it was a different cut we were selecting our leaders from, a nastier, less able group. He was sickened by what was now required to win.  He thought the behavior of campaigns and candidates was “dangerous” and “dishonorable” and that was part of the reason he was getting out.

 It all made me think back to when he was friends with Jack Kennedy, and they had agreed to campaign together across the country in Lincoln-Douglas style debates just before Kennedy was shot. What a difference, what a new standard that would have made!

 I left that meeting locked in thought.  He’s a Republican, one of the most prominent conservative Republicans in the nation, he sees what I see.  There is something here, there is something to be made from this, but what?

 On Election Day, the staff was in good spirits or at least putting up a pretty good show, the office was filled with excited volunteers coming and going.  This is what it was all about, the day the people got their say, got to choose their representatives.  It was an easy day to forget all the tracking polls that showed my plummeting numbers, to forget our lack of funds, to forget we had no commercial buys, to think, well . . . it could happen.

 I knew better, but I did dream a bit that evening as we all waited for the returns, particularly after John finally got around to taking that swing at me. Unfortunately, his swing hit one of my volunteers instead.  I ran into her as I was entering our campaign office. She was standing outside in tears.  When I asked what the matter was, she just looked up at me, mumbled “McCain’s gift,” and motioned inside.  

  I walked in where everyone was pretty angry. “Fuck him!” “What an Asshole!” “Let’s call the press and let them see what he is really like,” were a few of the blasts I heard.  “No,” I said, “the race is over.”

 The results rolled in showing things were worse than anyone expected – a humiliating rout of some 18 points.

  My efforts at the traditional call to concede were met with “John is very busy sleeping,” but I did have his gift.  It was surprisingly beautiful, upset as everyone was, no one had ever seen anything quite like it: an enormous funeral wreath of dead black roses.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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MCCARTHY GONE

Published by Richard Kimball on October 3, 2023

THE ZOO REMAINS

Excerpt from the Mircle of Me

An Autobirography of a Nobody

Chapter 29

 I had not fully understood party caucuses until I participated in one.  I knew these closed-door affairs were used to share information and pressure any unruly members on the fence regarding some issue. However, to any fly-on-the-wall outsider, to was the focus on tactics, (how to screw the Republicans), that could be jaw dropping.

 Of course, Republicans met too, to design a good screwing of Democrats.  In my first meeting, on my first day, there was no caucus talk about the citizens, legislation, or any other matter of substance, just how to get it up and get ready to screw. When we were done, we marched on to the Senate floor, the session was gaveled to order, we exchanged a few formal niceties and got right down to the issue of the day and every day: screwing.

 It was a horrible revelation, when my first Senate session was over and everyone had filed out, I sat in what I imagined was my dad’s old Senate seat, and thought, “My God, was my dad one of these people?”

 I don’t believe he was and as the decades passed, I would come to know that as bad as we were that day, few elected today could measure up to those in either party I served with, nor could have we measured up to those that had served in my father’s era.

 Today, it has deteriorated so badly that visiting some legislatures or the Congress would be like visiting a zoo to find that we had captured all the animals and then put them in the same cage.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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IN FOOTBALL THEY CALL IT A HAIL MARY

Published by Richard Kimball on October 2, 2023

CHAPTER 38 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

                    MCCAIN ON A BOX TOO HIGH

 It was three in the morning, I was a bit drunk, and pretty weepy sitting on the floor with the last surviving Hard-on, who had won my trust and become what I was certain to be a lifelong friend. He was the Press Secretary on loan from a U. S. Senators office and the only other person left in the office that night.

 I looked over at him, “We can do this.  Forget the money, forget the commercials, let’s do it differently, we can change the way people campaign.  Let’s just get in the car, head out non-stop and start talking real to real people, every group, every church, every club that will listen about things that matter. Screw all this puffed-up manipulative nonsense. It will catch on; I know it will.”

 His response was conventional prudence, dead on accurate, safe, Hard-on realism, and ended the last flicker of hope that I could campaign honorably with my head held high. “If you do that, you will be a joke, I will quit and you will be alone,” he said.

 I simply did not have the confidence to watch all the paid staff pack up, move out and leave me to campaign with real supporters, real friends, and family. Even though I almost certainly would have fallen back to 16% by election day, I have deeply regretted that lack of courage for almost 40 years.

 The following day I was sandbagged in a meeting with major contributors, staff and some close friends who pleaded with me to change my mind. I relented and let the Hard-ons stay.

 The race was over for me, there was no passion, no interest, no desire to run or to serve.  I hated politics and could not wait for Election Day to come, get spanked, and be done with it.

 Appearances had to be maintained for the down ticket candidates, even if just a passionless façade. I owed that, if not to the Hard-ons, at least to the volunteers, my family and friends that had done so much to support me and really did feel that “We need you, Richard Kimball, in the U. S. Senate.”

 I would get a final last chance to be heard in one statewide prime-time televised debate. I had challenged John to debate me in each of the state’s 14 counties knowing McCain would say no and maybe take a hit in those he refused.  His public response was a more effective and amusing, “I want to debate him not live with him.”

 The two-campaigns met and argued over every little detail: Would the candidates stand or sit, would there be podiums, would there be chairs, would the candidates be allowed to walk, what subjects could be covered, how would the set be designed, who would sit on what side, would the questions be known in advance, who would ask the questions etc. etc.

  Each side saw advantage in one thing or another.  One was that they wanted to sit but we wanted to stand.  We wanted to stand because I was 6’ 4” while John, a jet pilot, was somewhat smaller enabling him to fit in that A-4 Skyhawk cockpit he got shot down in.

 My Hard-ons were pleased that they won the stand argument, but failed to see the simple remedy McCain would employ so as not to be seen looking up at me.

 My campaign tried to do as all campaigns do, that is to put me through a series of rehearsals where the Hard-ons and staff fired questions and I would practice giving responses.  Within 30 minutes or so when it became apparent that I would not tolerate my answers being tweaked, the first and only rehearsal ended.

 Discussion after that simply focused on what the Hard-ons considered a “Hail Mary” effort attacking McCain.   John had a temper, a pretty bad one, and we knew it. There were rumors about his behavior toward his staff, colleagues, and family some of which came in firsthand.  The guy had a fuse, and it could be ugly and easily lit. The plan was hatched, that at the end of the debate, when he was comfortable and having only his prepared closing remarks to make, I would hit him with a vicious attack exposing the previously unknown “truths” of his behavior, and in doing so hopefully, expose his inner self. The Hard-ons greatest hope was that he might take a swing at me.

 Adding nothing to my credit, I did not oppose the idea and prepared to deliver the slimy sodden mess.

 On the day of the debate and particularly in the car with my mother on the way to the debate hall, nightmarish thoughts swirled in my panicky brain as I struggled mightily not to show it.  I was certain that my ignorance and foolishness would be dramatically exposed for all to see and be aghast.  In my mind, my incompetence was real, the thought that I should desire to be a member of the most powerful governing body on earth was such a farce, that when all was said and done at the debate not one on my campaign, not a supporter, friend or even mother would be able to vote for me or even look me in the eye.

 Then an odd thing occurred.  We arrived at the hall, and I suddenly felt calm, resigned to my fate. It did not seem to matter much what I did, there was nothing I could do about it, what would happen, would happen.

  I spent a few minutes shaking hands with members of the audience, most particularly those in my opponent’s camp. I heard one of John’s Hard-ons jokingly ask him if he wanted to work the audience.  He didn’t.

 As I shook hands I came eye-to-eye with some of his family, I knew I couldn’t close with the slimy attack thought so crucial to my chances of shaking things up. There was something else I thought I might close with instead.

 During the debate, I only got hit by one or two questions that I had not expected. My answers were largely unpracticed ramblings but not out of line.  I even had a few moments of fun, or what I thought was fun, though much of it would again ensure that the media coverage would say little about anything of substance.  

  John had voted for full funding of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a new military transport that was supposed to be indestructible with substantial defensive and offensive capability.  The vehicle was grossly over budget (as was usual with military contracts) and had flunked its field tests.  When the vote failed, John had voted for a bill providing half funding for the vehicle which also failed.  Then finally, when legislation was proposed to strip all funding for the vehicle, John voted for that too. I had a bit of fun with his support for full, then half, and finally no funding for the Bradley suggesting that John wanted to be all things to all people.

 Most impactfully and perhaps stupidly I then added emphasized with a bit of information completely unknown to the television audience. “You are so insistent on being what you are not, that you even pretend for the audience to be taller than you are by standing on that box hidden behind your podium.”

 A spattering of cheers and boos came from the various partisan factions in the audience, while several photographers edged out of their front row seats to take side shots of John standing on his box.

  He was upset.  And the debate suddenly became far livelier off camera during the commercials than on.  During the breaks we would glare at each other, he would bark things suggesting I was naïve, and I would fire back that he was incapable of honesty.

 Finally, the debate, which the League of Women Voters ridiculously claimed was the most substantive ever, came to the final commercial break just prior to our closing arguments.  I looked over at John, who stood there stiff, and lock jawed staring out above the audience but at no one in particular.  I thought about the scummy attack I had prepared to make in my close. 

 I wouldn’t do it, as I have said, I did not really know the man, had no real reason to dislike him and I was not going to trash his personal behavior. I could not imagine the Hell he suffered as a prisoner, and I secretly admired that he had fared so much better than my imagination suggested I would have.

 Tossing out your all-important closing remarks just before you are about to make them in front of a large audience and thousands of viewers on state-wide television is an odd thing to do.  A kind of discomfort settled over me that I had not felt since before my State Senate filibuster. What was I going to say? My knees began an uncontrollable shuddering behind my podium.  Afraid that the audience might notice I jammed my knees together in an attempt to settle them.  An action that simply made it appear as if I badly needed to pee.  

  The camera came back on and the moderator said, “Mr. Kimball it is time for you to give your closing remarks, you have two minutes.”  What the Hell, I thought.  The election is over I might as well say what had been tormenting me since I took that first $50,000 check. I looked directly into the camera and said these words.  Now I have never gone back to look at what I actually said, but I am pretty confident these words if not spot verbatim, are damn close.

 “Understand what we do to you,” I started, nodding to John. “We spend all our time raising money from people we do not know, people who are going to want access to us if we win and we both spend it in the same identical three ways; First we measure you, we hire pollsters to find out what it is you want to purchase in the marketplace, just like Campbell’s soup or Kellogg’s.  Second, we then hire some consultants who know how to tailor our image to fit what we then know you want to buy. And finally, the most expense thing we do is bombard you with the meaningless, issueless, emotional nonsense that inevitably results. And which ever one of the two of us does this to you best, is going to win.”

 The audience sat in goo goo eyed disbelief without the tiniest peep.  Then John went and gave a standard patriotic close and the debate was over for everyone but the media. For them, or at least their coverage of the debate, it had not yet begun.  The media’s debate coverage would focus almost entirely on what happened next.

 As the announcer was thanking us and the television audience, I decided to have a last bit of fun. While the cameras were still on, I leaned over to John and reached out my hand to shake as he began to reach out his. Only I did not take the last step to be close enough for John to both reach my hand and stay on his box at the same time.

  He quickly retracted his hand.  I just smiled and kept my hand out. His anger was converting into silent fury.  Suddenly, recognizing my thoughtful gesture the moderator chimed in, “Yes it would be appropriate to shake hands now.”   I smiled again at John as my hand went to that same just out of reach spot.

 John crimped a smile to cover the pure venom underneath and stepped off his box to take my hand.  My God, I thought, I have him, he’s going to strike me.  When the camera lights snapped off the stage was instantly rushed by his Hard-ons.  Within seconds he was snared and maneuvered out the back door and into a waiting car before the media could get to him.

 The media coverage had its usual cow pie focus.  On television, when he stepped off the box to shake my hand it looked like he fell into a hole. The following day all the newspapers had stories and pictures of the soap box, little if anything was said about our differing opinions on any issue of significance.

 Years later when he was running for President, I would read a short memoir from a person that had been on his staff the evening of that debate. Writing about the debate’s ending he wrote, “John wanted to kill Kimball.”

 After the debate no one, not my family, not my staff, not the media — no one mentioned my closing remarks. It was as if I had only imagined saying them, and no one heard them but me.  Some weeks later I discovered one person did hear them and that would finally drive me toward a chance at making my life worth the living of it, after all.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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CHAPTER 37 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

Published by Richard Kimball on September 29, 2023

CHAPTER 37 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

POLITICS AS MAKE BELIEVE

    Pretending often works!

 Despite myself, for a few months we were making steady upward progress in the polls, mostly because it was the only direction to go. Bigger contributions and more volunteers were coming in the office door.  Before long we started to look similar to a real campaign.

 Then we got cute.

 We knew one of my biggest problems was that John McCain, shot down in Viet Nam, spent 5 ½ years of hell in the Hanoi Hilton at the same time I was a long-haired, anti-war demonstrating student, occasionally kicked back Bogarting my friends’ joints (If you know what that means you probably were too). Worse than that, I made no secret of it.  Unlike Bill Clinton who famously said, “It touched my lips, but I did not inhale,” I admitted that my lips proved a poor barrier.

  Oddly, because I thought the one place the defense budget needed to be enormously increased was to provide education and first-class health care of returned veterans, the head of the Viet Nam Veterans Association, the head of the Disabled American Veterans, the head of the Blind American Veterans, our Congressional Medal of Honor winner along with a number of other now prominent returnees liked me best.   Well, I wasn’t exactly sure they liked me personally that much, but then it did not matter. In big ticket politics I would learn the support you get from people that hate your opponent can be more valuable than those that love you. And in this case, it was clear they were pissed off at McCain.

 The Hard-ons decided to plan a big media day, where all of these veterans’ groups would announce their support of this wonderous, glorious me.  Each step would be carefully orchestrated by the stiffies to appear as if our campaign had nothing to do with it. A Democratic muck-itty-muck would quietly provide a plane, and the veterans would fly all over the state on their own (no Kimball staff) where they would hold press conferences in the state’s four biggest cities on a single day.

 This was going to be big, really big. The vets, on their own, supporting the former long haired, draft dodging, pot smoker?   John McCain’s hero status would take a hit. It was Kimball standing tall with our troops simply because he thought they needed more support after war than they did during it.

 My veterans all got up before the sun on a carefully selected day, a day the Hard-ons were certain had no other competitive news events.  Cloaked in their freshly pressed dress uniforms, with eye popping displays of commendations stuck to their chests, they were square jawed, steely eyed magnificent. As the sun crested the Desert Mountains and began heating another blistering Arizona summer day, they lifted off.

  As with almost everything important in life, say, homering on that high school fast ball, your move for that first good night kiss, or taking a soufflé from the oven, politics requires good timing. Bad timing and you swing too late, she’s through the door before you built the courage, the soufflé falls flat, or in this case no one gets the message.

 The veteran’s first stop was Flagstaff, AZ. A single reporter showed up who had been assigned to cover our event the night before. He apparently slept late and had yet to turn on his radio or television.  He would be the only reporter to show up at any of the Flagstaff, Yuma, Phoenix, or Tucson media events.

 As it turned out we were not the only people who decided to get up early that day.  In the White House, Ronald Reagan got up early too.  Unknown to any media, the public and certainly anyone in Libya, he had selected that morning to send off his own flight crew, only they would be active military with instructions to fly over Libya and blow it up.

 When your big story is blown off the news by much bigger news, you can’t just pretend your news didn’t happen, rewind and do it again another day.  

 Despite my campaign’s fumbles, when the next polls came out, we found ourselves at 42%. I was thrilled, we had gone from 16% to what would be our pinnacle.

 John’s campaign commercials showing him young, busted up and hobbling from a plane after his release from prison hit everyone’s TV set.

 We dropped a few points in the polls, so my Hard-on and Chief came up with the idea that I should go to a little town called Kingman where he knew John was going to do a radio interview. Somehow, he and the Hard-on, on loan from a U. S. Senator’s office, managed to schedule an interview with me immediately following.

 It was there they wanted me to confront John for the very first time and try to stir things up a bit. A gutsy idea they suggested take place in the Republican’s Attila the Hun part of the state.

 I got there while he was still on the air and tried to fluster him with my unexpected appearance. I stood on the other side of a thick pain of glass and tried to disturb his on air presence with an unwavering glare. At the time it did not occur to me that my threatening stare through the window of a small-town right-wing radio station would be an amusing curiosity to a man who spent five years in the hands of the Viet Cong.

 However, as I stood there, it did occur to me that I didn’t know John McCain, had never met him and was suddenly aware that I had no real reason to dislike the man. But here I was glaring through a window at my “enemy.”  This little Hard-on stunt would get me exactly what I deserved.

 When John finished the interview, he got up and walked out as if I did not exist, which I would wish I didn’t.

  Then it was my turn to get an interview. The aggressively unfriendly radio jock’s first question was that I explain my attack on John’s environmental record, referring to something I had said a few days earlier in Phoenix.  The way he blurted out the word “attack,” tossed me, I did not like it. And in response, I spoke openly and honestly, opening the most common self-inflicted wound created by a naïve candidate.  In apologetic tones I stated that I was sorry if I had attacked him, perhaps I spoke too harshly, and I regret it.  I simply disagreed with some of his environmental votes.  Oops!  

 The “sorry about that, perhaps I spoke too harshly, and I regret it” portion found its way into one of John’s most successful commercials.  Richard Kimball apologizes to John McCain.

 A cardinal rule of politics is that you never did such things. If a candidate is quoted saying something that did not go over well, you better say your comments were taken out of context. If you gave out some bad facts, say you misspoke.  If an old picture pops up with a joint in your hand or white powder on your nose, say you didn’t inhale!  Caught in bed with an intern? You had better say “NO, NO, NO” like your political life depends on it, because it does, or did back then.  Saying you might have used better judgement will drive a dagger in your heart. Think Nancy Reagan, “Just say NO.”

 Anyway, that bit of honesty and talking as if I were a human backfired and gave our polls a burn, our Hard-ons were getting nervous, not so much about my losing but that they should not be to blame for losing badly.

 My main job had become to raise money to fuel more of what we had done, what we would continue to do. I no longer owned a home or even had an apartment. At the end of each day, I would be dropped off at some friend or volunteer’s home.  I was driven by someone everywhere.  The one vehicle I owned; an antique 1967 Volkswagen van had been parked for months behind our Phoenix office and was slowly disappearing as thieves pilfered it for its parts to sell other classic car owners.  Hating my campaign was a new experience for me, and I knew it was because this campaign no longer represented me but the boners’ representation of me. The end of the stiffies began to take form in my mind when two somewhat amusing events added sulve to our wounds.

 One was a serious problem that self-corrected.  The state’s biggest and most influential newspaper had an editor who enjoyed parading around in his military uniform loaded with the ribbons and commendations he had won in battle and service to his country. He was a friend of John’s and had an intense publisher’s dislike for me. I had wrongly presumed this was because unlike he and John, I had not served with distinction in the military.

 In politics, like much else in life, when you have an enemy, your best defense is to demonize them, but how do you demonize someone who “buys their ink by the barrel.” In his case the heavens opened and rained a moment of clarity on that son-of-a-bitch.

 He was exposed like some turtle suddenly finding they had no shell. He had no military experience whatsoever.  He had been parading around town for years, including occasions with John, in a military outfit overloaded with commendations and medals acquired from some lets-make-believe Hollywood costume shop. This all-powerful OZ was toast and my stiffies would eat it up as best they could, while John would run from his relationship with him, much the way one would from a gas explosion in a sewage plant.

 The second event was discovered a few weeks later. We were to learn that I was not the only Senate candidate who could put his foot in his mouth.  In politics you can make mountains out of a bit of nothing, particularly if you have that bit of nothing on tape.

 It started with my joking around with some of my campaign volunteers.  I was talking about how my apology was turned into a McCain campaign commercial when a University of Arizona student recalled an off-the-cuff remark John had made speaking to his class. John had been talking about a retirement community called Leisure World. Only the student said he did not call it Leisure World, for a laugh he referred to it as Seizure World.  It was nothing, the people living at Leisure World often joke they lived in Seizure World.  Without much hope the key question was asked, “Did anyone tape his appearance?”

 It took a couple of days for the Hard-ons to run down the professor, get our hands on the tape, pick another day without news competition (this time successfully), draft some press releases, and organize another “independent” event.  This time it would be supportive senior volunteers at my campaign who would demonstrate and demand a public apology from John McCain for his heartless remarks about seniors.  One clever fellow showed up dressed in a coffin, so that the cameras could catch him rising up one last time to vote against John McCain.

 Nonsense can turn campaigns. Even anchored in meaningless wackery, the media will become a willing, wonton whore, if what you do, they think sells. A simple off-handed remark made months ago, that anyone, including myself could have made, was everywhere on TV, radio and newspapers. Some cartoonists drew pictures of the heartless John McCain, showing him walking over the bones of the elderly to enter the U.S. Senate.

 This time John would take a hit in the polls.  That would help our fundraising, giving us another round of commercials. Commercials as it turned out that would cut to the bone, my bone.

 First was the Hard-ons effort to revive the military support for my candidacy.  They had found a mother and wife of a Vietnam MIA (Missing in Action) and put her on camera endorsing me.  Somehow as she announced her support for me, they had managed to get her to cry. I had not been told, a violation of my specific instructions, but somehow ignored. I never actually saw the commercial nor do I remember having done anything about it, other than becoming so angry that the commercial was pulled.

 The second was a radio commercial a few days after, again, that I had not been informed of.  I first heard it over my car radio on the way to some speech in rural Arizona.  The commercial was attacking John on an environmental issue. It was not inaccurate exactly, but that does not mean it was fair, which it was not.

 I am not sure what upset me more, that the attack was misleading or that I was now saying things that I had no intention of saying.  In any case, it was no longer me running for office. I rushed back to Phoenix, where I fired my Hard-on and Chief along with his PR people and then met with my supportive staff and volunteers.

 I told them that I would manage the campaign myself, design all our future media and of course be the candidate.  In concern, not so much for the campaign but for me I heard a chorus of, “You can’t do it all Richard!” each had said in their own way.  “Money will freeze up.”  “You will not be taken seriously.”  “No candidate can manage everything and run for office at the same time.”

 The blowback was total and seemed unanimous.

 I was devastated and threatened to quit the race, “You can’t quit,” they insisted, “Look what everyone has done for you, how they are counting on you, the people that have given you their money to run on, the volunteers who have spent thousands of hours on the phones, holding signs, going door to door, leafleting parking lots.”  Of some impact, were candidates of my own party running for smaller offices and counting on me to pull voters to the polls who would vote for them down ticket.  “If you quit,” they would say, “you will burn us too, along with all those that care for you and fight for you and” here it comes again, “need you, Richard Kimball, in the United States Senate.”

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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cults

Published by Richard Kimball on September 22, 2023

  Cults comfort and nurture the most vulnerable and quietly desperate to find relief from the most broken and painful abscesses brought by life, cracking one’s natural humanist nature.

  Impossible it is for loved ones impacted to use reason with such captured by an idea that takes hold, locks in, and holds out resolution and relief to one so afflicted with pain.

  Most distressing for survivors is not just the loss of a loved one taken, but the common history gone and shared joy in the experience of life.

  It is not uncommon for those whose love is the grandest, whose care is most passionate and devoted, to take the most brutal hits from those seized by a cult’s unerring, regimented, hardened truths.

 To any that might identify with these words:  This night, I feel your pain!

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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THE GALACTICALLY DOPEY?

Published by Richard Kimball on September 22, 2023

CHAPTER 36 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

                             Where Dopey Lives.

 Unlike my previous campaigns I was spending little time talking to real people. I had to raise money, big money from deep pockets if I had any hope of paying for all the hard-ons and their plans. Any spare time and I was off to the library, where I really needed to be. I would read through mountains of position papers on dozens of issues I knew were important but knew little about. Concerns citizens would want McCain or me to deal with if elected, the hard-ons viewed my library time as a waste of time.

 Any citizen would be drop-jawed to discover how little candidates know about most issues. These candidates started just as you are now. For a sense of it just ask yourself, right now, how much we should be spending on each of the perplexing components of defense spending; or why Americans’ health care costs are so out of sync with the rest of the world; or explain why we have fewer people than guns to protect ourselves from each other and the government We, The People control; and at what point should a woman lose freedom over her body to the growing child within it. And if you can handle a real whopper, try to describe our taxing structure, explain why it has such colossal winners and losers. So complex, no citizen can fully comprehend it, forcing Americans to file blindly or fork over a fist full of cash to some brick-and-mortar tax advisor like H&R Block. Or if really fortunate, seven-digit cash to tax lawyers steering you clear of any tax at all.

 After a half century riveted on politics, I still have no confidence in answers to these questions for me, let alone you.

 When running for a major office or any office, particularly for the first time, you just don’t know what you don’t know, and most candidates don’t know diddly, they just need to appear as if they do. Today, once elected they mindlessly retreat into the party line, locked into the stream of money that makes their elections possible.

 If you doubt me, just digest this one statistic:

The blue and red dots accurately visualize the number of cross-over votes over a 50-year period:

  Any nincompoop can easily figure out the relationship.  For any not yet advanced to the nincompoop level, I ask, “Will your waiter give you a better table with a $5 tip or a $500 one?  It is just that simple.

 Major candidates are trained and practiced on all the questions hard-ons imagine they might be asked. In today’s politics the public doesn’t require you to answer the question asked at all, but back in my day, if you didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t answer a question the media would feast on you for their evening news meal.

 We accept behavior from these candidates wanting to rule our lives that we wouldn’t accept from any other applicant for any other job. Let’s say you are hiring a babysitter. Johnny from down the street says he would love to take care of your kids and directly answers your question about your kids doing their homework, getting their baths and ready for bed and in it on time.  Then little Lucy comes in and says she wants the job too.  You ask her the same question, but she responds with, “That’s an excellent question but let me tell you about Johnny.  He flunked his reading exam, got sent to the principal’s office for spitting and there are rumors that he stole a popsicle at the Piggly Wiggly. You would never hire Lucy, that is unless she was applying to represent you in Congress. Because for that job, dirt works, that is why there is so much of it.

 Anyway, back in my day, one of the first to feast on me was mother.  It was one of those speeches I coughed up on an issue I knew little about other than from my library studies. As a 38-year-old, I pontificated about the elderly, the burdens of aging and their difficulties with health care.  When my talk ended, I was perfectly puffed up, thought it a great talk, on all the experiences older citizens face aging.

 Unfortunately for me, Mom had been quietly sitting in the back of my retirement community audience. Just another of those that had been living for some years now with the pains and worries only one in their last years understands.  When the talk was done, she looked up at me, got out of her seat, took my arm, and walked me out in silence. I was surprised, I thought I would have swelled her with pride as I was.  No, she just waited until we were off alone where others would not hear and then said, “My, you’ve grown a mighty big head, haven’t you?” It was her polite way of saying, “You don’t know shit.”

 After a month or so of listening and watching my hard-ons do their thing, I cut them off and insisted on giving a comprehensive speech on why I was running. There would be no bull, I would talk about what I would do on the issues about which I had some command, with a mention or two on important issues of which I was learning.

 It would be important, if only to me, and would not be some crap lifted out of a consultant’s can. I wanted and did give my sense of the world I thought was to come.  A world where I thought future battles would be won or lost with knowledge, not bombs.

 I nailed that speech covering concerns on education, defense, environment, health care and social security. With little help from the hard-ons, my staff and friends pressed the media to attend. For 50-minutes I poured out my heart on real issues, at a conference center filled to the brim with retired auto workers.

 Not a news reporter showed up. I was stunned. This was my reason for running, this was why I hoped people would vote for me. My speech was a total snore then, and since this chapter has a bit of what I said then, maybe now too.

 I imagined again, someone walking up and putting an arm around me with the refrain “Now, now, Richard!”  But it was only one of the hard-ons smiling at me from across the hallway as I exited with a muffled, “No attacks, no blood, no drugs, no sex, no drama, no media.”

 I hadn’t managed one scummy, newsworthy reference to John McCain. Like many back then, I blamed the media for an unwillingness to report the important. But it was no more their fault than a grocer for putting more ice cream on the shelves than spinach. You push what sells, not what is good for you.

 Today, like any other business, the news business chases money. Money comes from the number of viewers you have to buy products. In the media as in politics, attracting that audience is everything. Fear, sex, crime, the crooked, violent, salacious misdeeds of our species on parade gather audience. Like any species, we pay attention to and are forewarned by the behavior of others. Our senses are heightened when we’re threatened, when we’re told to be afraid, are in danger. Just cry out “FIRE” in a crowded theater and you will see what I mean.

 People have been drawn to bad news for some time now.  It’s instinctive and essential for self-preservation. The media has learned to take that instinct and turn it into dollars.

 So most everything we see on TV, hear on radio, or follow on the web is bad. The sky is forever falling–be afraid, very afraid. The media and politicians make the best, most obvious use of this, constantly telling their audience what to fear, who to fear, and blame for all your worries in your town or your nation. The competition for audience in the media and between candidates is now so vicious that it is impossible to tell what is so and what is not.

 In spite of it all, there would be a chance to correct much of this in my future, in what would become my life’s work, which I hope to get to before this book or I end. When that finally happens, I would be asking my young staff and students: “If you were sitting in the lap of God and he asked what generation of Americans would you like to be born into? You would be a fool not to choose mine.”

 As an American, my generation has had few burdens not recently self-inflicted. No revolution, no invading country burning down Washington, no Civil War killing hundreds of thousands of ourselves, no War to End all Wars, no Great Depression, no World War II.  My generation has had it easy. Not only that but we have become the most cunning of all American generations by far. We suckle on the milk filled tit won by our parents and our parents’ parents’ parents and have the brass to pile the burden of our growing debts onto the shoulders of our offspring and those of theirs. And yet, we have the pluck, as we party on everyone else’s dime, to complain about everything.

 No truer words have been spoken than, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Today the crescendo of fear knows no end. Americans own more guns than there are Americans, you’re more likely to die in your bathtub than in a terrorist attack. If you are murdered it is a hundred times more likely that it will be at the hand of someone raised in a Christian culture than a Muslim one, and if you are killed by a Muslim there is a better than 90% chance that you are a Muslim.  We all know that. Right?

 The United States of America conceived the beginnings of a culture where freedom enables common people to enjoy the invention, production, and prosperity of their own labors. We have learned, advanced, and enrichened, with an explosion of shared knowledge. An idea of freedom and democracy that has been cloaking the world. And if some culture was not ready for it, we have been so confident in it, and impatient for it, we’ll shove it down their throats.

 We simply think of it as free enterprise, a marvel that few of us really get.  As a species we cannot naturally run, swim, or fly faster than a thousand other species. We cannot hear, see, feel, or smell better than a thousand others.  The only anchor of our success, the only thing that gives us advantage, the only thing that has enabled such astounding success and the progress that gives us all the comforts that we now smugly see as our right, is our ability to know.

 Yet we do not see it, do not heavily invest in it, we barely encourage our ability to know.  In the human environment the least able to succeed, from the moment of conception to death is directly proportional to their access to knowledge.

 When you touch something today, anything at all that is in your field of vision, ask yourself how it happened, where did it come from. Unless you are reading this out in the woods, you will see that everything around you came from our ability to know. So extraordinary is this one tool that we have invented ways to run, swim, fly, hear, see, feel, and smell better than anything else on earth.

 If we should survive as a species, some future generation will look back and ask about us, “Good God, they had two centuries of advances unequaled in all prior human history. All clearly anchored in their freedom and ability to know, and they still could not see it. How is it possible they could be so brilliant and distressingly dopey at the very same time?!

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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Let’s Party!

Published by Richard Kimball on September 14, 2023

 I have been writing some pretty depressing stuff lately and some readers have rightfully taken exception to it. So here goes, on the upside:

 Facts are facts and of all the facts I know, being crazy lucky to be of my generation is the grandest of all. What a kick it has been to progress:

 From listening to events from some distant state, to seeing them live from anywhere in the world.

 From taking four days to cross the country by train, to hopping on a plane at breakfast and being there for lunch.

 From sweating under a fan, to kicking back at home in an environment completely under my control.

 From needing an operator’s assistance, time, and money to place a call across the country to reaching anyone in the world on a whim.

 From finding the answer to my question somewhere in a 32-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica to just asking Siri.

 Just a few, and if you go back a bit further, say to my great-grandfather’s birth, well, he didn’t have phones, fans, planes, trains or encyclopedias, flush toilets, washing machines, cars, or any paved roads for his Kimball Carriages. And he was a pretty rich fellow as President of the American Carriage industry, and inventor of the assembly line, almost a half century before Henry Ford.

 Yeah, I have been handed down a little family braggadociousness, even if the family couldn’t convert his carriages into automobiles.

           Kimball Auto Carriage

  DIDN’T SELL!!! 

 Sorry, I digressed a bit there.  My point is me, my generation, we are just unimaginably lucky to be us.  We took advantage of democracy and the inventiveness that exploded after its introduction of freedom and the ability to enjoy the rewards of our own labors.

 We are pretty darn comfortable.  Most Americans’ lives today would be the envy of any pre-America King, Queen, Czar, or dictator in history.  In their time, hunger, plagues, rats, stench, and filth of every imaginable kind lay in wait out every door and quite often on both sides of the door.

 Hell, Walmart was just unimaginable to any human living during 99.95% of the time we have existed on earth. As I use to tell my students: “If you were sitting in the lap of God and he asked what generation of Americans would you like to be born into? You would be a fool not to choose mine.”

 So, it is fair to say things have gotten better in spite of us, and us can be pretty despicable. After all we have now learned the downside of democracy as we vote for and suck up the rewards earned by our forefathers and how to spend the future resources of our children.   You would think as long as we have decided to use it all, we would at least have the decency to stop complaining and party.

 Oh well, turns out I couldn’t write something uplifting after all.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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CHAPTER 35 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

Published by Richard Kimball on September 10, 2023

“Tah Dah: HERE I AM”

“Hey Mack, what should the sound bite be for today.”

 So, I headed back to Arizona, hired the suggested “say-anything, do-anything-to-win” campaign consultants and one of the requested polling firms — people who only got stiffies for the bumps and grinds of politics. The result was a TV commercial suggesting Arizona horses would vote for me, so you should too.

 When the pollster finished measuring the citizens’ impressions of me and pasted together the me, they said they saw, I was a stranger to myself. “They don’t like you, Richard. Well, it isn’t that they do not like you, it is just that they do not like anything you stand for.” Or, as one more generous and gentler consultant flattered me with, “Richard, you are just a little too bright for such a dim state.”

 Amongst many things that now troubled all the consultants about my chances was my past anti-war activism and my divorce — nothing to do with issues facing the nation but deadly liabilities non-the-less. They were the reasons John McCain, walking with his pretty pregnant wife and a couple of his kids at the head of the 4th of July parade got rowdy cheers from the crowd, where as I, riding with my mother in a horse drawn black carriage at the end of the parade, got one embarrassingly audible, “Way to go Richard.”

  My only positive, the pollsters reported, was that I was a native Arizonian. A vote for my mother who chose a nice spot to punch me out onto planet Earth.  Being a native was not much advantage when you consider that my hometown had grown from the 50,000 of my first year to 1 million in my 38th one. This was not because Tucsonans were unusually randy but because retirees elsewhere were sick of shoveling snow and came to Arizona in post war droves, making me a freak of nature.

 So, our first commercial came out emphasizing my mother’s location on the day of my deposit.  The commercial shoot would go down, right next to my third-grade poop in front of Jerry Eagerton, as one of life’s most humiliating episodes.

 I was to become a useless eunuch in a stampeding herd of consulting hard-ons looking to stick it to John McCain.  I just didn’t get it right away.

 When I arrived at the ranch setting to shoot that horrid commercial, the hard-ons explained that they were having a difficulty with the first scene because the actor that was to play the part of the rancher was sick. As a replacement they fell upon the friend I arrived with. They thought he looked like a rugged rancher, not the New Yorker he was. He had fun getting dressed up in the outfit they had and the Stetson they paid him off with and then asked him if he could ride a horse. He said, “Sure.” It never occurred to the hard-ons to ask me. 

 I had been on a horse once in my life when I was seven, thirty some years earlier at summer camp. The ride lasted all of 10-seconds when the horse, disagreeing with my vice-like grip on his reins, thought it best to buck me off into a prickly pear cactus. The afternoon I spent with the nurse and her trusty pliers served me well. For thirty some years I had discovered a great many more pleasant things to do than get back up on a horse.

 The absurd nature of the commercial was becoming apparent when the hard-ons became aware that I did not look all that comfortable on a horse, but it did not deter them from the caricature of me they wanted to create.  “Well, we will just have you two walk and talk in front of the stalls filled with horses.” After a few takes the hard-ons, being mostly of the eastern ranch ignorant variety, realized that the horses weren’t members of the Actors Guild.  They would get the horses properly set for each take, but by the time they said “action” and we walked by, they had simply gone about their business and turned around. It turns out that horses’ asses and a candidate, as perfect as that really was, wasn’t good politics. “We need those horses facing forward and attentive,” the director yelled.  More than that, I thought, I was pretty sure I was going to need each horse’s vote if I wanted any votes at all.

 The hard-ons were going to get the image of me they wanted. They eventually sewed a bag full of baby carrots to the side of my trousers that the camera would not see and had me parade back and forth in front of the horses feeding a little carrot to each as I passed. Much like voters, when the horses got something, they were much more supportive.

 Next came the scene designed to counter the baggage this divorced, childless bachelor had compared to a war hero with kids and an expecting pretty wife. This scene was the easiest for me to play out, because I would rather spend my time with a group of children than I would with most adults.  We were able to take the shot in one take.  They had brought a half dozen kids donated up by staff and volunteers. The kids and I laughed and giggled as I lifted them up to pick Arizona oranges and played a bit of soccer with those we dropped. We had the only fun during that shoot and the message was pretty clear: I loved kids; kids loved me. Were they my kids, the viewer would wonder?  Who knows, the commercial wouldn’t say.

 The next scene was of a picnic, where I walked around smiling picnickers representing everyone that would be or could be an Arizona voter. Old, young, male, female, black, white, Hispanic, Indian, Asian… the exact blend at a picnic table no one had ever seen. It could not have been more unique had they stuck in a Martian. If you did not see yourself at that picnic table, your kind had yet to be discovered in Arizona.

 The final scene was one that had every hard-on exasperated and on my case. They had designed the scene for simpletons, as one, I was to say a line I had never, would never say to any person and not expect the refrain BULL SHIT!

 The hard-on said, “Just imagine you are in front of a crowd of enthusiastic supporters. You turn, look directly into the camera, smile, and say these words from your heart: ‘I feel this way because I was born here, and I love Arizona.’”

 I hated the line, and I could not, as directed, smile while saying it.  On take number twenty something, with the required Arizona sunset waning and all the hard-ons going limp with frustration, I decided to take over as director.

 The real director, in desperation, had set up a makeshift audience of cast, prop people and any passer-by that wanted to be on TV, to see if it would make me feel more comfortable pretending to give a speech and being warm and fuzzy about being an Arizonian.

 Just before the next take, what would be the final take, I leaned over to my New York friend and asked him to stand at the very end, where he would be the last person I would see as I turned to face the camera and say those mind-numbing words the hard-ons thought so necessary. I told him, “Please don’t just stand there as I turn, do something, do anything, take my mind off this agony, make me smile as I turn.”  The cameras rolled and as I turned, there he was, his middle finger stuffed up his nose. Perfect! The hard-ons had to leave the sounds of my laughter on the cutting room floor, but we were done.

 That first “Vote for Me” commercial that ended up on television was humiliating and I ordered off the air. No one was very happy, particularly about the money that had paid for it. But money that was followed by more money.

 After all, the country badly needed a guy born in the desert, can walk in front of horses, enjoys other’s children, has a friend from New York City, and supports fruits, which you should too.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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WE ARE FADING

Published by Richard Kimball on September 4, 2023

Our fading ability to tell the difference between what we know and what we think we know will end democracy.

Recent movements and separations between people don’t make much sense to many of us.  Even as it worsens, sources for it and cures to it, dissipate in a mist of false facts from disreputable origins.   Citizens are losing any ability to know what is so and what is not.

 As bad players adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) foaming with misinformation that captures and molds minds to their own end, we all become chumps, certain we are in the know and others are not.

As AI becomes more powerful and Artificial General Intelligence enables systems to integrate our ability to know what is true will vanish.

Without a source to which all people can turn in confidence for the facts, for reality, there can be no democracy.

My ponderous efforts to begin such a source at Vote Smart, sparked but now faded are nowhere near where I had hoped they would go and now need to be.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder — Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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 Chapter 34 – The Mircale of Me                                                

Published by Richard Kimball on September 2, 2023

CHAPTER 34 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

U. S. Senate Campaign

Newspaper Cartoon

U. S. SENATE CAMPAIGN

 Good fortune can appear in frightful packages. A fearsome Republican newcomer had moved to Arizona and entered its politics.  Married to wealth, a former prisoner of war with the pent-up energy of a caged pit bull and temperament to match, he scared the Hell out of Arizona’s Democratic governor who had been drooling over the Senate seat being vacated by America’s conservative lion, Barry Goldwater.

 Not unlike me, McCain had been a poor student, at the bottom of his class, focused on anything but school, he was unconventional and would invest every ounce of his energy when running for office or fighting for what he believed was right.

 Unlike me, he had money, lots of money. And he had survived five years of misery in a Vietnamese prison camp while I was enjoying the good life, safely barking about bringing him and every other soldier home from a fool’s war that went nowhere and advanced humanity nowhere—a farce that served only to feed the supersized heads of idiots that insisted upon it. Yes, I barked and barked and then enjoyed another kegger with my frat brothers—all while McCain was kicking back on his prison cell floor after being busted up again.

 As one operative told me shortly after McCain won a seat in the House of Representatives, “One day you are going to run into that guy.”

 It would be a changing of the guard. Goldwater, who had almost single-handedly bent the nation towards a more cautious, conservative road, had become exasperated by the religious and political fanaticism that had twisted his road into intolerance. Over the past dozen years or so, I had grown to respect and admire this retiring political icon.  This, in spite of the fact that years earlier when I was 15, Stevie Bogard and I walked into a Goldwater for President headquarters and pretend to be volunteers. We told his office that we loved Goldwater and wanted to do what we could. We took all the bumper stickers that said Goldwater, left and then went out and pasted them under stop signs around town.  We, of course, were certain that drivers would read it as STOP Goldwater, a perfect representation of my level of political sophistication at the time.

  Anyway, Goldwater had announced his retirement, thus opening a seat in the “world’s most powerful deliberative body.”  McCain announced his candidacy for the seat and over the following few days our governor and other well heeled, well known, Democratic big names fought over just the right words to explain their deep sorrow at not being able to run at this time. As they galloped away into a sea of “prior commitments,” one of my influential supporters crudely put it, “What do we know about this guy other than he can’t fly and he can’t escape.”  And with that, I realized my opportunity to cop-out on the last three years of my Commission term.

 I knew I would have little chance, as one cartoonist later graphically displayed, with a roulette wheel showing me as the double digit zero and McCain with the rest.

 So, I announced, and the horse race polling instantly began, showing me with 16%, or put another way, roughly the same number of people that still think the world is flat.

 To me 16% was a surprisingly large number and given the choice of a few more years on the Commission or the chances God gives snowflakes in the desert of becoming a U. S. Senator – I became a flake.

 It would have been such a simple matter to stop me. Any other Democratic candidate willing to make a fight of it would have instantly backed me off and sentenced me to those three more years of Corporation Commission Hell. But no one else came to the stage, no other so imprudent.  As a result, I became the Democratic nominee to challenge the unbeatable, well heeled, heroic, teeth gnashing John McCain.

 My biggest problem, as I was quick to discover, was that I wanted it. I loved Arizona, its rich history, the people I had grown up with, the smell and taste of the state that only a child raised in its flavors could truly feel a debt to.  

 Unlike almost every other elected official I had ever met, I had never really acquired a taste for the power ingrained in elected office. I just didn’t much trust others to have it.  The only time I enjoyed my soon-to-end political career was when I was campaigning.  I had just loved meeting people, occasionally being recognized by strangers, and talking about stuff. People in their homes or just out on the streets were never on the make.  No manipulation, no ego (minus mine of course), just their thoughts, passions, worries and ideas.  Granted, some ideas could be a little off the wall or lacking the practical reality that comes from swimming in pools of the politically ambitious.  

 The notions of citizens were usually honestly arrived at, thoughts and ideas were equitably intended, if not well informed, while those in the halls of power were well educated but almost to a person, self-promotional.

 Spending real time with real people wasn’t done in campaigns for “Big Ticket” offices. To be taken seriously, or at least not embarrass myself, I would have to raise $1 million. To have even a chance of winning, I would need four times that. That was back in the 1980s, when U.S. Senate seats were very expensive by historic standards and dirt cheap by current ones.

 Despite that fact, my campaign naively started like all my prior efforts had, going door to door with friends and family.  I was going to do this right.

 One of the things that going door to door gives you is a lot of time to think, particularly when no one is home as it was on my first day knocking. As I walked, I daydreamed this calculation:  Imagine, I thought, that at the next house there was not only someone home but that they were having a party with two dozen guests.  They invited me in and gave me an hour to tell them why I was doing this crazy thing and listening to what they had to say.  Then I imagined that there were a few dozen at the next house and again at the next, and every house ever-after.  I did just that and never took a day off for all the months left to campaign.  Not only that, but I was so brilliant, so articulate, that every single one of those people fell in love with me and voted for me on Election Day.  It added up to a little over 2 percent of the expected turn-out. That is not how you get to be a United States Senator.

 Anyway, when I did give speeches they were about things I wanted to say, they were heart-felt and passionate, and after a few weeks I started to climb a bit in the polls.

 After a month or so I thought we were doing OK, people were holding bake sales, stuffing envelopes, and having little receptions. Even my brother Bob, a teacher who had just enough money to buy his clothes at Goodwill, somehow put together the maximum and gave me $1,000. We had raised $25,000 in our first month, a lot of money–or at least what I thought was a lot of money.

 I had climbed from 16% to 25% in the polls.

 It was then that I got The Call. The kind of call that all potentially winning, or perhaps just useful candidates get in one form or another.  Mine was from the AFL-CIO.  It seems they knew I was often partial to people who worked but it was unclear why they thought that should translate into their support, since I thought union leaders could be no less corruptible than their white-collar counterparts.  

 Moreover, most union members seemed oblivious to what was happening to their jobs.  The country’s corporate leaders were deep into replacing them with cheaper slave labor from abroad, where workers struggling to get a cup of rice or a tortilla into their child’s stomach were much kinder to their bottom line. Corporations reducing costs flow toward cheap labor where workers are un-hobbled by freedom, fairness, equity, or any other advance since the invention of the whip.

 Anyway, when The Call came, I acted just like the puppy dog they wanted, and I was. Knowing McCain would spend millions I was anxious and immediately hopped on the plane to Washington.   

 I was taken to the AFL-CIO building, constructed during organized labor’s hey-day on the opposite side of Lafayette Park from the White House, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce just across the street. When I walked into the front door, I was met by a few labor leaders and led upstairs to a tiny little room where a few members of the United States Senate sat, along with a couple of other wannabees just like me. It was an odd feeling sitting there–waiting for what, I was not sure. But then the door opened and one of the Senators got up and went into the next room. Ten minutes later another was called in, then another and another, until finally they called me.

 I walked through the door and entered this enormous conference room. The conference table in the middle seemed to stretch for a city block, with large carved mahogany medallions of historic labor leaders hanging high on the walls. Labor heads from across the nation sat in large leather chairs, some lazily pitched back smoking cigars as if out of a Frank Capra movie. I knew no one in the room; the Senate hopefuls that had preceded me had been excused. For a newcomer to the big game, it was intimidating.

 I was introduced and given a few minutes to tell them about my campaign and how I might win. My talk started off a bit clumsily as I recall, and I assume that I talked with some passion about people that worked, but the truth is I really do not remember what I said. When I was finished a Mr. Perkins, their Chair, said, “Well, Richard, we think you might be able to pull this off and we would like to start you off today with this $50,000 check.” He had the check in his hand.

 Boy, I thought, whatever I said was really effective. I was so effective that they were willing to break the law and start me off with an illegal campaign contribution exceeding the legal limit.

 I objected and pointed this out. Mr. Perkins smiled and put his arm around my shoulders much the way my own father used to and said something that would be repeated by others during the months that followed, “Now, Richard.”  Then he went on to explain, “No, no, you don’t need to worry about that. It’s all legal.  See, we all represent different unions, with our own memberships, our own Political Action Committees. We simply like to bundle our funds and spend them collectively for greater impact. It’s all legal,” he assured me.  

 I thought about it a moment and then, like any prudent politician, I stuck my hand out for the check.  What happened next, I cannot say I recall with perfect accuracy, but my recollection here is fair or at least the best I can do.

 As I stuck out my hand out, they put in it, not the check, but an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with maybe a dozen names on it. Then they told me that they wanted me to spend the first $20,000 of the money to hire one of these pollsters they had confidence in.  

Mr. Perkins said, “We want to see what people in Arizona like about you and what they don’t, what they like about McCain and what they don’t.”  I was not all that interested in doing such a poll but I understood their need for one and said OK, thinking I would make good use of the other $30,000 and again stuck my hand out for the check.  

 Again, they handed me another list of names. “These are some people with trophies on the wall. We want you to spend another $20,000 as an initial payment to one of these trophied consultants who knows how to design effective campaigns and create successful messages.”  The trophy remark was in reference to victories they had produced in other congressional and gubernatorial races in the country.

  Now I had my dander up. “This is my campaign,” I barked.  “I am running because I have some serious differences with McCain on Star Wars (missile defense), Contra Aid (U.S. sponsored revolution) and other crucial issues. I am going to run my campaign and say what I think,” I told them.

  “Now Richard,” Mr. Perkins said again, “We

don’t want to stop you from saying what you believe. But we aren’t stupid, Richard. We aren’t going to just hand over this check and say, ‘Have a nice day, you sure seem like a nice guy, good luck to you, hope to see you in the United States Senate someday.’  “Don’t be stupid, Richard. “We need to make sure you spend this money wisely, have the talented help who can emphasize those things you believe, that the citizens of Arizona believe, because WE NEED YOU, Richard, IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE.”

 That last line felt pretty good, my head swelled a bit and besides, to say “no” would admit that I was stupid.  My being so out of my element and in such unfamiliar surroundings and company, I wasn’t certain I wasn’t. Stupid, that is. Why provide additional evidence.  Their argument seemed logical; they weren’t asking me to lie outright.  I could say what I wanted, and they were going to help get the person the country needed into the United States Senate — that would be ME!

 So, I took the $50,000 as I would a dozen or so other such checks from special interests and pranced off and into political oblivion.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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WE TASTE GOOD

Published by Richard Kimball on August 26, 2023

 The delusional are no longer marginalized in America. The malignancy is in full bloom invading the civic tissues of every American household.

 You think you matter? You think what you think matters?

 IT DOESN’T!

 Do you ever wonder why there is global warming, the extinction of half of all other earthly species?  Why religious demagoguery has replaced science, why we do not invest in educating our youth in mathematics, literacy, and science, why we have stripped social studies from school curriculums?  Why our health care is the most expensive in the world, why banks steal and are protected from their thievery?  Why we have gone from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation, obligating you and every other taxpayer to pay $183,000 in damages?

 No, it isn’t what you want, what you support, nor is it what other citizens desire.

YET IT IS SO.

“THE PREFERENCES OF THE AVERAGE AMERICAN APPEAR TO HAVE ONLY MINISCULE, NEAR ZERO, STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT IMPACT UPON PUBLIC POLICY.”  (From a Princeton study showing that a bill introduced with no public support, none at all, has a 30% chance of passage, while a bill that has significant, near total public support also has only a 30% chance of passage.)

What moves the needle is money, the $5.8 billion spent by the country’s elites to obtain the $4.4 trillion in payoffs you pay for.  And that is only the nation’s 200 largest banks, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and such.  They have the power to stop any legislation no matter how publicly popular, along with twice the power to pass any legislation they want even as public support measures at the zilch level.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder  

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CHAPTER 33 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

Published by Richard Kimball on August 23, 2023

ME-MEs 

Terry never did announce his candidacy, and I never knew if I had gotten bad information or if Terry just decided to turn tail.  Either way I ended up the nominee of my party for the open seat on the Corporation Commission. And although I did not know much about regulation, I would soon discover neither did the other two Commissioners.

 The Republicans nominated Arizona’s State Treasurer, a fellow who knew little more about regulating companies than he did about hard ball politics.  It would be a tough campaign for him, not because I was tough on him, I rarely mentioned him.  For me he did not exist, I ran against the other two Commissioners who had a low key, quiet, invisible way of sticking it to citizens on behalf of the major utilities.

 The other two Commissioners would not be up for re-election for a few years, but my effectiveness generated a serious effort by citizens who didn’t want to wait for their terms to end. Recall petitions were attracting thousands of signatures.

 When I won the election and the recall effort fell just short of the necessary signatures, I had made two bitter enemies.  This would be confirmed on the morning of my second day on the job. The first day was spent moving into Jim’s (the retiring commissioner I was replacing), empty office and dropping into the offices of the two other Commissioners to calm ill feelings in hopes of getting along as best we could. The meetings were congenial enough.  However, the next morning when I arrived, I received a more official welcome from my two fellow Commission members. They had ordered the staff to remove all my things from Jim’s office and dump them into the hallway.

 It was their way of saying, “Our two votes will tell your one vote where to go and where to live around here.

 The childishness degenerated into a kind of infantile paralysis at the Commission, in which I participated. I would give as good as I got. Like on the day Taurus, my love—a 14-year-old border collie who suddenly took ill. The vet pumped Taurus full of drugs—just before I had to be at a Commission hearing—advising that I keep a close eye on her for the next 24 hours. I had put my suit jacket in the bottom of a large cardboard box, laid Taurus on top and then carried my crippled sweetie up the Commission stairs to my office.

 Thirty minutes later my secretary nervously opened my door saying that the Department of Public Safety was on the line and needed to talk with me right away.

 “Commissioner Kimball?” the officer asked uncomfortably.

“Yes, I am Richard Kimball, what can I do for you?”

“Well Commissioner, I know this is odd, but pets are not allowed in your building, and we have gotten a complaint that you have a dog in your office. If you do, I need to ask you to remove it, or they insist that we come over and take it.”

 “You’re going to arrest my dog?” I joked.

“Sir,” he said with obvious embarrassment, “We have had a strong complaint from the Commission and so we are required to enforce the law.”

 I explained my dog’s situation and mine, then asked, “Can you give me just 20 minutes?”  Curious, he asked, “Of course, but why?”

 “Because that is how long it will take the media to get here, film your arrest of my half-dead best friend and capture a couple of interviews with my two colleagues for the 6 o’clock news.

 As it turned out the complaint was quickly dropped, but the next morning as I arrived without my recovered buddy, a maintenance worker was drilling in a brass plate next to the Commission’s entry door. The plate said: NO DOGS ALLOWED.

 Oddly, the three of us voted together more often than not. The nots were the cases dealing with the biggest utility companies in the state. It wasn’t that I had evidence to prove their rate hike requests were unnecessary, it was just that we had no way of independently verifying they were necessary.  It was instantly clear to me that it was all one big company-controlled shell game with quick-handed utility companies controlling the shells and maximizing their take by tricking both consumers and their assumed protectors, us.

 The basic rules and primary problem in Arizona utility regulation are easily explained: 

1. Because costs would be outrageous if numerous competing utilities had to support their own independent production and delivery systems, monopolies are allowed to exist.

2. Because the state must give utilities a monopoly to reduce both their costs and those of consumers, the utility must get approval of the rates it charges citizens.

3. Because the Arizona legislature refused to provide funds sufficient to regulate utilities, the regulators must trust the data and testimony provided by the utilities.

  This doesn’t mean utilities always get what they ask for but that is largely because of a “blink and whisper” understanding between the utilities and the Commission.  The “blink and whisper” requires the major utilities to request more money than they need or is reasonable.  Then the Commission can cut the rate requested down to something that is less unreasonable to maintain the appearance of protecting consumers (their voters).

 It works pretty much that way in every state I know of.

 Commissioners never really know what is going on beyond what a utility tells them.  Utility executives’ only reason for being is to maximize profit for stockholders and thus provide good reason to pay themselves a salary that could be 5,000% higher than that of any regulator whose responsibility is to be in charge.

 I kept saying “No” to the large utilities, not because I thought their requests unreasonable but because I could not independently verify that they were reasonable.  My two colleagues kept arguing an opposing rationale: we have no evidence suggesting what they say is not so.

 You say no to the Big Dogs of the business world, and they will label you as anti-business, even as thousands of small businesses suffer and even go under from spiraling utility charges.

 My relationship with the other two Commissioners settled into a comfortable agreement to disagree. Then one died from a heart attack and the other resigned.

 The governor had to appoint two new Commissioners until new elections could be held. It was then that things got as good as I would ever experience in politics. He chose two academics, a Republican business professor at Arizona State University and a Democrat, a law professor at the University of Arizona.  They were bright, conscientious and, unlike previous Commissioners, unmotivated by politics.

 These two new Commissioners allowed me to become the Commission’s Chairman and I then proceeded to preside over one hell of a Commission mistake and another that paved a road to utility control.

 In our blindness we allowed a Tucson utility to split up. With the combination of insufficient staff, no independent research, an unscrupulous utility chief and our own naivety we approved the sale of assets. The power producing parts of the utility formed a new company that didn’t sell power directly to citizens thus the Commission could not regulate while the distribution and sales stayed under Commission supervision. We effectively lost control of costs and citizens got screwed.

 To our credit, the two appointed Commissioners and I managed to adopt new regulatory principles that forced utilities into pretend competition. We started approving not rate increases but the possibility of rate increases.  We would set rates on what amounted to an average or fair rate of return on the costs the utility bore.  However, if they failed to reach the efficiencies we judged to be normal and achievable, they would get penalized by our reducing their profits. Conversely, we would provide them with a financial incentive: Should they exceed our expectations a bonus larger than what they had requested could be obtained, thus rewarding them for good decisions and efficient operations.  In effect it was pretend competition in a world where no competition exists.

 As it turned out I would not be at the Commission long enough to see if our plan would work or even be sustained.  I was about halfway through my six-year term, new elections had been held to replace the governor’s temporary appointees and two fellow “consumer advocates” were elected as result of all the concern created. They were politicians to the bone and egos and jealousy, including my own, would reign again. Only this time we were all of the same party, all so-called “consumer advocates.” A perfect representation of why people get so disgusted with government. There we were, the Commission totally reversed, presumably intent on representing and protecting citizens.

 What achieves primacy in the minds of the elected?  Me! Me! ME!

 I was elated with their elections. OK, a bit weary that Marsha, the vacationing member of the Breakfast Bunch, and wife of the former Commissioner Jim Weeks was one. The other was Renz Jennings, an ultra-liberal former State Representative who slept in an open shed on what he said was his farm, though it had little produce to put in anyone’s pot other than his own.

 Bottom line: The Commissioners who had been in the utilities’ silk pockets were now replaced by three scrapers, all posturing for an Oscar as Best Consumer Advocate. For my part, I wanted war, with either the Republican State Legislature that would not fund us, or the large utilities themselves who thought themselves protected by our in ability to examine them.

 I wanted to force the legislature to give us adequate funding or the utilities to provide funds for us to independently verify the need or requested rate increases.

 For an initial blast across the utility’s bows all we needed to do, I thought, was let it be known that we would not blindly approve any rate increase without the ability to independently investigate the utilities’ operations and need for a rate increase.

  My hopes of accomplishing this took a hit on the first morning we all met. My new colleagues had only stomach enough to go to war with each other.

 Renz asked me to join him and Marsha “socially” for breakfast one morning.  The social gathering quickly turned into a Commission business meeting.  I pointed out that it was inappropriate to discuss Commission business secretly outside of an open public hearing. I had fought hard against the first two Commissioners I served with when they wanted to continue with Commission tradition and privately discuss the public’s business, only without me.  I made it so difficult for them to do so that I managed to enforce a rule prohibiting expartee (secret) meetings.

 My two new commissioners instantly poo-pooed any such prohibition and continued their Me-Me negotiations.

 What was foremost on their minds was to get themselves elected chairman of the Commission.  They thought it was best that the chairmanship be rotated between the three of us and since I had been elected chairman by the two appointees, one of them should now get it.  I can’t deny that this hurt a little. I had initiated what was clearly a successful fight against the pro-utility Commission long before they got involved. Now that the fruits of the fight were supposedly ready for harvest, I thought their Me-Me position a bit unjust, but I listened.

 The question continued over the next week: Which one of them should get to be the next chairman. Marsha thought she was the clear choice, having spent years in bed with a former Commissioner.  Renz, for his part kept cornering me with the grace of a turtle climbing stairs, to say three things:

     “I have no ego!”

     “I am more likely to side with your positions than she is.”

     “You will vote for me to be Chairman, won’t you?” 

 This was going to be three more years of “Please won’t someone shoot me?”

 It might be worth it I thought if only I could push through my one primary objective, get the commission the resources it needed to actually regulate utilities.

   I was certain that the citizens would support us on this. Consumer savings would make up for any budget increase a thousand-fold.

 Both options would require the three of us to stick our collective necks out, but even if we failed the loud public fight would make the shell game apparent to any citizen concerned with their utility bill (just about everybody) and put enormous pressure on the Republican Legislature.  Anyway, after all that I could say was said in support of doing our job and actually regulating utilities, my two Me-Me colleagues let it be known that they had no stomach for it.

 I was trapped and completely disinterested in finishing my six-year term of office. Unlike in the State Senate, I had a sense of some success since the Commission would no longer just rubber stamp rate increases, but I wanted out. What excuse could I give? How could walking out with less than half my term served be explained?

 A freshly-minted Arizonian, former prisoner of war, freshly elected to congress and about to burst onto the national stage would provide the answer.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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YOU COUNT

Published by Richard Kimball on August 22, 2023

Richard with nieces

When young we were so concerned about what others thought of us. In our middle years we did not care so much. Now old, it becomes clear no one much thinks of us at all.

I suppose that is so with most of us as we age. Our energy spent, our ambition gone, the flush of fresh ideas diffused and drifted away.

When I was young, I believed in Santa Clause. A bit older and I no longer believed. Now old, I am Santa Clause and so are you.

Don’t leave without giving the present of your life: what you experienced, what you learned, what you know. Write it, record it, film it.

DON’T JUST GO!

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder — Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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CHAPTER 32 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

Published by Richard Kimball on August 19, 2023

 REVENGE

A researcher would later tell me it was the longest filibuster anywhere by anyone. Not sure that is true, but it somehow helped me believe that I did what I could.  The thing is this: the how and why the gas tax bill bite out of taxpayer earnings was done is not unique or even unusual. It is just how and why the big fish eat the little ones.

 It explains, I suppose, what Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others…”

 Citizens could correct much of this with a bit of campaign finance reform, but the degree of difficulty in fighting for that appears more arduous than just taking it in the chops year after year.

 What remained of my second term would have passed in a pillowy snore if it were not for one other ritual of institutionalized political corruption.

 It was that in-your-face, sacramental, decennial mugging of a free people celebrated in every state legislative body called reapportionment.

 It started with Elbridge Gerry, one of our Founding Fathers, a very wealthy privateer, who once claimed, “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” As Massachusetts Governor, he signed a bill setting the borders of a political district to include only those he liked so absurdly as to look like a salamander. A precedent that state legislators still strive to duplicate today. The practice is named in Elbridge’s honor: Gerrymandering.

 After each decennial census defines the redistribution of people, congressional and legislative district borders are redrawn, and Gerrymandering is the common accepted practice by which every legislature routinely destroys most voters’ ability to fairly elect someone to represent them in congress or their state legislature.  They do this openly, wantonly, and most impressively, directly in front of every citizen they are screwing. They easily anoint the winners and losers in almost every district’s races, while maintaining the voters’ sense that they matter, but without any real need for those pesky voting booths.

 It is an entirely partisan affair, where the controlling party’s sole objective in each state is to exterminate the opposition by dismembering the citizens’ ability to have choices other than those they have pre-selected. This is done so outrageously that some district lines are drawn to support or oppose a single human being.  In one example, in my state, during the last year of my legislative service, that person would be me.

 From the controlling party’s view, it is just a huge complicated, computerized numbers-mashing political affair too convoluted to trouble citizens comfortably sedated in their Barcaloungers with a cold beer, engrossed in Dancing with the Stars.

 Following the Gas Tax mess there seemed to be consensus between the leadership in both parties as to what should happen with a certain central Phoenix district, my district. They all agreed that the four surrounding districts should expand inward, each adopting a chunk of my central Phoenix supporters and repositioning my district, or at least its number, out on expansive wasteland in an upper eastern corner of the state that had been reserved in an earlier century to screw Indians.

 Supporters were surprised that I didn’t call foul. I was no longer attending party caucuses, where I knew my district boundaries were left undefended.  I had no interest in running for re-election, they could do with me as they willed. I was going to be happily done with elected office, nothing could make me want to run for office again. Well, OK, there was one thing, perhaps the only thing: a hot-blooded desire for revenge.

 Following the filibuster a few of the Breakfast Bunch and I decided to take a holiday.  We took a four-hour ride south to a dusty Mexican beach town called Puerto Penasco.

 Those of us who had arrived early were sitting on the beach talking about Marsha Weeks (the Breakfast Bunch’s vacation member) and her husband, Jim. Jim was on the three-member Corporation Commission but had been diagnosed with cancer some months earlier and let it be known that he would not run for re-election.

 The Arizona Corporation Commission is one of those odd unique things that the progressive Arizona of old had created in its constitution. It was designed like a fourth branch of government. Power in the state was to be divided between the Executive, Legislative, Judicial and Corporation Commission branches of government. The Commission regulated the state’s railroads, securities and utilities, including the nation’s largest nuclear plant, called Palo Verde. It was powerful and of considerable importance to banks, developers, unions and of course utility companies, all those that I had fought on the gas bill. 

 Anyway, a few of us were sitting on the beach talking about Jim and Marsha when they drove up.  They quickly walked down to where we were sitting, clearly with something to tell. “Guess what?” they said as they approached, “Terry Goddard is going to announce his candidacy for Jim’s seat on the Corporation Commission.”

 I froze. Then someone said, “So that’s it, they’re all going to back him for Jim’s seat on the Commission, that was the pay off.”

 I was instantly catapulted to my feet. “When is he going to announce?” I asked as I headed up to toss my unpacked luggage back in the car. “We heard it would be sometime around noon tomorrow.” I slammed the car into gear and disappeared in front of a billowing cloud of dust that followed me the entire four-hour drive back to the Capitol.

 At 10:00 a.m. the next morning I stood at a press conference in Phoenix announcing my candidacy for the Arizona Corporation Commission. It was a big surprise to everyone, mostly to me.  I only knew two things about the Commission. One was that the two remaining commissioners had a reputation for hobnobbing with the utilities they were supposed to regulate, and now a second thing.  It was the price Terry extracted from that bank meeting to get him to switch horses and screw Arizona citizens.

 The fact that I didn’t know much didn’t much matter to me or to the press.  People in the know, knew what I was announcing. “Come and get it Terry!”

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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CHAPTER 32 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

Published by Richard Kimball on August 12, 2023

 PISSING OFF YOUR FRIENDS

 OK, if you are one of those reading this book, you might want to skip this chapter.  For you, I fear it is a long sleep-inducing snore, but for me it was seminal, and so I must tell it all.

 The elation felt during my first election victory was not duplicated during the second.  I was thankful I won, and I celebrated with a lot of people who still strongly believed in me. But I now knew what being a State Senator was like and I did not think that I made for a very good one, nor did I think there were many others better.  And a growing few were real stinkers.

 The reasons I was a poor senator made me odd.  I did not like giving speeches, wasn’t much good at wheeling and dealing and I found it difficult, if not impossible, to compromise a principle to achieve a necessary end – you know, that business of supporting a measure you didn’t like in order to get one that you did. In other words, what makes democracy work.

 A legislature thrives, like any business thrives, by catering to the customers who come in the front door, and it was big money, in the form of paid lobbyists that came in the door each and every morning and hung around for the day.  They are paid to get their bosses money or protect the money they already have. They know the legislation affecting their bosses’ interests better than any legislator and, unlike everyday constituents who rarely came through the doors, these lobbyists had the dough that fueled legislators’ re-elections.  One day, some fifteen years after leaving the legislature, I decided to go back for a visit. Not a single member I served with would still be there but many of the lobbyists prowling the halls were the very same and the bureaucrats that ran the place where almost to a person identical.

 Today, with term limits (something I once supported, like most frustrated citizens), no new legislators know what they are doing. Term limits dilute the citizens’ power to elect whomever they want, while also immensely increasing the power of lobbyists and bureaucrats who do know what they are doing.  New legislators lean on them for everything, starting with directions to the bathroom on up to how a bill becomes law.

 Blue collar types seemed to like me in politics, and I was a bit partial to them.  I just liked people that work and produce, I was more comfortable around them and thus I naturally supported carpenters, machinists, steel and construction worker types, teachers, and of course fireman and policeman.  They were always either sweaty, dirty, tired or all three at the end of their days.

 I had discovered during that second campaign that the only time I would comment in front of a crowd was when I thought something important to say had been left unsaid and could be said quickly. One gathering of laborers fit those criteria.

 Labor supported me as they do almost all democrats, for the same destructive reasons all selfish interests in society latch on to one side or the other…it is the gimme, gimme, gimme that all lobbyists for special interests represent.  I do not mean to pick on labor alone here.  Lobbyists are paid to represent doctors, lawyers, bankers, bakers, butchers, and candlestick makers at the expense of everyone else.

 Labor’s political clout had been on the decline for some years, but they did support me, even when on occasion I did not support them, or in this case, even talk to them nicely. This particular election year gathering was of AFL-CIO members who came to watch a parade of candidates appear on the stage and plead for their support.  It was the kind of ritualistic begging that goes on each election and degrades all involved.  At this event each candidate was given 10 minutes to tell the Union why they thought they should get union support.   By the time it was my turn, I had seen enough groveling, and I had something to say, thought it had been left unsaid, and I could say it quickly.

 “This is Arizona. It is a Republican state with a Republican legislature, and they don’t like you very much. You are seen as liberal, and your public support will be a liability to me.  If you know me as well as you might know a close friend or family member, you know I will support people who work, whether they support me or not. So be smart, don’t support me, endorse my opponent. His name is Joe Haldiman, and he may win, and if he does you will need his door open to you.  In other words, if you think you are buying influence with me or that labor’s support isn’t being used against me, you can take your endorsement and stick it.”

 It took me less than a minute; I walked off the stage to an audience silently gawking at me.  But as I approached my seat, and to my astonishment, people began standing and cheering.  People who work can be funny that way.

 The me, me, me of lobbyists knows no bounds. They are “just doing their job” they like to say, but their job is dragging legislatures from sea to shining sea into the grimy selfishness of me, me, me. In that work they would play a big part in my long brewing and now imminent rebirth, at the end of my second term.

 It did not matter if a candidate had been absurdly but successfully labeled liberal or conservative.  If an organized selfish interest on either side helped you get in, deliverance of the goods to that interest was expected.

 During my experience in the Twilight Zone of my re-election, and oddly during my divorce, one of my biggest backers was the National Organization of Women.  Again, by sheer coincidence, they liked me because of beliefs I already possessed. Long ago my mother and Lacy Scanlon, my grade school love wish, taught me that women were a superior gender.

 Guys have been running the show since human time began. As for women, well, we want their friendship, loyalty and of course their bodily submissions.   They serve in every imaginable way without a fair or even reasonable stake in life.

 Most men are so blind when it comes to women. They fail to recognize or simply accept and expect that women will be of service to them.  That is why women are not fairly paid or promoted, why they are given inferior health care, constitute the majority of the poor and are abandoned by the millions with our children. Open a door for them? Sure! Adjust a chair as they sit? Sure! What a cheap price it is we pay. And if they object, well that is why one out of every four housewives are abused at home and 600 a day are raped or sexually assaulted.

 Superheroes defend women and children, legislatures do not.  And they don’t because …… well, …… I really don’t know why.  There are more women than men, they have the vote.  I just don’t get it, but I am damn glad I am not a woman, and it is a good thing for men that I am not a woman. For after 250,000 years of this shit, I would surely support all abortions, both pre and post birth, as long as they were of the male gender.

 I was the sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, a now long dead effort to ensure women equal protection under the constitution.  Protection they had historically and statistically lacked since the very moment they tricked the rest of us into eating healthy apples.  They had a little difficulty with my occasional remarks against some abortions since I did not feel I could competently divine exactly when a conscious life began but they were willing to overlook it.

 But women’s groups behaved no differently than organized labor unions, oil interests, bankers, bakers or those candlestick makers.  Anyone of which makes a good representation of how tortured and convoluted representative government can become.

 Once money from selfish interests is accepted, the bargain is struck — you have a friend, they have a friend, and it is these friendships that make such a mess of our struggle to self-govern. It is as simple as understanding that if you give $50 tips rather than $5 tips you will get a better table.

 Now this is as absurdly convoluted as it gets: The National Organization for Women slammed me for sponsoring the ERA. They had decided on a strategy that would demonstrate a lack of support by the “insensitive” Arizona legislature, to anger contributors out of more money so they could then spend it in other states they thought had better chances of success. It seemed not to occur to them that this Machiavellian scheme to cast the legislature as completely insensitive in order to raise revenue was disingenuous.  It was also unsuccessful, and the Equal Rights Amendment, that great equalizing legislation of the women, largely by women, for women perished from this earth.

 I was beginning to hate being in public office, not just because of those whose views I often opposed but because of those whose views whom I had often supported. Elected representatives thoughtfully considering the various courses that might be taken on problems facing society seemed non-existent. There was no real debate or any sort of open communion on the roads that might be taken on any contentious matter — just an endless process of deals, where blame, brag and accusation swirled in endless conflict over some morsel of advantage for one party or the other.

  I regretted that I was now obligated to serve another two years and knew I would never run for the legislature again and was happy to just quietly live out the term.   But happy and quiet was not to be. It appears I was primed to blow a gut and be the talk of the town.

 The weeks, issues and votes went by, including one that called for the biggest tax increase in the state’s history. It was a gas tax designed to build better roads that would be collected primarily from the Ford and Chevy owners of the world. Roads are very expensive largely because they need to withstand the enormous pounding they take from the tonnage on eighteen-wheeled semi-trucks.  If all you had on the roads were Fords and Chevys, they would essentially last forever.

 Anyway, the tax was designed to be little more than a subsidy to the trucking industry, so I voted no.  My argument seemed logical to me: The people creating a cost and receiving the benefit should pay that cost, in this case trucking interests.  But my old friends in labor who wanted road building jobs, bankers and realtors wanting more growth, truckers, of course, and just about every business that wanted more people and what they buy had their thumbs in the pie and opposed me.  It was not unusual for those interests to feel that way and not unique for me to be on the losing end of a vote. 

 However, this legislation, strongly supported by a Republican controlled legislature and our Democratic governor, would be forced into a second life at the hands of thousands of angry, vengeful citizens who saw no common good in any tax.

 The bill and the events surrounding it would be a life-shaping experience for no one but me.  I would take the silent, invisibility that was me, spanning back over the decades and make up for it in one foot stomping blast of words that would not be silenced for 5 days and nights.  That “another day” of my youth was about to arrive. I was 31 and about to be born again—and insist on making my life, if not worthwhile, at least not worthless.

 The story actually starts in 1912 when Arizona became a state and adopted an extraordinarily progressive and unique set of citizen protections in its Constitution. One was the citizen’s right to stop the legislature from imposing any law they thought a bad idea, called a referendum.  It required an ungodly number of petition signatures to do it, but if citizens chose to go out and get them, they could then vote on the matter themselves and tell their government to go to Hell.

 Well, for the second time since statehood the citizens of Arizona looked at what the governor and legislature were doing and did just that on the gas tax bill.  They organized and got the needed signatures requiring their government to put it up for public vote. I had played a small part in getting those signatures, but the real leader was Terry Goddard, a good, decent, honorable fellow, close friend and son of a former governor.

 This caused a great deal of shuffling amongst the well healed powers of the state.  The banks, unions, realtors, developers of every sort, weren’t going to get what they had paid for with their lobbyists and political contributions if citizens were allowed to vote the gas tax increase down.  So, they decided to sponsor a secret meeting, not at the people’s capitol building, but in a private meeting on the 25th floor of a bank building in Phoenix. There the governor and legislative leadership of both parties would hold a private conclave without pests like me, the public or the media, and decide what to do about the ignorant masses who didn’t want the wall-to-wall paving of Arizona.

 Their plan was deviously simple: The governor would call the legislature into a special session where they would pass a new gas tax bill that would do the exact same thing as the original bill that the citizens had stopped. Only the new bill would have a different bill number and title.  And for this new bill they would put enough pressure on legislators to pass it with what is called an Emergency Clause, forcing it into effect before citizens had any time to gather the signatures necessary for another referendum.

HERE

 I got wind of the plan and the secret meeting. The arrogance of it was ludicrous, I thought. “They will never get away with that!” I told Terry.  They did not invite me to the meeting, which was fine because they did invite Terry. He and I got together and devised a sure-fire counter measure.  A piece of cake we thought, there was no way we could fail to stop them, we would embarrass the whole shifty group.  He would go home, get dressed, and let me know when he went into the meeting and then just sit and listen politely to what they had to say.  I would hit the phones and contact all of the media, tell them of the secret meeting and its location.  When the media arrived Terry would simply step out and expose the effort to trample the State Constitution and the people’s will. Game Over!   He would be the people’s hero.

 It was a slam dunk, Terry let me know when he went into the meeting, I went down to have a visit with the capitol press corps and made my calls. As expected, the media stormed the bank building. The easy job, my job was done.  I patted myself on the back and waited for Terry to return with their heads.

 An hour later (it apparently did not take long),  the Democratic majority leader, one of the meetings sponsors, came prancing down the hall.  I gave him a big snooty smile and said, “I guess it didn’t go so well.” He went striding right past me and flipped a chuckle into the air, “You must not have your television on.”

 The smile dripped off my face. It just couldn’t be. I ran into my office and turned on the tube just at the right time.  There was my was Terry, my buddy, who on behalf of the Governor and the legislature, was announcing that he thought the new legislation great and would help lead the charge for final passage of the Gas Tax Bill.  

  I no longer cared about the damn gas bill, this was now legalized, corruption at its worst, a theft, a trampling of what was still right with the world. No one knew the truth of it, no one to expose the truth of it, no one but me.   I could feel my father’s eyes riveted on me and saying, “Kimmy, it is now or never.”

  I was numb. I had never had a friend, someone I trusted, even admired, turn and do such a despicable thing.  Was everyone on the take? What had Terry sold out for, what did he get?  I didn’t want to believe it, there must be some explanation, something I didn’t see, didn’t understand and Terry would surely show up soon and tell me what had happened.  But no, Terry didn’t show up, he never showed up. . .well, not until the wee hours one night 10 days later to sit in the gallery and watch me struggle to stay awake on the Senate floor.

 The rumor mill went crazy.  What deal had the governor’s son gotten?  I certainly didn’t know. I was concerned with one thing: was there anything I could do to stop it?

 The governor called the Special Session the following week, the Gas Tax Bill would be introduced, and I had something to say.  As the Senators filed in, I was sitting at my desk and after the Secretary read the bill, for the first time I reached for the microphone to speak.  I simply said, “In the three years I have served as a State Senator I have not taken your time with a single speech in this chamber, but if you do this thing, you will hear from me.  I will give you three years’ worth in a single standing,” and I sat down.  The senator sitting next to me stopped reading his newspaper and asked, “Did you say something?”

 That night I didn’t sleep. I was sad, angry, and very worried that I wouldn’t fight, that I would find some excuse to just let it go and remain quiet and hidden in the dark. I knew if I did remain invisible it would leave a hideous scar, even if no one could see it but me, along with the knowledge that my life really wasn’t worth the living of it.

  Late that night I called a few other Senators I thought might be willing to fight with me and asked them to meet me for a very early morning breakfast. Then I spent the night walking up and down the same streets I had walked so many times before, filing past all the people’s homes that I had visited during my campaigns, going over and over in my mind what I might say the next day when the fight began. At 6:00 A.M. I walked into the nearby Denny’s to meet with the “Breakfast Bunch,” the other Senators I had called.  I had not slept but I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.

 I sat down. There were only six of us, but it was a start.  They all talked outrage, but they just weren’t as crazed as I.  One, Marsha Weeks, intended to go on vacation that day.  Another seemed to see a filibuster, the only stalling tactic available, as a good press opportunity.  But two others seemed spirited and ready to audition with me for the key role in The Man of La Mancha.  At the morning session when the Gas Tax Bill came up, I would ask to be recognized by the President of the Senate and start: speak as long as I was able, then, just like in a relay race, yield the baton or in this case control of the Senate floor to one of the “Breakfast Bunch.”  They in turn would go as far as they were able, pass it on to another, and another and eventually back to me.  And so, we would go until we had shaken things up enough to stop the vote or simply run out of steam.  We hoped we could keep it up for a day or two until citizens had a chance to see in the news what was happening and get a chance to make a fight of it all their own.

 Our breakfast meeting ended, I went home, took a quick shower, got dressed, and entered my Senate office 30 minutes before the morning session would begin.  The Senate was called to order, and I was about to blab like no one had ever blabbed before.  I had thought about what I would say for a long time the night before and thought it was important—if to no one else, it sure was to me.  I had asked my secretary to record it and had set up a machine to do so under the speaker in the ceiling of my office. I knew I would want to listen to it later to make sure that I said what I meant to say, what needed to be said.  

 As I took my Senate seat, I noticed that the gallery was filling up with the usual lobbyists and guests but also with an unusual gathering of Senate staff, pages, janitors, and secretaries, including my own secretary, who it turns out never punched the record button on the machine I had set up. People were in the gallery who were never there–people around the Capitol knew something was up. I took the microphone with something to say for the second time in two days and three years. I do not remember precisely what I said, and I am not willing to try and reinvent it over forty years later. My short two or three minutes dealt with people, their struggle to self-govern, responsibility and the dignity of the Senate and was effective enough to have a few members slump in their seats and a few out of place hand claps from the gallery.

 After some moments of silence another Senator stood up in an effort to defend the plan created in the bank building meeting. I had expected this and had also thought of something to say should someone stand and disagree with me.  My response was neither mean, nor abusive but it was so blistering and humiliating that he slunk off the Senate floor. Those who were part of the secret meeting, I thought might also have something to say but were all suddenly distracted, looking away and backed off their microphones as if they might bite.

 The Senate President thought it a good time to take a recess. I walked off the Senate floor where a number of Senators gathered around me slapping me on the back, one older member said, “Son you need to speak up more often, that was worth every day of the time it took you to say it.”  Another Senator, one of my Breakfast Bunch and a long-term Senate veteran said, “They were the most eloquent remarks ever uttered on the Senate floor.” When I got out in the hall some of the people who had been listening from the gallery came down to thank me, even the Senate Minority Counsel said, “I thought your first remarks were brilliant but then when you took that other Senator down, I almost screamed with joy.”

 Now normally I would feel elated at such wondrous compliments and slaps on the back, and now, on reflection, I feel exactly that way. But I did not then. I was completely riveted to my mission. I was going to beat them.

 Thirty minutes later the Committee of the Whole was gaveled to order.  It was clear that trouble was coming so all other legislative matters were disposed of, putting the Gas Tax Bill up for debate. It was Wednesday morning just about 10:30 a. m. when I was recognized, stood and grabbed the microphone for the third time, and this time I would not give it up.

 The first half dozen hours went by easily, I never ran out of things to say. When I really wanted to make my point, I would simply read off a few hundred more names of those citizens struggling to govern their own lives, who signed the petitions that were now stacked on my desk.

  Eventually I had to go to the bathroom, and I nervously turned over the microphone to Senator Alston, the most loyal member of the Breakfast Bunch. She continued to read the names into the night as I sat there and kept her company. Then I took the wee hours shift.  By midnight the gallery was down to just two or three diehards, a few members of the press, the recording secretary, a page and one other Senator unlucky enough to be selected to sit as the presiding officer. Should I falter, he would gavel me out of business.   My other fellow Senators had all departed for home hours ago. I just stood there and kept reading those names.

 When the morning paper hit, it was not supportive, its fake decorated military leader made sure. And since almost every other news outlet was “rip and read” (meaning they had no staff and just regurgitated the news from the major paper), the point of the filibuster got zero coverage.

 That wasn’t a total surprise, but the following day people started showing up and sitting in the gallery.  Radio station KOY came in and set up microphones and broadcast “the filibuster that would not end” live on and off throughout the day.     

 This picked up my spirits because I knew someone had to be listening.  As an additional moral builder, it just happened to be the same radio station where my mother had once had a radio show back in the day when my father was the Senator, and she was trying to preserve some of her Hollywood dreams.

 On Thursday night I still did not feel any end to my energy, and as I spoke on, I marveled at the fact that I could stay awake so long.  When one of the Breakfast Bunch would relieve me, I would get something to eat, use the restroom or check with my office for messages and then come back and sit until it was time for me to take over again.

 On Friday various appeals were made to get me to stop. Some were from friends actually concerned for me, but most of the appeals came from those who had been in the “secret” meeting and just wanted to get me out of there and go home.

  Naively, I assumed other media would eventually investigate what had happened, about the bank meeting, Terry’s sell out, and explain how the Gas Tax issue had been trumped by the vastly more important issue of circumvention of constitutional intent. They did not.

 As I stood on the Senate floor hour after hour, the leadership worked the press.  Few in the media understood what had happened but some sympathetic stories began to leak out.  Thousands of calls started pouring into the senators’ offices demanding to know why the hell they were shoving this tax increase down citizens’ throats.

  The pressure was on.  More secret meetings were being held in the Capitol’s back offices. Votes needed for the Emergency Clause that would strip citizens of their right to do another referendum started to collapse. Knowing that, would get me through another night.

 On Saturday morning, I realized I had not been in a bed since Tuesday, I had not left the Senate floor except for bodily requirements since my Wednesday speech, and I was beginning to feel it.   When one of the Breakfast Bunch would come to relieve me I would go to the back of the room and tilt a chair against the wall, close my eyes and try to sleep, but I couldn’t.  I was convinced that if I did sleep, something bad would happen. About noon Senator Alston came, asked to take over and insisted that I go look out the front windows.

 Down on the mall in front of the Senate Building a group of demonstrators had arrived and were setting up tables, passing around new petitions, carrying placards, and doing chants about taxation without representation.

 I wanted to go down and tell them to forget the tax bill, the issue was now far greater, that their representatives, corporate leaders, and unions were doing a hat trick that would, if successful, turn them into chattel.  I wanted to get them to leave the Capitol and go stomp around in front of the Senators’ homes because that is where they were.  Senator Alston, me and the unlucky lottery loser selected to preside were the only Senators at the Senate that Saturday.

 Senator Alston, who I adored beyond her politics and support, was right.  The scene out front was a big boost to my spirits.

 There is no place deader on earth than a state Capitol building on a Saturday night. Generally, you could go into any state senate chamber in the country, fill it floor to ceiling with actual bull shit and no one would notice until it opened for business the following Monday. The complete deadness of the place, no one in the gallery, no press, just the legal minimum sitting in the presiding chair, made me begin to doubt myself. The lack of sleep was getting to me in a way I had not expected, it didn’t make me feel sleepy as much as it made me feel punchy. It reminded me of my college days getting sloppy headed drunk but without the morning after hoping-to-die stuff. 

 Sometime late into Saturday night I was analytical enough to notice my sentences were not holding together very well and sometimes I couldn’t remember what I had just said. The presiding Senator, for whom I was clearly ruining a weekend, leaned over from his chair above the Senate floor and with a mixture of concern and hope for a middle of the night finally asked if I was all right.

 His questioning of my stamina made me feel indignant, flushed me with new-found energy and I began speaking loudly and clearly again. As he shook his head, I swung around to say a few words to the empty gallery, only it was no longer empty.  There was someone sitting up in the shadows off to one side.

 Leaning forward in a gallery seat, with his elbows on his knees and head in his hands was my good friend, the former Governor’s son.  I said nothing to him, I just turned around grabbed a handful of the petitions he had gathered and championed for the people that had trusted him.  I read them very slowly, one syllable at a time. I imagined that each one was like a dart to his heart, but when I turned back to the gallery he was gone.

 Early Sunday morning I was having a little trouble thinking clearly again when one of the Breakfast Bunch relieved me.  He said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”  I hadn’t been outside of the capitol building in four days and decided to take a short walk on the capitol grounds.  I walked out the front door and around the corner, took off my shoes and socks and walked through the grass so that I could feel the tender shoots punch up between my toes. As I approached some trees I looked around and realized I was completely alone, I was invisible again.  And then suddenly, out of nowhere and for reasons I can’t explain because I really don’t know, I began to sob.

  At about mid-day on Sunday members of the Senate started to show up. I didn’t know why, and was too spent to really care, but I should have.

 The approach was made in the interests of my health. “We want to get you a doctor, we need to get you a doctor, let us call a doctor,” the Democratic Minority Leader and key member of the secret meeting said to me.  “NO, I am fine,” I said. “Well at least take a break, go home and get some sleep, you have to rest,” he insisted.  “NO, I am fine,” I said. “Listen, I am the Minority Leader. You helped elect me as the Minority Leader of our party. I give you my word that I will not let anything happen while you go home and get a few hours of sleep.  We are all very worried about you.”

 I thought about it, I knew that my supporting cast of Senators wanted to end the filibuster the next day during the Monday session and let the votes fall where they may. I knew that I couldn’t go on forever. And I knew that no matter how clean and fresh I felt when I started, people had started standing a measured distance away from me. I stunk!

  I turned it over to Senator Alston, that closest member of the Breakfast Bunch.  And on the promise of the Minority Leader, I drove the five miles home, hopped into the shower and flopped down on the bed. Almost immediately I sensed something was not right and then remembered with a start, that when Senator Alston had done her turn, she would turn it over to the weak link. He was the same Senator that had told me days before that my remarks were the most eloquent he had ever heard, but he was also a close loyal friend of the Minority Leader. The shower had revived me a bit and brought some of my senses back. As I raced to my closet, I knew I was in trouble. Why had some Senators started showing up on a Sunday morning?  I was out the door like a shot and running into a Senate chamber still trying to tie my tie.

 Turns out that during that hour I was gone the leaders pressured my weak link and got him to agree that when Alston passed the microphone to him, he would stop the filibuster.

 An hour later and it would have been over.  My weak link had cut a deal with the leadership, he would pass the microphone over to the opposition and the filibuster would be ended. My sudden and totally unexpected appearance stopped him. Embarrassed, he left the Senate Floor, and I was gritted to make to Monday.

 As it turns out some of the other Senators had not shown up just for the killing—at least not willingly.  They wanted deals.  They had been trying to cut deals for days and every once in awhile one would come out of a meeting and look upset.  I wouldn’t understand it until the media broke a few stories.

 The votes had started to collapse, and the leadership was in a full-court press, ready to break arms and threaten constituencies and political careers in order to keep the big money deal hammered together. There was the story from the angry legislator upset about the “unheard of” pressure tactics, another from a Senator who claimed that they threatened to withhold money from his reelection campaign if he didn’t stay the line.  Sicklier was the story threatening a legislator’s constituents with the loss of a bridge needed for fire and police protection.

  If the leadership didn’t get two-thirds of the Senate, meaning most of the majority and a good portion of the minority, they couldn’t pass the bill with an emergency clause. Without that emergency clause the bill was worthless; citizens were angry and getting the necessary signatures again? No problem.   A lot of Senators took heat that day.

  At 10:00 a.m. Monday morning, five days after it had begun, it all came to an end. There wasn’t anything left to do.  All the attention that the issue was going to get had been gotten, all the tactics that could be employed were done. I relinquished the floor.  It was time to call the vote.

  It was unclear how it would go until the very last vote was tortured and locked.  Many Senators tried to explain their votes when they were called upon. Those who voted YES broke into three categories: Those who had attended the bank meeting or represented safe districts were sheepishly silent. Those who were not from safe districts tended to apologize for their yes vote and the manner in which the issue had been mishandled, manhandled and coerced. Others were clearly pained by events and even made remarks in opposition to the measure, and then inexplicably voted for the bill.

  Those of us who voted NO, said little and anxiously kept track of the tally.  It came down to a single vote and the Senator who cast it, clearly under enormous pressure, began with a blistering attack against the leadership, the bank meeting, and the way the legislation had been managed.  Then she hesitated and angrily barked, “I vote YES,” and stomped off the floor.

                          Luise Gonzales, me, Lito Pena, and Lela Alston 

       The Breakfast Bunch minus the traitor and vacationer.

  A researcher would later tell me it was the longest filibuster anywhere by anyone. I’m not sure that is true, but I was grateful to think it. I had lost the vote but as odd as it may sound, I was fine, better than fine. I felt selfishly good about myself, if not for all those I had failed.  I had come out of the dark, was visible and convinced that I had fought as hard as anyone could fight. I had done the right thing. I had lost but felt that my life might one day find some way to become worthwhile after all.   

 As I walked off the Senate floor, I was asked to meet with the media who had all gathered in the Republicans’ caucus room. As I walked in and stood at one end, the television lights came on and I was bombarded with questions. While talking, I noticed at the far end of the room another, even larger group of reporters had gathered around some fellow.  He wasn’t a member of the victorious leadership, nor any member of the legislature, nor staff, or any government figure or person I recognized.  When I asked a reporter who it was, he was surprised and said, “Why that is the guy who sponsored the private meeting you’ve been trashing these past five days. He’s the Bank President.”

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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VoteSmart.org is born.

Published by Richard Kimball on August 5, 2023

 There were no roads through the mountains to it, no phones, or any access to anywhere but by a 40-minute pounding ride in a boat the locals called a panga. The dirt path through the little fishing village was swept clean each morning by a few in huts selling local produce, brooms made from long thin sticks, candles, and a few other necessities. All led down to the half dozen fishing boats pulled up on shore next to the “The Yacht Club” a little place cooking whatever food the fishermen caught that day and with a shared shelf they called the library.

 For me, living there in a thatched palapa with swinging rope bed covered in mosquito netting was heaven. It was there that I came to terms with my brief political career. It was there that I found my life’s calling.  It was there, after weeks of pondering, that it hit me: it was simple.

 With the loss of common ground Americans were being fractured.  With trust lost in all media, there was no anchor to which both conservatives and liberals could depend upon for the truth and the facts essential to successful self-government.

 Without that, I thought, there would be no democracy.

 There was only one solution I thought, to create a source where facts were sacrosanct but never interpreted, to which any citizen could turn for the truth.

 Within the day I left my little chunk of paradise and hopped a ride to go create VoteSmart.org.   Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Barry Goldwater, Michael Dukakis, John McCain, and a few dozen others of both parties, understanding how essential it was, hopped on that ride with me to go build it.

 For your good and that of the country, use and support VoteSmart.org

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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PART 2 of THE TWIGHLIGHT – CHAPTER 31

Published by Richard Kimball on July 31, 2023

 After reviewing my little brother’s business inventory, I didn’t take time to re-pack; I just bundled up everything in my arms and threw it all in the back seat of my car. I started the engine, looked down the street and saw the not so inconspicuous car of plain clothes officers watching my house and realized I had forgotten something.  Two minutes later I drove away and pulled in behind The Bombaro bar and heaved the bricks of marijuana into the dumpster.

 That night, about 2 a.m. my baby brother found me at a friend’s house on the other side of town and wanted to say, Hi with a ballpeen hammer. In some drug induced insanity he came at me brandishing the hammer and stammering about his young daughter’s welfare.  She had just turned three and was to be the beneficiary of his drug sales. I got him to drop the hammer and then let him swing away at me. Finally, he hit me square in the mouth, popping off two caps on my teeth and saying, “This is going to be a lot easier than I thought it would be.” Realizing he really intended to hurt me, I ended it.

 The campaign stubbled on and re-election was in serious doubt, not because the Republicans were aware of much of this netherworld I had come to live in, but because they had cleverly chosen a candidate who had both the industry and ethics of a Praying Mantis in heat. The candidate they had chosen had the same name as, and was a close relative of, a popular and very well-known Phoenix Democrat named John Haldiman. Joe Haldiman, the candidate, was making good use of it and a half-hearted effort to walk the streets as I did.

 I had heard stories about what he was saying at each door but thought them so absurd as not to be believed.  Then with a bit of good fortune, I was going door-to-door one afternoon and saw him turn the corner.  I ducked behind a bush to watch.  As he made his way down the street, I saw him walk up to the door of Fay Weidman, one of my campaign volunteers who I had nicknamed Mother Superior for her penchant to dress me, feed me, and protect me in all that I did.  I quietly made my way up behind him with my index finger across my lips so that Mother Superior would know not to give me up.

 His pitch went something like this: “Hi, I am Joe Haldiman running for the State Senate and I wanted to talk to you about Richard Kimball, that embarrassing bum currently representing us. You must have heard by now that he is a baby killing abortionist, that he never graduated from college, that he is a pawn of labor, and is lying when he says he was born in Arizona.  He moved here from Illinois with the backing of their unions. We need to send him packing. That is why I agreed to run for this office.”  I looked over his shoulder at Mother Superior. The demonic expression now roasting on her face forced me to intercede, less she add to the mounting pile of shit that my life had become.

  “Hi, Fay,” as I put my arm around Haldiman’s shoulder, “This is my good buddy, Joe.”

 Election Day was getting close, and they still hadn’t found the assassin who had threatened the President and me. His wife, who had become a good friend, and I were still in hiding. Then for some inexplicable reason Broom walked right into the Democratic Party Headquarters as if it were just another day on the job. Everyone had been given an emergency number on the unexpected chance that he might appear.  I happened to already be on my way there for a meeting but wasn’t as quick as the various forces looking for him. When I arrived, Broom was sequestered in a back room surrounded by a couple of Secret Service Agents and the local police.  After an hour or so an agent came out and I asked if I might see Broom alone for a minute. The agent, thinking me naive, said that it wasn’t a very good idea.  “Listen,” I said, “He was my trusted friend, he is not armed and if I just have a minute, I might find out some things that would be helpful to all of us.”  Surprisingly, they agreed, which instantly suggested that they were far more interested in protecting Jimmy Carter than they were me.

 As I entered the room, Broom was sitting in a lone metal fold-up chair with the four or five officers standing around. The agent said, let’s give Senator Kimball a minute and they all walked out and stood just beyond the door, which they left ajar.

 Broom, who was not scared, sad, worried, or flustered in any way, just sat and stared at me. I went over to a stack of folded cafeteria chairs and set one up right in front of him and sat down. ”Broom, what is going on, this is absurd,” I pleaded. His expression did not change. He said not a word, just sat comfortably and looked at me. “Listen, do you want me to get you a lawyer, or some counseling? I know some good people, some good programs where we can get you some help. Whatever you need, I can help. Just talk to me.”  Broom Hall’s eyes had never left mine; he just looked a bit burdened but resigned.  Then he leaned forward a little and in a soft perfectly calm voice said something that you do not hear every day but was definitely a talk ender. “I am sorry Richard, but I must kill you. I have been ordered to kill you.”

 The officers came back in and although the authorities could never get enough evidence to imprison Broom, I never saw him again. I would on occasion worry about where he was and if I would get another early vote in the mail.

 Three days before the election, which was becoming an acknowledged loser for me, I was spent and went straight to bed in spite of an unsettling phone call from someone claiming to be one of my supporters.  He spoke so loudly and angrily that I had no difficulty making out these words. “What a lousy bastard you are.  You lied to me and everyone else.” He then hung up.  I took the phone off the hook and slept.  At first light I was up and walked outside to get the paper, only this time I found it amongst a half dozen of my yard signs that were broken or ripped and strewn on the lawn. Scribbled on the back of one, “I thought you were a decent man. You’re scum.”

 I went back inside and put the phone on the hook, it immediately rang, “Did you see what Haldiman did?” a campaign volunteer bellowed.

 As it turns out the opposition had mailed a hit piece to every household in my district saying essentially what I had heard candidate Haldiman say to Mother Superior at her door, only with emphasis on the “fact” of my having moved to Arizona from Illinois with a bundle of labor money.  There was one important difference: this time it lacked crudeness. It was done professionally, in a polished convincing way that had clearly been drafted by the best the opposition could hire.

 The campaign was over; even some of my volunteers were calling to ask if the hit piece was true. We called the Arizona Republic demanding that they correct the lie by doing a story. But that same editor who was later caught masquerading as a highly decorated warrior refused.

 My campaign was broken, and I was broken in just about every way I could be broken. But even if we had the money there was no way we could create a response, mail it, and have the Post Office deliver it to everyone’s door before Election Day.

 With all good hit pieces there is usually a grain of truth somewhere to lock in its bite.  In this case, it was the backing by labor charge.  The local fire fighter’s union was one of my strong supporters and the opposition was about to find out just how strong.  Turns out, they can put out more than one kind of fire.

 Down the street from my home, Pat Cantelme, President of the Phoenix Firefighter’s union owned that firefighters’ hangout called The Bombaro.  By 2 a. m. the night after the hit piece arrived at homes all over my district, I had become the best customer The Bombaro had that day.   I was tired, resigned to my election defeat and well into my bottomless glass of scotch.  Pat leaned over the bar and said, “You know, Richard, we don’t need no stinking postage stamps, if you can think of a way to respond I will have every firefighter in this city and most of the policeman turned into Postmen by the time the sun comes up.

  By 3 a. m. I had my idea.  It would be a wild crazy shot into the dark. I was about to wake up a person I had never met in the middle of the night.  I pulled the phone over and asked for a phone book.  Luckily, unlike most insurance company presidents, particularly wealthy, prominent, honest ones, John Haldiman, the patriarch of the Haldiman family had his number listed.

 I dialed, a women’s sleepy voice answered. She was clearly concerned as anyone would be from a call in the middle of the night and said, “Who the Hell is this?” I told her I was so sorry to wake her but that it was an emergency and I just had to talk to her husband.

 The next few hours ended candidate Joe Haldiman’s hopes of taking over my seat in the Senate and any future in politics.

 Not only did the prominent, honest Haldiman support me, but he thought less of his namesake relative than most people do of maggots. I told him what had happened.  By my third or fourth sentence he interrupted me, “Be at my house by 4:30,” and hung up.

 I arrived a few minutes early amongst a stream of other cars.  He had essentially ordered every Haldiman in Phoenix, a very large group as it turns out, to wake up, get out of bed, get dressed and come to his house – NOW!

 By 5:15 am I was at one of my brother Bill’s shops. He had yanked himself out of bed, ready to go to war. As fate would have it his shops were printing shops and they were up and ready to run. I handed him a card and he was off and at it, saving my ass, just as he did back when we were kids.  By 7 am firefighters getting off duty from throughout the city started showing up and taking out crates of brightly colored yellow cards, all of which would somehow manage to be delivered to every door in my district before supper time.

  Although I no longer have a copy, something I have kicked myself for years over, the card essentially read:

 A PUBLIC APPOLOGY TO SENATOR RICHARD KIMBALL FROM THE ENTIRE HALDIMAN FAMILY

 All of us in the Haldiman family strongly endorse the re-election of Senator Richard Kimball. He has been an honest, strong, and honorable Senator.

 We also want you to know that we are embarrassed over the outrageous behavior of Joe Haldiman, a member of our family who has lied to you and has dishonorably and dishonestly attacked Senator Kimball with a series of vicious lies.

 Please re-elect Richard Kimball a good and decent man to the Arizona State Senate!

                A dozen signatures splashed over the card.

                All with the last name of Haldiman.

 Some years later I heard that candidate Haldiman unsuccessfully tried a second career in fraud and ended up with a number tattooed to a prison shirt.

OH YEAH!

 Somewhere in the Twilight Zone there was a Gary Marston, a one, maybe two-day long Kimball for Senate Campaign Manager, hired either just before or just after Broom.

 It was a sweet elderly woman that came to me at a barbecue I held at my home for volunteers. She said, “I feel funny and am not sure I am well.”

 Turned out that Gary thought it a good idea if one of the side deserts was marijuana brownies. Of all that happened those miserable months, it was Gary I most wanted to kill.

 I do not think I have given my experiences in the Twilight Zone justice, but it is the best I could do.  To Carole, my first wife, I weep to this day. To the rest of you that may be offended by my recollections, go frig yourselves!

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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THE REPUBLICAN SPLITS

Published by Richard Kimball on July 30, 2023

  I stand tight with Republicans on the battlefield slashing at half their number with stupefying fealty to an American horror.

  Like Mark Twain, the older I get, the more clearly I remember things that may never have happened and tend to forget those that did.

  So it is with that Republican half, who either ignore or believe that:

Blackmailing the Ukrainian President

Advising us to use ultraviolet light and disinfectant in our bodies

Attacking NATO and friendly democracies

Slathering praise on barbaric dictators Putin and Kim

Grabbing pussy

Violating the Emoluments Clause

Separating children from their parents

Subverting the 2020 election

Inciting insurrection

Politicizing the Justice Department

Befriending white supremacists

Firing whistle blowers

Refusing to divest to profit from his election

Stealing classified documents

Obstructing justice

Nepotism

Espionage

are the qualities to seek in our leader.

—

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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RE-ELECTION-PART I – CHAPTER 30

Published by Richard Kimball on July 23, 2023

RE-ELECTION – PART I – CHAPTER 30

 WARNING: You are about to enter an alternate universe.

 It was during my campaign for a second term that my recollections arrive in the Twilight Zone. So surreal I do not imagine you will believe, but they are so, and although my memory might confuse the exact order of things, they all happened just as I will describe them.

 I had not enjoyed being a State Senator but without ideas leading elsewhere I decided to run for re-election. Besides, my favorite part was coming up, meeting with thousands of voters in a re-election effort, a goodly number of which had become friends.

 It was in that happy spirit that my first mailed vote arrived, a few months early, in a plain white envelope without any return address or markings.  When I opened the letter, its sole contents, a shiny, heavy lump dropped out and landed in my lap.

 Now, I had not been much interested in hunting since I was about 10 when I hit a dove with my Christmas BB gun and watched it die. As result, I cannot tell you the caliber. I wasn’t worried and didn’t even report it.   This was long before such threats and shootings became common place.  Asking around, no other Senator had received such a gift and I just shrugged it off.

 I was more concerned with the pending flop.  The flop being my major re-election fund raiser that disabled my toilet plunger and completely unable to handle the mountain of crap to come.

  It was about two days before the fundraiser when I pointed out to my wife that no one would be attending.  The “no one would be attending,” remark was referencing the event’s dismal ticket sales, and I thought served as a punch to her midsection, since it was she who was managing my campaign and presumably the fundraiser. She wasn’t hurt or concerned. She had her own life to run and had handed off most responsibilities to a campaign manager she had hired with the kind of skills and experience we could afford.  His name was “Broom” Hall. Broom, a name he earned for an ability to beat all comers in pool halls using only a broom handle.

 Anyway, the flop had been advertised as vaudeville, and as it turned out there were more people signed up to be on the stage than there were people in the audience.  It was a bit humiliating, but partly saved by the local firefighters and my brother Bob.

 The firefighters, who adopted me during the campaign, went backstage and put on pillowcases in such an unusual way that they made them all look like four-foot-tall Pillsbury Dough Boys without elbows or knees. They humored the seated dozen or so with five minutes of relief, and then we all went back to waiting for a crowd that would never appear.

 I walked over to my mother, who never wanted me to follow my father into political life and now stood there, as only my mother could, with that same cocked, rigid look that used to say, “It’s your bedtime.”

Concerned or just embarrassed for me, my brother Bob, who spent a few months on the streets singing my praises to anyone that would listen, didn’t like such events or crowds suddenly stood up.  Bob was not supposed to be part of the program, but he marched up to the stage and began an impromptu 15-minute monologue that had the lucky few howling with laughter again and again. More importantly, he made them and me feel all was right with the world despite the empty room.  It was a peerless performance that would later that night make me cry, and as unassociated as it was, tell my wife I wanted a divorce.

 The fundraiser had little to do with my decision to separate from my wife. The fundraiser failure was only an event, but I felt it made as good a catalyst as any, to make my long agonized-over position known. I was just coming to recognize a flaw in my character: no activity, no matter how initially exciting, ever sustained my interest.  I would get bored with most every game, sport, hobby, friend, or person I ever knew. I inevitably just wanted to experience something else.  However, as it applied to people, this did not mean I did not care or was not loyal. I was perhaps offensively loyal, always struggling to sustain any and every relationship, but much the way most keep the relics of their past in pictures, to recall how much fun it once was, I wanted to keep the people themselves, only at a space apart.

 I had not yet come to grips with this character flaw and so duped myself into believing that there were two episodes that caused the breakup.

 One was coming home early one day, some weeks earlier and overhearing my wife tell her friends how she had demanded that she be able to keep her own last name when we married.  She did not know I was there. 

 For days before proposing, I had agonized over the precise words and arguments I would use to persuade her to keep her maiden name. I had never understood why women gave up the name they had been born with and so closely associated with for their entire lives.  A woman keeping her maiden name was still unusual, but I was pretty sure Carole would want to but might feel a little uncomfortable talking to me about it.  I wanted her to feel great about keeping hers and thus in my marriage proposal I included a virtual insistence that she do so.

 My often-unforgiving nature in the face of some perceived injustice could not forgive this violation of trust.  This indirect condemnation of me in front of ultra-liberal friends was minuscule but impossible for me to choke down.

 More fundamental and perhaps not entirely as self-duping was that we were entering our thirties and she had informed me that she still did not want to have children.  I wanted them badly but was in no position to force her cooperation.

 My handling of the divorce was unconscionable. I would not make the slightest effort to reconcile or talk to anyone about it. She could have everything (which was nothing) and within a day she had moved to her parents, I had thrown out my campaign volunteers, locked the doors and went on a cowardly three-day binger, drinking as heavily as one can and remain breathing.  I had desperately wanted to make sure I was more miserable than I imagined I had made Carole, who I loved and greatly admired to this day.  I just could not live with her.

 When I did come out filthy, unshaven, and not particularly coherent, volunteers asked if I would see a doctor. Being there “leader” and still in my self-absorbed early years, I refused, instead deciding to give a little more door-to-door a try. It was then that one opened into the Twilight Zone.

 Getting close to home, maybe three blocks away, I knocked on a final door. A heavy-set woman, maybe in her 60s, in a coffee stained and tattered robe, threw the screen door wide open hoping to hit me. The hatred smeared across her face was real, possibly dangerous.  She backed me up the sidewalk with her thundering voice, “You bastard!  I heard what you did.” She kept coming at me.  “What are you talking about?” I blurted. “You liberal commie bastard! You think we all do not know what you did.  Everyone knows your wife caught you sleeping with that blond bimbo. We saw, we all know she chased you out with a frying pan.”   She kept coming at me. “I knew you were a lying bastard when I heard you moved here from Illinois with all that labor money. You lying, fucking bastard!”

 It was, of course, difficult to know exactly how to handle this particular voter, who had gotten her information from the Klingon Star Ship. But getting her vote was not likely, so I kept backing away. Bodily harm was her desire, but I was pretty sure I could out jog her slippers if need be.

 Her bit about a blond, money and Illinois, a state I had never been to – what the Hell was that all about?  I wouldn’t find out until sometime later when tens of thousands of leaflets arrived in voter’s mailboxes. For the moment, I was just thinking of an escape route. She continued to rant as I back peddled. I heard sirens approaching on our street and thought, please hurry. My hands were raised palms out in a gestured effort to pause the onslaught and protect myself from any knives or hatchets that might suddenly appear. I made it to the corner and my chance to escape. Spinning around I jogged down the street toward my house and it was then that I entered the Twilight Zone.

 The pace of my escape was as in a dream, where try as you might, with all of your might, you just can’t accelerate in the goo.  For as I gazed down the street, I saw a number of police cars at my house with two more squealing around a corner, doors popping and guns out.

 Starting with no supporters coming to my fundraiser, the kind of guilt that only comes from hurting someone you love, piled on by a neighbor and constituent’s revulsion of everything that is you, and now this massive police presence: Exactly how horrid a creature was I?

 I slowed as I approached home.  What I thought must be a policeman, only very nicely dressed in a suit, approached me. He explained the scene around my house as well as anyone could. “Senator Kimball, you and the President have been threatened.” The President of what I asked. “President Jimmy Carter,” he said. “Huh!” was the best I could manage.  He repeated himself and I struggled in vain to digest the comment. It was as if all the parts of my brain had suddenly become unscrewed.  I didn’t feel worried, threatened or concerned about anything that he said, I just couldn’t grasp it. I was only concerned with the crazy lady who I was certain must have tracked me and about to pounce from behind. Thankfully she had vanished.

 Oddly, as I began to mull over what the officer had said, I noticed that I felt a tiny twinge of pride. “The President and me you say?” Some wacko put us in the same category.  “I am with the Secret Service,” he said, “Please come with me.”

 We walked over to a group of Phoenix’s finest, who informed me that I couldn’t go into my home right now, that they were searching for the suspect and evidence. “Do you know who it is?” I asked. “We are looking for a fellow named Broom Hall.”

 Admittedly, Broom was a little strange and I had learned that much of his money came from an adorable little wife who made itsy bitsy stage outfits for strippers, but an assassin?  No, this was all wrong.  Despite his oddities, he seemed such a nice, even thoughtful fellow.  “Listen there has to be some mistake here,” I said to the various badges now surrounding me. “NO! There is no mistake,” the agent barked. “We deal with threats all the time; we had him on the phone for some time and this one fits the profile we do not mess around with. We have to find him, now.”

 An hour later I was to learn that Broom owned a number of guns that were now missing from his home, that he had gone after his pregnant wife because she knew too much. She was now nowhere to be found.

 The warning or threat began with a police caller, who the Secret Service, with little difficulty, figured out was Broom himself.  The caller had said that I would be taken down at a Democratic Party fundraiser scheduled for later that week by a man pretending to be and made up to look exactly like my campaign manager.

 The various officers in charge insisted that I not sleep at home for a few days while they staked it out.  After hearing about Broom, the guns and his wife, and the event to happen at the party fundraiser, I thought the idea of my sleeping elsewhere a good one, so I picked my jaw up off the pavement and dragged it down the street where my little brother had just moved into a little house.  

 Out of the blue, just as I was packing up a few things, Broom’s pregnant wife showed up. She was scared as hell and after the Secret Service interviewed her, she asked if I could help her find a place to hide out. I found a place that the officers thought a good one on the other side of town and then got us out of there.

 I didn’t have to go far, which was good, because I would still have access to my home office and files when needed, but what had been bizarre was about to go freakish.

  My littlest brother, who if anything spent more time in the Black Hole of adolescence than his four siblings had a surprise of his own.  My brother’s place was perfect, I thought. He wasn’t involved in my politics at all, few knew him, his house was just few doors away, and no one knew him. Perfect I thought, the police could stake out my house, try to trap Broom and I could still access my campaign files when necessary.

 A policeman escorted me over and agreed it would be fine. An hour after the officer left, I was putting some my stuff on the top shelf of my new bedroom closet and discovered that my baby brother was in the drug business. He had a little marijuana trouble with the law years earlier and spent months in a Mexican prison for it. There were two rather large foil-covered bricks of tightly packed marijuana.

 The coming headlines scrolled through my imagination!

 The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper, was led by a heavily-medaled military leader, who no longer served in the military but greatly enjoyed his uniform and commendations and wore them at formal occasions. It would later be discovered that he had never earned those ribbons or medals, or even served in the military, but unfortunately for me, this absurd masquerade had yet to be exposed and for the moment, he possessed real power and a lack of affection for me.

 When he got wind of all that was going on around my house, I thought he would have a difficult dilemma.  What headline would he choose?

 KIMBALL IN SEX SCANDAL

 KIMBALL CAMPAIGN MANAGER PLANS HIS ASSASSINATION

 KIMBALL CAUGHT IN BROTHERLY DRUG DEALS

 It would all be bullshit but that never seemed to matter to this fellow and his paper. I imagined that an after the fact simple headline might be the best result for me:

 KILLED DEAD – CAMPAIGN MANAGER CHARGED

—

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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