Today, no one is a greater danger to Americans than Americans.
American’s worry each other, don’t trust each other, blame each other, condemn each other because there is no common ground for truth.
We are fully capable and with immense ease able to turn this around. “Everyone has a right to their own opinion but not their own facts,” an old, dead boss of mine once said. All it takes is a place for facts, one untainted source, one unopinionated source simply a factual accounting of what was, or precisely what Vote Smart once attempted.
Great changes, important movements that change civic culture and destiny almost always take place when people are in pain, either physical or fiscal pain. They do not happen when people are clothed, housed and fed or at least not until now, when the people’s slightest misgivings are kneaded into anger amongst their greatest good fortunes.
Long ago when I was a State Senator, I opened a letter, and a .44 caliber slug dropped out. Without a note, return address, or any sense of what I was condemned for, it seemed such a silly threat I saw no need to report it.
Today, fear sells. Fear-peddling politicians, Hollywood producers, the media, all get paid if we pay attention. And nothing gets our attention like screaming FIRE in the theater of anywhere.
Vote Smart’s worries were consumed with what was happening to us from within, most acutely by the changing character of the politicians trashing truth we had to select from. It has been an inferior crop of candidates, less distinguished, less principled, less devoted to the nation than to themselves.
Every generation of Americans has had some battle to sustain freedom.
Know it is this slowly chewing cancer dinning on truth and reality, where every fact is twisted and tortured for selfish gain that is our generation’s challenge. It was why we were building Vote Smart.
All politicians today, rant about our horrible world, and how much worse it’s going to be if their opponent wins. All while we wallow in lives that would be the envy of our grandparents and every generation of beings going back through all millennia.
How is it that we can be so whiny, holding this year’s long party of grievance. A party that has harvested most of the fruit grown by past American generations along with the buds that would have belonged to future generations. What the Hell, if we are going to do it, don’t we have some moral obligation to enjoy and party instead of complain?
Or, OR, we could do a simple thing, create a trusted source of just facts, facts without interpretation, in the dream that most, both conservative and liberal, will again find footing in truth and extend this glorious “experiment” that has brought so much advance to the world.
Some weeks ago, following Waltz’s performance at the Democratic Convention I unfortunately wrote this:
“It is that precious thing, the real thing, that I finally saw tonight in politics when Tim Walz spoke. There is no mistaking the real thing. If you see it, you know it. It is a thing no human can counterfeit. So thrilled with finally seeing it in my life it dampened my eyes just as it did with his teary-eyed son. Something else you just can’t counterfeit.”
Then as so often, disappointment and embarrassment set in. My endless need to find purity in someone, anyone in politics found my shoulders adjusted and now slung low:
WALTZ: “As the events were unfolding, several of us went in (to Tiananmen).”
WALTZ: “Donald Trump’s asking for a nationwide abortion ban.”
WALTZ: “When (Trump) left office, we had more people unemployed, percentage-wise, than the Great Depression.”
Waltz was nowhere near those heroic people.
Trump has said for months that he wants abortion policy to be set by each individual state, not set by the federal government for the whole country.
The unemployment rate was 6.4% when Trump left office while the unemployment rate was above 20% during the Great Depression.
Waltz did not “misspeak,” he was not taken out of context or confused. He had simply been swallowed by the whale that has become the accepted, even required deportment in the politics of our day.
OK! I have given myself something to do with this writing about my life. It has entertained me most, but also been a kind of therapy that works about as well as the “lobotomy pills” I now take each day.
I have enjoyed my life. It’s adventures always exciting to me, at least in hindsight. I haven’t written about my two stepsons because they think so little of me, much the same as that wonderful love of my life has recently revealed about her feelings.
But those things as disappointing as they would be, should I write about them, would simply give evidence and I guess rightful cause to all about their ending of my life’s passion, Vote Smart.
I began seeking applicants to replace me but the difference between the salary our board approved for me so long ago, that I never took and my insistence that we were all essentially volunteers caused many candidates with substantial fundraising experience to turn away. So, I recused myself from any involvement in the Executive Board’s selection of my replacement. Then my full-blown liberal, giving, trusting, dreamy La La Land I wanted for everyone and Vote Smart came into full bloom. I decided to announce I would drop off the Board for one year to help build confidence in whomever replaced me. After all, I would be remaining on staff for that year to train and advise.
I then let the board know I would not withdraw the $1.7 million owed me in back wages but instead donate it to Vote Smart. I only requested $30,000 annually for my retirement, that could be easily paid from returns on a small endowment a foundation had created, decades earlier that could not be used for operations thus holding Vote Smart’s funds and my contribution unaffected. They all said that my proposal was much too generous, but agreed since that was the only way I would take it.
Then one of our Board members who was leaving his academic position suddenly announced that he was interested in taking over for me. He was a good guy, someone I had selected earlier to serve on the Board, someone who had done good work for me in one of our research departments two decades earlier before entering academia. I was excited about the possibility and strongly supported it.
But then, over some days it became known that he had no intention of moving to Vote Smart’s offices but instead would operate it from his home in Pennsylvania. He also wanted twice the actual salary that I had been taking.
I was certain that the Board would not accept either condition. It had taken me 30 years of living at Vote Smart’s offices, leading staff, implementing programs, guiding, course correcting, hiring and settling and raising some $50 million to learn all that I knew. Turning Vote Smart over to someone managing from afar would be like hiring a brain surgeon to operate on cancer without ever taking the trouble to attend medical school. His fellow Board members, knowing him, liking him, as I had hired him anyway.
I remained hopeful, but knew that such distancing and that salary increase for a single administrative position would place administrative costs at well over a fourth of Vote Smart’s entire budget. Without some plan to make those cost up could be lethal to major givers, while also killing one of Vote Smart’s key legs (no one is here for the money).
To alleviate the issue, that liberal, trusting, goodie two shoes of my nature chose not to complain but simply go off salary for my last year and donate my time instead.
THE LOCK OUT
The day my staff position changed to teacher/advisor I was gone in every way my replacement and Board could make me gone.
I was kept from participating in every important decision. At first, I was just fuddled, but soon panicked. New budgets were being created with plans to spend but not to raise. The fundraising plan so successfully tested was retired in exchange for one created on a whim that I knew was certain to fail and they would have zero experience to tell them why.
I wrote long emails to the Board, reminding them of how we had accomplished what we had, particularly with fundraising in step-by-step, how to’s, in hopes of getting through. Not my replacement or any board member would respond, nor a thanks for my having donated my final year’s salary.
I never had the chance to introduce my replacement to some members of the full Board (who weren’t members of the Executive Committee), a few of which contacted me with concerns about decisions the Executive Committee was making which they were no longer party to, causing some, since I was gone to simply drop away.
With the new leader’s decisions to ignore the past, I was certain that what I and my wife had created would simply bleed out the money I left them and die. So, I did what I do. I EXPLODED!
My anger was blistering, particularly against the Alpha on the Executive Committee, a Viet Nam war pilot and longtime personal friend who I called a coward for his unwillingness to respond to any of my concerns.
Over the days ahead they cut me off from any contacts with staff, all current financial information, and they refused to approve the tiny retirement package I requested, deciding to keep all the money for themselves. I threatened to sue–my legal counsel was sure it would force them to accept my modest terms of retirement, but I had no stomach for suing what I had created. In the end they offered me a pittance if I signed this:
You will not at any time discuss or disclose … the substance and/or nature of any dispute between Vote Smart and any employee or former employee, including you.
You will not at any time directly or indirectly make, or induce any other person to make, derogatory or disparaging statements (whether or not you believe the statements to be true) of any kind, in any manner or by any method – whether oral, written, electronic (including but not limited to social media), or otherwise.
They all knew me, I had selected each to serve on the board, I would never sign away my rights in return for money, no matter how deserved.
In the year that followed, I would get zero information. When the year I agreed to stay off the Board to support my replacement was up, the Board refused to let me back on the organization I had created. After two years of pleading with them to let me know their condition and their refusal to give me any information the organization I birthed and loved, and had continued to support, lost my support, which I informed each Board member in a personal message.
The only response from the Board was from the Alpha who wished me well with one word: “Hooray!”
So, it ended. The organization I bet a life on withered, I never existed and was a nobody after all.
The headlines tomorrow will NOT use the words intelligent, thoughtful or useful.
Political slapstick has NOTHING to do with leadership. The debate may generate great interest as its promotion has saturated the news coverage day after day after day, but you will only get a picture of what each candidate’s directors, producers, editors and even costume designers have labored over many weeks.
If you want the best vessel to deliver a product, whether it be Cambell’s soup, Kellogg’s cereal or a President, this is the show for you.
As American lives experience the best in all human time and citizens find time to turn and eat themselves, I find time for the little stories that speak to our basic natures.
This week I ran into these morsels:
Bags of poop are being ballooned from North Korea into South Korea, triggering air raid warnings to our troops.
Murdoch The Magnificent, the most rewarded sculpturist of fecal messaging, finally purchases his master peace of love with a fifth “Hail Mary” buy.
Two hundred sixty-nine thousand five hundred and twenty hours had passed since that first hour in my palapa in Yelapa overlooking the Sea of Cortez. I had been grilling fresh grouper and swilling down some cheap tequila I had sweetened with limes plucked from a bow hanging over my porch when the IDEA came to me. The thought that had me stuffing my backpack early the next morning, hopping a rickety old train and bouncing back home to an existence I hoped would finally make my life worth the living of it.
The IDEA rooted and passed through Oregon State University, Northeastern University, University of Texas, University of Arizona, University of Southern California, and finally anchored in those last 18 years at The Great Divide Ranch Research Retreat in Montana.
Losing the Ranch ended me on the spot, but I hoped not the Idea. Was I dispirited? You bet! But an “itsy bitsy, teenie weenie” bit of me was relieved.
I was no hotel developer, restaurant manager. I was no wrangler, no recreation park planner and certainly not a house mother to a few thousand young students and first jobbers that flowed through the gates of our remote research ranch. All those things I would never have to be again. What had consumed my time and responsibilities would end. What was left was the IDEA, one pristine, unopinionated, protected source of facts any voter could turn to with absolute confidence – Vote Smart.
The IDEA protected in concrete: No funds from corporations, unions or any organization that supported or opposed political candidates. All political board members had to join with a political enemy. No pay for most staff and those that were paid had to sign on for two years at minimum subsistence wages, with all the organization’s finances instantly open to anyone that cared. All to assure voters that anyone and everyone working on the idea had no political agenda and the effort they worked on had nothing to hide.
A sign I had hung on every office entrance.
The IDEA was something those few still surviving from the “Greatest Generation” were as certain of as I and the reason they became Vote Smart’s greatest supporters.
It was 2017, with the “Greatest Generation” vanishing and as Vote Smart moved and struggled to grow financially, a source of Sludge so noxious with deceit it would asphyxiate the nation with its stench, burst out of its adolescent silly-putty attracting absorbent, infantile, manipulable minds with no knowledge of what had been fought for since 1776.
Some loathsome media and officials seeking selfish advantage waded into the sewage attacking America in its best of times. They jumped into the fact-less slime encrusting every city, town, and hamlet, intoxicating the very worst in human nature.
The Sludge, earlier a Democrat, backer of Democrats, abortion supporter and gun control advocate, would become a gigantic record-setting deficit spender, the very antithesis of every conservative ever known.
It was as if he jumped into a phone booth, flashed out in a different suit and said: “There go the oblivious. I will lead them!”
Simplistic, crude and vindictive, it was leadership most foul, but leadership none-the-less. Politicians had so lowered the bar on integrity, they never saw it coming – someone who could see where the bar was going and simply dumped it into the dirt.
For me, this might be the chance for the return of civics education on an all-inclusive national scale.
We opened our new office at Drake University in Des Moines with as much fanfare as a small liberal arts school could muster, and I plastered its façade with quotes from those responsible for our being.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” -Thomas Jefferson
“Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.” – John Adams
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”
—James Madison
.
“Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” – George Washington
Most importantly, after three decades of effort, trying to do and be everything, living in or at the offices, I turned over the day-to-day staff management to Walker McKusick, who had been with us for some years and was one of the most amiable, capable managers of people you could ever know.
For me, well, I would become obsessed with the vulgar, narcissistic, shameless sham leading millions of my countrymen, neighbors, even members of my own family. My disappointment with the Ranch, my desire to step back toward retirement would have to wait until I could re-root Vote Smart in granite for the coming fight to save democracy—or in Vote Smart’s vernacular, The Facts. The honorable world of compromise, negotiating disagreements, conservative vs. liberal or otherwise, was dead. Now it was simply truth vs. lies, fact vs. fable.
Like the last flicker of a light bulb that burns at its brightest, I would strain to deliver only to become a nobody after all.
On one of my many winter trips East I stopped in Chicago to meet with some supportive foundations, members, and do a few media interviews. The local weather report said the temperature would quickly dip below zero that night. Being an Arizona desert boy, I looked forward to feeling what that was like, and did a few hours after returning to my hotel. The desk clerk kindly called me to say, “Mr. Kimball it is now one degree below.” I bundled up in my Target turtleneck tee and zipped up my polyester fleece to walk around the block.
The wind was fierce and as I turned the corner, back to my hotel, I was on the run: I could no longer feel my face.
That experience came to mind one winter evening in Montana, when I heard that the students, many from the Sunbelt, had just left the Ranch to drive the 26 miles to a party in town for a departing staff member. The forecast: blizzard, heavy winds, snow and 16 degrees below zero.
Snow had been accumulating for a couple of hours by the time I caught up with them about ten miles out, with the lead car impossibly submerged in a drift. With temperatures plummeting and darkness falling I told them they had to turn around to the safety of the Ranch before the road back became snow blocked.
The vote was unanimous. NO! They wanted to party! Then the ex-con I had hired as a maintenance man insisting, he was a real Montanan, and this weather was nothing to worry about, began kneading one student into a slog through the drifting deepening snow by foot to see if he could find some help along the 16 remote miles still to go to town. I jerked around and ordered the student to go back to his car and the idiot ex-con to his truck. Neither would. I had a full-blown revolt on my hands and the kid nagged on by the idiot to go on a blizzard hike began high stepping it through two-foot drifts, on a road you could no longer see where it was or wasn’t, any more than the car driver who submerged his vehicle in front of everyone.
Screaming at him, I begged the kid to stop, but emboldened by his party loving friends snuggled in their cars stomped off into the blizzard. Thankfully, maybe 100 yards into his trek, with visions of snowplows dancing in his head, nature called to him: “You’re going to freeze and die.”
The kid returned, embarrassed and angry, he too, snuggled into a warm car with a gas gage just above empty, while the rest of the partiers waited for some magician’s way forward. I kept demanding car to car that they turn around back to the Ranch and safety. No one moved, so I waited and prayed reality would sink in, which eventually did.
When I pulled into our parking lot at the end of that long line of cars it was clear, I was no savior, I was the villain that killed the party. I was relieved anyway, or at least until the soon-to-be-gone Montana ex-con insisted he was taking an intern back out on our snow mobiles to tug the snow-smothered car out. I simply told him that if he wanted to go die, that was mighty fine with me, but if he took a student with him on one of my snowmobiles, I’d have him back in prison as soon as the sheriff could pick him up.
It took most of the next day for the State Highway Department’s plows to clear the state route, then the business routes, rural school roads, and finally way out to us.
A dark thought came to me as I finally got to bed that horrid night: How big a news story would it have been had a few dozen students been found frozen to death. It would have been big, REALLY BIG and everyone in the country would have heard about it and finally discovered Vote Smart. OK, OK, as I said it was a dark thought.
I would never recover. Things quickly degenerated into what Dr. Brent Steel, our wisest, most experienced board member, called an “isolated culture.” The students and some staff members, never having seen any of our Board Members, decided they didn’t exist and wanted to take over Vote Smart.
One member of the board wanted me to simply fire them all and start with a new crew. But it was only a few young party loving pups with Alpha personalities, I had to let go.
I was done. The effect of all this was that I was spent, and what had been a wonderful, beautiful dream over three decades was done.
The Grail was as far away as ever.
GONE
A dozen universities competed to be Vote Smart’s new home. And when the president of one came for a visit and tour, I chose. We would sell the Great Divide Ranch where we had been building and operating for 18 years, and a dozen before that had to move to a small liberal arts school in Iowa, Drake University.
I started to think of retirement, but then the greatest educator in a century burst onto the scene.
For 18 years I would get up long before the sun, walk out the back door, pick up an armful of small logs, kick open the crude board door to a tiny ramshackle 1920s trapper’s cabin, toss the wood into a rusty old cook stove, fire it up and hoped it would be above freezing by the time I returned with a cup of coffee.
The Duck Inn, my office, was so miserable, member guests likened me to some early Christian involved in self-mortification. Not so. I loved it, enjoyed it in my warm fleece, with a cup warmer and the little space heater between my legs as I began early morning calls to those just getting up and out on the East Coast.
The most delightful moments were rare evenings sitting on the porch with Adelaide, when we weren’t entertaining any of the 7,200 newcomers or guests who slept and ate in our home over those 18 years. We just sat and watched all the young people heading out after another days agonizing, monotonous defense of the facts to play basketball, tennis, ride horses, go boating, fish or hike through that extraordinary property with its gazebo, teepee, tree house, rope bridge, and endless beaver ponds – maybe on their way to the old homestead or grave yard beyond, where we had put a dozen pets, including Hopsalot, a favorite bunny done in by a fox, and Teddy, everyone’s favorite horse who was done in by lightning and then eaten by a bear.
From that porch we witnessed a great many sights one does not normally see:
The huge bull moose with a deep, blackened scare where some heroic hunter did his best on this dossal King of the forest. He would often frequent the lake between our buildings foraging for his dinner on the bottom aquatics.
Once, after joining my after-work flyfishing lessons, a half dozen interns were trying their luck when the King arrived and waded in for his supper. Not getting any trout strikes, the students blamed the moose for disturbing the waters. They got in a rowboat to chase the master away. Not a half dozen strokes out the King looked up from his meal to find a curious sight: a boat coming toward him stern first (never having rowed before, they had gotten in the boat backwards). The King turned his enormous rack toward them and began swimming as if to greet the newcomers. The effect was instantaneous. Hunters no more, with Olympic effort they made it back to shore just as the King got bored and finished up his purely vegan meal.
“A bear, it’s a bear!” some student called out. Bears were infrequent visitors because we kept our leftovers secured, but when they did come, we had Fish and Game come out, trap them, and take them elsewhere. But on this evening’s occasion, a particularly cuddly-looking one relaxed on the lodge lawn as dozens of interns ran for their cameras. Seeing them rushing back towards him from various directions, the bear panicked and scampered high up into a Douglas Fir.
The students quickly and completely encircled the tree, cameras clicking. It was then that I thought I should get involved. So, I leaned forward in my porch chair and called out the most effective line I ever uttered: “It’s OK, just make damn sure you are not the closest one when that terrified animal busts out for freedom.”
Over the first ten years at the Ranch, we continued to slowly grow. But just at the point I began construction of a large addition to our office, to house more staff and students who would begin efforts on local county and city elections, our membership numbers took a dip.
Our biggest supporters, the “Greatest Generation,” was dying out. And the younger generations, so stripped of civics education in our schools, that less than a third knew of their right to choose a religion, express themselves, or assemble. Protections they were unaware that the “Greatest Generation” and every generation before them had fought and died to make certain they would have. These younger generations were becoming vulnerable. Exposed to manipulation and an AI future that without VoteSmart.org or something very much like it, would first confound, and eventually bring everyone to heel.
I did not see any of this until everyone went out in a blizzard to party.
When last did any of us have an intelligent thoughtful conversation on a political issue?
I once lived on politics. At parties, dinners, or gatherings of any sort I so enjoyed the give and take of anyone foaming forth with political opinion. I enjoyed it most when secretly agreeing, I would take an opposing view and put the greatest value when my view of things had been changed. Nothing engages more than that moment in an argument when you realize you are wrong.
My wife referred to it as my “party games.”
It is such no more. Most have simply become what they choose to listen to and what they listen to is what they want to hear.
Political discussion has devolved into angry, simplistic argument, regurgitating this self-serving media source or that. Who speaks loudest, most fervently often feels victorious but only hardens what might be a less demagogic, respectful opposition. Views are never changed.
You can look back over the past decades and witness how thoughtful conversation evaporated into slogans, or in today’s vernacular “narratives” successfully punching their way into the public mind, like easy to grasp, quickly satisfying Big Macks.
Absurdly, there is no longer communion on facts. It is no longer a world as one of my past employers put it on the Senate floor, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Today everyone claims the facts. Without a trusted source of what is fact and what is not, voters simply choose the facts they like.
There will never be more Lincoln Douglas style debates that consume the nation’s interest, no longer the hours long arguments atop soap boxes in public squares that followed the American revolution and certainly not the long thought out through examinations of public issues discussed in Greece or the Roman Forum – times and places where the art of argument was a studied and appreciated art that enabled an attentive citizenry capable of self-governance.
Today, a voter’s political discussion is what remains after Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, TikTok and a thousand more attractive entertainments consuming their time. For most, the time left for the “downer” politics has become, is just enough to get a Big Mack loaded with the simplistic self-satisfying nonsense some cook gets voters to eat.
AI will transform everything in your life. Knowledge of you and everyone else will become increasingly detailed and intimate. Entirely because it enables the ability to drive you and all the billions of us to go this way or that is worth everything money can buy.
It just won’t matter when the responsible few we now elect try to catch up and cage it. No punishment can match the gold to be had.
AI could also lead to unimaginable GOOD, but little interest or real money is being applied to that.
There was once a chance with an organization open to complete exposure, a balanced board of political enemies, a refusal of support from selfish interests and everyone giving instead of taking. It has gone and unless such a being can be recreated you are headed into the dark so, “Fasten your seatbelts, it is going to be a bumpy night!”.
It has become impossible to reprise the number of idiocies Trump has spewed, laws being eviscerated, or institutions emasculated. Standards that took 234 years of freedom to build and 1.2 million lives to defend, all now under the shadow of a boot.
Why?
As one member of my own party and official of the National Democratic Committee nastily growled, as he leaned into my face, “ Richard, It is not our job to educate, it is our job to win!”
Americans are learning to hate each other, not because of Trump, but because of the door we all opened and asked someone, anyone to walk through. Trump was just the irresponsible nincompoop standing in that door at the right time.
It is not unfamiliar to you or millions of other citizens that most politicians began soiling themselves as far back as the mid-1990s with Gingrich and Clinton. Citizens are not blind to the decades of chicanery that eventually convinced so many that someone, anyone, needs to mix it up and blow it up.
How many times have you heard a Trump supporter say, “I don’t like everything he does or says, but….”
Horror is what politicians preach along with much of the media. Be careful what you wish for, whatever that wish may be. You would be a fool to want to be alive during any generation of Americans other than the one you are.
New Year’s morning I headed back to that ranch and there it was, only now under sparkling, rich, deep blue skies and framed by 10,000 ft. snow covered peaks. As I rolled up to where I had parked the day before, the reverence that trawled over my face would have given me away to anyone. We would buy!
To this day it is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Everything on the ranch was a wintery incrusted jewel. By the time Adelaide, my soon-to-be wife crept down those last 12 miles of ice slicked dirt and petrified by the thought we would be so remote, I was ready to write the check. The oddities of life would one day make her cherish the place and me dread every moment I had to be there. But for now, it was paradise and exactly what Vote Smart needed.
Fortuitous, we closed the deal on April Fool’s Day, 1999, for a modest $1.25 million, about half from the sale of our Agora Farms in Oregon, and the rest coming from supporters anxious for us to “GET GOING!”
Wanting to consolidate our offices at what I was sure would become the epicenter of all that was good and true in self-governance, we informed both Oregon State University and Northeastern University that we would be closing our operations and consolidating them at our new Montana paradise. The decision to close our Northeastern office, a wholly successful operation that sang as smoothly as a tuning fork, would be a mistake I would later attempt and fail to rectify.
The ranch had been used as a “city slicker” operation where the owner outfitter catered to rich Easterners who wanted to go West, play cowboy, ride, shoot and fish. He went belly-up, because money doesn’t prevent saddle sores or make you superior to a bear having to take a shit in the woods.
The property had a number of advantages, the most obvious being its dazzling setting on the Continental Divide, handing us our new home’s name–The Great Divide Ranch on the road I renamed, One Common Ground.
Three practical factors convinced me that this beautiful place could work. One was that the utility company was willing to put in underground fiber optic cable down those 12 miles of dirt road, providing virtually unlimited communications ability–much better than we ever had sharing university systems. Then we discovered that the public access road to the wilderness went right through the Ranch’s property, and a long-ago prior owner had made a deal with the Forest Service. They could use the property for their road, but they had to keep it plowed free of snow each winter, meaning that we had year-round access. Finally, I met with the County Board of Supervisors about emergency services. They all assured me that it only took 5 minutes for the Life Flight medical choppers to pop over the mountains from Missoula. It was a lie that later would cost two lives!
I, of course, had no idea how to run a restaurant, hotel or recreation facility, yet we were about to double the size of all other such facilities in the county put together.
At first glance Philipsburg, the closest town, was just a down-on-its-luck abandoned mining town, where you could buy a house cheaper than a car, with four abandon churches and just as many bars opened to replace them, serving it up from early morning to its 957 citizens.
Those still living there were largely uneducated, unemployables, I would employ and make it a day or month.
A few progressive citizens were trying to champion the little town as a tourist attraction and would eventually succeed, despite the “We Don’t Serve Queers,” and Confederate Battle Bars flag holding sway over most locals.
I had a six weeks to prepare the place and move our equipment, programs with whatever staff was willing to transfer, if only temporarily, to help train new research teams at The Great Divide Ranch no located on One Common Ground.
I lived at the ranch alone, working with contractors, cleaning and converting the storage building into offices, and hiring new staff. The applicants were mostly local Montanans, with a good number from the little town of Philipsburg, all a little rough, but assuring me that they were intensely interested in good government. There was the liquor store manager, a former radio disc-jockey, a handyman who had recently lost his job working on a friend’s ranch that had to make some layoffs. . . and Aili Langseth.
I scheduled the job interviews all for the late afternoon and at the ranch so they would have to make the drive and see what they were in for. I was prepared to hire almost anyone because I figured if they were willing and committed to the effort, I could train almost anyone.
My first days were spent cleaning out the half century of odds and ends that had accumulated in the storage building. Old wagon wheels, stoves, horse tack and a thousand other indescribable somethings, were stacked from front end to back end almost to the ceiling. I pulled out the most interesting pieces and scattered them around the property thinking they would have novelty value and add to the ambiance for those who would come.
On a final afternoon of cleaning, a day before the electricians who would re-wire the soon-to-be-office building would arrive, I was in a big hurry. I had scheduled my first applicant interview for 5 pm and I was a dirty, shirtless, sweaty mess. I had not started the day half naked. In fact there was snow on the ground when I woke up that morning, but by 10 am it was long gone and getting pretty toasty, so I yanked my sweatshirt off for a time. By 1 p.m. I was racing to put it or anything I could find back over my shoulders. Heavy clouds had rolled in and were punishing me with marble-sized hail which turned into snow 10 minutes later. By 3 p.m. it was clear and once again the sun began to burn. I had never seen such weather. By 5 p.m. the temperature and my struggles dragging out every imaginable bent, broken or otherwise indescribable whatever had me ready for a quick shower and the one interviewee I had scheduled for that evening.
I picked up one last, exceptionally large box full of canvas and broken sticks, what I guessed were bed slats, and began walking it from the office building the 100 yards to the lodge. From behind me I heard what I can’t adequately describe, simply because I had never heard anything that sounded at all similar. I can only say something was coming.
The box was so large I could not balance it to take a look, so I just kept on walking. But the sound got louder and a whole lot closer. Another step or two and panic would set in. If I had to describe the sound with some mash-up of letters it would be something like this: fflooomp…………fflooomp…………FFLOOOMP!!
It was right on top of me and I dove forward into the dirt with the box breaking open and spilling its contents across the cold mud.
I put my arms up to protect and defend myself as I rolled over to see an amazing sight pass not ten feet directly over my head.
Fflooomp! is the sound a Bald Eagle with its gigantic wingspan sounds like coming in for a view of its own. It was my first and most innocent experience with the wilderness wildlife yet to come.
I picked myself up, showered and sat in the lodge making some calls until late evening. The applicant, some young lady named Aili Langseth, never showed up.
At seven the next morning I was on a conference call with people back East when someone startled me with a knock on the lodge door. A young, good-looking though rumpled woman walked in and quietly took a seat at the old copper bar on the far side of the room while I finished my call.
When done and a bit hassled with too much to do, I blurted out, “What can I do for you?” She responded, “We had an appointment about a job, I am Ailee Langseth.” Irritated, I explained to her that my only appointment that day was with an electrician. She said, “I know, our appointment was for yesterday afternoon, but I couldn’t make it.” Suddenly I remembered and my irritation increased, and I said, “Well you should have called. So what are you doing here now?” Then I heard the rest of the story.
It turns out that she would have been on time for the interview, having left her home in Butte, a town ninety minutes away, in plenty of time to drive the 65 mountain miles to get to the Ranch. But when almost there she had taken a left turn, one dirt road too early and had ended up stuck in the snow on a road to nowhere. She had worked until dark trying to dig herself out but only managed to get herself soaking wet in the freezing slush. So, she crawled into the corner of the back seat, with a blanket over her wet clothes and sat out the night trying not to freeze. Later I would look up the low temperature for that night: it went down to 28 degrees. She joked that that she sat there through the night thinking of the cold hungry people in Bosnia, where, at the time, conflict had left so many people freezing and homeless. “If they can suffer through it, so can I,” she explained.
At first light that morning a fisherman saw her and was able to tug her out. Aili Langseth did not drive home to get warm that morning, nor to get some dry clothes on, or even something to eat. She kept coming on to the interview, to apologize for not being on time the afternoon before.
When my jaw managed to return to its proper facial position, I said, “YOU’RE HIRED!”
Long ago when I was working for congressional candidates and then became one myself, the rule was you had to have your message play to each voter three times before there was any chance the message got through.
Today, that message is called a narrative and comes with a discovery? If you pound it without end, along with your supporters, it becomes true, no matter how absurd.
As example: If someone recommends that swallowing bleach will cure COVID; or claims it is his ex-wife charging him with sexual assult rather than his accuser; or repeatedly asserts that Obama is the current president; or thinks Nikki Haley failed to guard the capitol instead of Nancy Pelosi; or that your inserting an ultra-violet lights is good for your health; or that drawing maps that mislead people about a hurricane; but none becomes a repetitive mantra by opponents, the insanity of it all goes nowhere.
However, endlessly claim, along with your minions, that it is someone else that is confused, feeble-minded and too old to be president, anti-truth locks in.
Long ago Mark Twain warned: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
I needed to take a breath. The world has become so alien to all my experience. It is an alternate universe, where I am no longer familiar with my fellow inhabitants.
A Congress that prohibits my dollars to aid a free people being savaged by a tyrant who eats his own to stay in power?
My friends in Israel, who now pass into a gruesome, detestable vengeance in the Middle East, unwilling to count how many crushed infants it takes to equal the worth of a single combatant.
The millions goose stepping for a Republican candidate so utterly vile in his conduct, he represents the antithesis to all his predecessors -Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, the Bush’s, even Nixon once triumphantly held the torch for freedom.
Now each frozen embryo is a human. Next up is the 525 billion sperm ejected during my lifetime, each one independent, struggling to continue its life. Without my employing measures to protect each am I to be a mass murder of galactic proportions.
Where are the thoughtful, rational leaders that were once able to steer us clear of the imbecilic.
The angelic little community of Corvallis, where Oregan State University is located, was angelic for the white winged only. Hints of this came early, and most conspicuous was that this place had no black people. If you saw one, it was generally assumed to be AOK for two reasons: One, being that he might help the football or basketball teams have a winning season; or two, they had spawned someone to help the football or basketball teams to have winning seasons.
Like most white people, it was convenient for me to ignore such things. Corvallis was adorable, with its volunteer band playing in the park gazebo, in a downtown ripped right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, all with AOK white people.
Then at 3 am one night in 1998, I woke up once and then woke up again.
We had made a special effort to recruit minority students in our National Internship Program. We pushed hard at colleges with large minority student bodies and often provided a little incentive to come out to our lily white, WASP-y little town by paying their travel expenses.
Brandon and Saudia were two of our first black national interns and just finishing their internship at Vote Smart. Both had been at the top of their class and on their way to successful careers, Brandon in the Illinois governor’s office and Saudia working on civil rights in her native Alabama.
They had an early 6:30 morning flight leaving from Portland, so Adelaide and I picked them up in the wee hours for the two-hour ride to the airport. Now this gets a little tricky to explain, it is a “you had to be there” kind of thing. But here is my best effort. I was driving and Adelaide was sitting in the seat directly behind me, while Brandon was sitting shotgun and Saudia directly behind him. In the dark of night, we came up to a stop sign before turning left on to a main but poorly lit street that would head us out of town. Off in the distance, I noticed a police car parked under a tree with its lights off. I turned left, drove five or six blocks when I noticed the patrol car approaching us from the rear. Suddenly he hit his flashers and siren, at the very same instant another police car came screeching around the corner in front of us hitting its siren. Drop jawed, I pulled over.
Completely fuddled, I asked Brandon what I had done, I knew I hadn’t been speeding. He shrugged his shoulders and Adelaide said, “Maybe one of our brake lights is out.” Two police cars for that? I did not think so and watched as the policeman that pulled up behind us started to get out of his car and then put his hand on his gun, while the other car blocked the road in front. Wow! What is this? I wondered. The policeman carefully approached me on the driver’s side, then seeing me, he slowed up and let his hand drop to his side. Now it was he that looked fuddled. Nervously I asked him what I had done. In an odd and equally nervous voice that was pretentiously stern he said, “Never mind, you can go,” and briskly walked back to his car. Both he and the other policeman drove away.
We all sat silent for a moment, then I glanced over at Brandon and then back at Saudia, neither would look at me. I just exploded, I hadn’t gotten it. When we had turned left onto the main street the police car down the block only saw Brandon and Saudia in the windows with two others in the dark shadows next to them. They saw a car full of black people.
My angry rant about getting his badge and going to acquaintances in the press and city council went on for some minutes. When I came up for a breath Brandon and Saudia simply stared at me, and in tag team fashion asked me not to do that.
I was now the student. They told me that if I did those things, it would only make it worse for others. Their suggestion was simply this: “If you really want to do some good, if you want to be helpful, Richard, sponsor some community discussions on racism and tolerance. It will bring it out into the open and help such incidents become less likely.”
The effect those two had on me were in level parts of shame and awe. Of course, they would know what to do, how to respond. Yes, some community discussions, it was the thing to do, the smart, effective, helpful, proper thing to do. But I was none of those things. I was just seething with righteous indignation and by noon I could be found in the mayor’s office, unrolling an obscenity-laced review of the night’s events.
She, of course, promised to have a stern talk with her Chief of Police who would make sure his patrolmen were properly chewed out, certain to magically result in a more respectful attitude toward people of color.
I had stirred up a nice angry pot and could now, like most of the self-righteous, point my countenance skyward and arrogantly walk on, having done exactly what Brandon and Saudia asked me not to do – busted some ass to create peace on earth.
We had great groups of National Interns. We were quickly becoming dependent upon their full-time efforts in 10-week shifts. We made great progress and had a lot of fun events out at our new Agora Farms. The students started something of a ritual where each student got to pick a tree and plant it. We had peach, apple, cherry, walnut, hazelnut, even some sequoias.
The students, my God the students! There were more signing up to do national internships than we were able to accept-young passionate and chomping down the work in enormous gulps. They came from everywhere and in the end 14 different countries would be represented. The G-7 asked us to make a presentation. The State Department, having money to burn, asked us to send representatives to some newborn democracies in Africa and Eastern Europe to show how we did what we did. They were fools’ errands to be sure, not a one could yet cough up any open records to do what we do. Poor Lorena, who had been with me through every tangled twist, volunteered for the trip to Mongolia where she slept in yurts and choked down roasted yak while fending off some Mongolian chieftain in heat.
Some interns were just over the top extraordinary, like Tsering. Tsering was a student from Tibet who hiked seven days over the Himalayas to say good-by to his Tibetan parents before flying to America for college and coming to Vote Smart. And there was Mia from Beijing, who became Tsering’s best friend. The two added a “Chinabetian Tree of Peace” to the growing saplings at Agora Farm’s.
I was giddy with fresh hope. Then one of the students who had just arrived, Saudia, (the same bright young black women I would drive to the airport ten weeks later), asked if I would teach her how to fly fish on Mary’s River, that little flush of water that ran through our Agora Farms.
I grabbed a couple of rods and Saudia and I walked down into the little river. She took to the casting of a fly rod like she was born to it. She didn’t manage to catch anything and I only one tiny seven-incher, but we had a great time, and she was hooked on the sport. Putting the rods away, I promised her that she could use them anytime she wanted to give it another try, and she headed back to campus.
Barely a toilet visit later, a slightly grungy, short, light haired woman came stomping over our bridge and up the driveway. Her manner, walk and expression were all contorted as if struggling to control pressure in her steam kettle by attempting to shove a cork in its spout. I was about to catch hell and knew it, but about what?
“We do not want any of these people in our water!” I recognized the woman behind the grotesque anger of her expression. She was a professor the university promoted as a kind of nature lover, who, I think had actually written about the stream Saudia and I had just been fishing in.
I really didn’t grasp what she had said and responded with something like, “Sorry, there must be some misunderstanding, what do you mean?” She softened her expression and more calmly said, “We don’t want any of these people coming and getting into our river.” Still confused, I asked whose people. Returning to her more aggressive attitude she blurted, “I know you were in the water, walking down our river with (hesitation) some newcomer. This is our river and we do not want these strangers in it.”
I cannot remember what I said next, but it wasn’t angry. I was simply thinking I could not have heard her right. But within a week it was clear. Inhabitants on the other side of the little forested river, and many beyond, suddenly became aware of an amazing array of nonsense. Before they were done, I would hear every sort of story bedecked in the horrid things we had secretly planned for them all. A few were not too delicately pirouetting around their fear: “NO NIGGERS HERE!”
When the more serious attacks began, those who opposed the construction of our research library (a size little more than your local coffee shop), had persuaded a fellow academic, to testify to the dangers of having a building of any size built on such unstable soil. When I pointed out that the soil on that same hillside, not a stone’s throw away, had safely supported an Iron Horse whose rumbling daily deliveries of lumber equal to a thousand libraries for the better part of a century, it did not dissuade or embarrass. But the zoning board quickly and unanimously supported our plans for construction.
The storm raged on, in the end good sense, reason and fairness lost and democracy won. In democracies, when the mob gets going that can happen.
The naturalist’s rabble, eager to keep students of a certain sort out of their river turned up the heat on us with middle of the night threatening calls and our mailbox full of manure. They did much the same to the County Commissioners, who were forced to reverse the decision and deny us the permit to make Agora Farms a reality.
We had raised $400,000 from members to build that research library. Humiliated by my failure in what I thought a sure thing, I wrote each of them an apology, saying I would refund their contribution.
What happened next would steel my resolve for two decades more. If my effort to build was a failure, my effort to return the funds was a tragedy. In the end, I did not have $400,000 but $475,000, with an almost universal reaction, “GET GOING!”
Will democracy end Nov. 5th because it promoted equality for all, empowering the least educated, least accomplished, least ambitious, dupable to rise up and overwhelm the knowledgeable, experienced few?
Websters dictionary – Foundations a: funds given for the permanent support of an institution —
FOUNDATIONS
I never go to sleep angry when I can stay awake all night pissed off. Any perceived injustice, rightly or wrongly, broils my brain into the wee hours. The “what was said, could have said, should have been said” pummels through the hours till exhaustion sets in.
It is a rare opportunity when you get to say exactly the right words you wish you’d said, that your fury requires. Rarer still, when after saying it, you aren’t absorbed with regret and kicking yourself in the ass in the light of day.
Such is the case in an interview I gave The Chronicle of Philanthropy, published for charity leaders and foundation executives:
Question: “Is the civics work these foundations are funding doing some good?”
Answer: “Not necessarily in governance. They want a Big Mac, a quick satisfaction kind of solution to problems: Fund a program and will voters show up? Fund a program and will special interest influence disappear, etc? If you can’t strike quick gold that can be easily measured and valued, someone at the foundation that supported it isn’t going to look good.”
Question: “But you apply to foundations for grants?”
Answer: “Yes, but I constantly struggle with grant writing language that makes us appear like the champions of the latest foundation fad, when the reality is that we don’t really care what the fad is; we just mold our language to adopt it. What Vote Smart cared about last year, cares about this year and will care about next year is just one thing: That voters have the facts to make wise choices regardless of their political view and that we stay so pristinely clean that everyone could take our data to the bank. If you are going to toss power out to the mob you’d better make sure the mob knows what it is doing.
Civics grantees become contortionists who twist their needs into the never-ending new language and new ways to serve whatever the latest foundation fads are. That is the game.”
Question: “If you don’t want the money for the latest fad why ask for it?”
Answer: “Fall out. With every grant for some new project there is at least some fallout that helps us with our primary goal, our reason for being. It might be in the overhead, it might be in the volume. For example: If a foundation thinks the public cares about or should care about campaign finance information which we provide but know they aren’t asking about, what the Hell, we can still be their man. So, we don’t poopoo the project they want us to implement, we simply play Father Knows Best, give them what they want and we get the grant knowing the personnel or equipment the grant pays for will be un-used or under-utilized and thus available for other worthwhile endeavors. Sometimes all of this twisting gets pretty batty. For example, one foundation wanted to fund bi-lingual researchers to handle new immigrant callers to our Voter’s Research Hotline. That is fine with us even as we know every Spanish-speaking immigrant interested in voting research can easily get by in English, but if we let the foundation do what it wants, we get two more researchers with nothing to do, who can help us with the research and answer those phones.”
LOOK OUT, HERE IT COMES!
I THINK THE WORD “DROPPING” IS WHAT DID IT!
Question: “Why not ask for what you need?”
Answer: “We do, but all proposals need to be put in a pretty package. Some concerned people at foundations know the game and they know you know the game, but because they support what you do, will help you convince their own board with advice. Usually choosing the right words, just the right colored wrapping paper and bow that a foundation board will find attractive.
If you ask boards directly for help with your REAL year-in, year-out needs you will hear: “We do not fund existing programs,” or “We don’t provide general support,” or “We do not provide sustaining support,” or” Our new president is interested in changing directions.”
As I mentioned, few foundations will fund good government organizations or what they call “GooGoo” efforts. This is often true when a big foundation changes presidents. New presidents or boards want their own moment in the sun and will not build a reputation on the fresh droppings of their predecessors no matter how fertile those droppings may have been. Of course, that behavior makes building anything substantial or sustainable in civics education unlikely.”
Question: “What is wrong with foundations investing in new innovative ideas?”
Answer: “Nothing, if it is successful and that success continues to be nurtured, but civics success rarely is. Big foundations get bored if there are not instant results, a kind of “been there, done that, move on” mentality. Their attention span is like kids at recess. They will play for a while, and if not quickly ahead pick up their ball and go home. They do this in part because civic non-profits cannot prove success. Vote Smart cannot prove that it is enabling better self-government because of its work. It is simply reasonable to assume that if a people are going to self-govern, it would be nice to make sure they have access to abundant, accurate, relevant information.”
Question: “But don’t they start a lot of good programs?”
Answer: “They sure do, and we have many of them. We have a Reporter’s Resource Center, a K-12 Education Program, and Inclusion Programs for minorities, low-income and youth, Vote Smart at your Library Program, Congressional Snapshot programs for newspapers and radio. We have had publications for journalists, schoolteachers, and new immigrants, some printed in Spanish, Mandarin and Vietnamese. All these programs were created at the behest of some foundation, all successful, used and needed by the end users. All of those foundations that funded those programs knew at the outset that those programs had little chance of becoming self-supporting because the users had no money and almost every foundation eventually got bored or changed leaders and pulled their funds to do something else.
“By 2010, you could walk through our offices and see volunteer after volunteer struggling to sustain the remnants of such efforts or visit our archives and see them boxed up. Efforts that ate substantial portions of our funds and enormous amounts of staff and volunteer time. It is very disheartening to a volunteer-based non-profit like Vote Smart when so many of our resources are consumed by foundations that have junked their notions onto the shoulders of our students and volunteers.”
Question: “Some think commercial interests can and will provide all of this information.”
Answer: “Could be, but we can still hope that in the thousands of years of human existence we might have learned that putting all political power, which is what access to information is, in the hands of for-profits is a dangerous thing to do. They are “for profits,” and serving the bottom line is their reason for being, not We, The People. Foundations often make righteous efforts to combat special interests’ influence, while leaving voter education to those same interests who so clearly twist and manipulate information to scare voters into behaving the way they want them to in a voting booth.”
Question: “Why do you think voter turnout is so low in the U.S.?”
Answer: “It is hard to get energized choosing between your jerk and their jerk. People aren’t stupid. They know that no one can win public office without playing the game and that playing the game requires one to become damaged goods and far less honorable than voters want and should expect. The wonder is why the people take it, why they do so little to encourage and support honorable citizens they know to run and then protect them from this unseemly mess.
Let us say you and I run against each other for governor. You want to be real, do the right thing. You spend your days talking to voters, maybe in workplace meetings, churches, schools, and neighborhoods telling people why you are running, what you think, listening to what they think, sharing ideas about how to best represent them. It’s a real give and take, learning, getting to know them and they you, all that good useful stuff.
At the same time I spend all my time raising big money from the wealthy, corporations, labor unions and other large professional associations who will want access to me if elected.
In the end I will have money, you your passion for good. I will make you look foolish and I have the money to do it. I will bombard you with trashy ads all designed to humiliate you. I’ll embarrass you in front of your family and friends and there will be nothing you can do to defend yourself, because you did what was right, honorable and helpful to all, instead of what the system requires you to do, if you want to win.
That is why so few honorable people run, people you know, people in your own community, people who have spent lifetimes doing good. They aren’t going to run, it is just ugly, and they are not going to subject themselves or their families and friends to the process.”
——
This interview was never published, I presume because an old friend I worked with in Senator Mondale’s office conducted it for the Chronicle of Philanthropy and wanted to protect me.
When he told me I was angry, so like I said, I let it broil my brain into the wee hours and when I got up, I published it to foundations myself.
With Adelaide and Lorena, the notion that was Project Vote Smart began to sputter to life. Adelaide gave the effort stability, maturity and dignity, Lorena provided an encyclopedic political knowledge and seasoned research skills, the volunteers and interns afforded us the capacity, while I came with a whip. With the whip I would learn to take blood from the lazy, unfocused, or any naive innocence that came to my attention, either in fact or imagination.
The young inexperienced helpers coming in the door were excited and off on an exciting adventure, whereas I dressed my brain each day in battle fatigues and went off to war. The two did not mix all that well–I was ruthless.
Almost all the young people we hired came with a kind of wide eyed excitement not yet tempered by life’s lessons. For a few the most arresting lesson was the work itself. In time, I would come to understand that some modern young Americans thought life’s lessons were easy and free, and that adulthood and the imagined respect they thought came with it required no more effort than what naturally occurred in their having grown an adult sized body.
Most of these young cubs would rise to the effort often in impressive ways, while some discovered that doing something worth doing required the kind of sustained straining that had just never been in their experience. Pointing out an error or suggesting some improvement could be devastating or even produce anger and in the worst cases I would later learn a kind of childish revenge. I slowly learned the lessons of a seasoned diplomat. In the rarest and most troubling cases there were a few who, although committed and willing, had parents who so successfully guarded them from any uncomfortable experience in life that they had no experience whatsoever, rendering them incapable of effectively doing much of anything.
No one was more loyal, kind and determined than Beth. She was on her way to becoming a schoolteacher and she would make a good one, designing her own assignments, but like a few others, her compassionate soul had been waylaid by the rumor that Project Vote Smart was seeking citizens to save the nation, which was actually true.
For an array of reasons, nothing this sweet young lady did was not made worse for her having done it. I hated the thought of dismissing anyone, particularly one who cared and tried so hard, but it would have saved us a significant sum to have paid her not to work.
Late one morning in frustration, I gave her a task that could not go wrong. We needed a tiny piece of wood to repair our conference table which had a splintery spot that caught and tore people’s clothing. I wanted her to walk a few blocks to a lumber store where she might purchase a small piece of wood to cover the spot. I worked with her, wrote out the dimensions, 2” by 8”, told her to purchase the piece as cheaply as she could, it was just a patch. Certain that she knew where the lumber store was, I told her the store would cut a piece to those dimensions for a dollar or two and sent her on her way.
A half hour later, late for a lecture I was to give, I rushed out the front door to see Beth walking back from the lumber store empty handed. As I ran past, I yelled, “Where is the little piece of wood?” Disappearing around the corner she yelled a response, “They’re going to deliver it after lunch.” Oh God.
Returning a few hours later I found a lumber delivery truck in front of our office and two men carrying up an enormous 8×4 ft. sheet of plywood. I bounded up the stairs to ask Beth what was going on! “Where is the little piece of wood you went to get?” “Why, it’s on the conference table.” And so it was, sitting there right on top, my little spot of wood exactly as I wanted it.
As the two men entered the room and propped the 8 foot plank against the wall, I noticed that a little notch had been cut off one corner. The bill, plus delivery, was a hundred and something.
Beth, seeing my disbelief offered, “They said the cheapest kind of wood they sold was plywood, so I bought the plywood and had them cut out the piece you needed.” A perfectly logical following of my instructions.
I tell that story because she was not unique, amongst our interns or first jobbers. Thankfully, more often than not, we found ready talent and in the most surprising places. Impressive, idealistic young people who, given the chance and wanting to make a difference in the world, awed us with their ability to learn, apply and lead. I think of Angela, a sporting goods clerk; Jodi, a Mary K Cosmetics saleswoman and single mom; Alex, a recent law school graduate; Julie, the university provost’s daughter; and Mike, a mostly self-taught whiz kid in the new IT field. They, along with some heavenly-sent interns, put the Grail within our sights.
By Election Day we had compiled basic background research on almost 1400 candidates for federal offices. We covered every congressional candidate; if they filed, we covered them, including: Mickey Mouse, the Lord God Almighty (apparently residing in Las Vegas) and even a few running for office from prison cells. If rules allowed them to file and make the ballot under any name from any address, we covered them. The “Lord God Almighty,” on the ballot under just that name and who understandably lived and worked where he was most needed, lost. Other flakey candidates lost too, but not necessarily to those less flakey. My point is that we covered everyone. We made no distinctions, if they made the ballot, we were on it and collected every detail we could.
We had set up a “Voter’s Research Hotline” bank of 50 phones, and staff, interns and volunteers were well trained and ready to answer them all. Next to each phone we placed an industrial strength metal catalogue stand with binders we called “The Bible,” each containing hundreds of pages of data. Each caller would have their own personal researcher to look up whatever they needed to know. Voters’ inquiries poured in over the lines. At the end of each day, research teams marched in from the research room and added new pages of data to the bibles from that day’s research: the candidates newly announced, new votes, ratings, issue positions, money or new biographical details were all refreshed and updated in all 50 bibles.
Somewhere early in the process we recognized that many citizens wanted paper copies of the information, or what one student called “data on dead trees.” So, we published a Voter’s Self-Defense Manual giving 100-page samplings of the data we had collected on each state’s congressional delegation and some brochures urging citizens to take control, be the boss, fight back, reclaim our power from a Washington that had grown out-of-touch and self-obsessed.
What the staff, students and volunteers had managed to do in little more than a year was remarkable by any standard. The only serious problem occurred the month, I ran out of money to pay the small paychecks staff depended on to live. I had known for weeks that funds weren’t coming in as fast as they were going out and with each payroll, we nudged closer to financial death. Not wanting to dampen the enthusiasm, the work, the enormous progress we were making, I had said little, but they knew anyway. I had been counting on another $25,000 grant from a goddess named Geri Mannion, Vote Smart’s program officer at the Carnegie Corporation who had magically saved us before, but it had not materialized and so the day came.
Vote Smart went broke and so was I. I gathered the entire staff on the lawn outside our Oregon State University offices. I filled them in on the details of our dilemma. There was simply not enough money to both make payroll and to maintain the programs, and something was going to have to give. I told them I would give each department five minutes to argue why their department was so important that we could not cut it. I do not know if the staff met in advance and organized what happened next or not, but they got me, they got me good!
Lorena, heading the Research Department, clearly the most crucial department, stood up first. “I do not care if you cannot pay me, but don’t you dare cut my program,” then she simply sat down. My recollection of how long I held it together is pretty foggy, but I would guess I was able to keep my face on for two or three others that got up and said essentially the same thing before I had to excuse myself.
The episode ended with my only missing payroll by three days. Geri did come through with another $25,000 grant, I paid everyone and swore to myself I would never go through such a meeting again. I quietly began a policy of adding 10 to 15% miscellaneous to all future grant requests, and hording it for any such future rainy day.
A few months into our Oregon move, an eccentric, political gadfly with enough money to run for president named Ross Perot called. Ambitious but earnest, this fellow was about to launch a quixotic campaign against both the Republican, George H. Bush and Democrat, Bill Clinton, candidates for president. He wanted us to send him a box of our materials, brochures, pamphlets, press announcements and anything else we might have written. Naively thinking he was going to distribute them in support of us we were happy to oblige. Two weeks later he launched his campaign, using lines pulled directly from the texts of our press releases, manuals, and brochures: Voter Defense, Be the Boss, Take Charge, Fight Back, etc. With Mr. Perot’s status just above goofball, but lower than mainstream, we just hoped he would help Vote Smart or at least give our people some credit. Neither acknowledgement nor support for Vote Smart ever found its way into his adopted rhetoric.
In the spring before that 1992 November election we had received a call from a PBS program called The McNeil/Lehrer News Hour. This news show, popular amongst those few able to tie their own political shoes, wanted to do a story on “this idea called Vote Smart.”
Unsurprised by the NewsHour’s attentions, I simply wondered how long it would take NPR, the radio version of public broadcasting, to discover and do stories about Vote Smart. That, as it turned out, would take more time than I would have on the planet.
PBS would continue their interest with other interviews including a program called Adam Smith’s Money World. Arriving at Adam Smith’s studio in Washington, DC a bit late, they rushed me in and slapped a little microphone on my lapel. The host then spent a nice 30-minutes grilling me about this great new idea called Vote Smart. However, the interesting and telling part of the program happened after the cameras were turned off. I had stood up, un-hooked the clip-on mic and said to the host, “Thank you for having us on, Mr. Smith.” The bemused look on “Mr. Smith’s” face struck me as strange. Then he put his two hands on my shoulders and said, “My name is Goodman, Mr. Smith died 200 years ago.”
So, The NewsHour and Adam Smith’s Money World would be the only prominent national stories that year that told what we were doing and how we were doing it. We would learn that it was the how we were doing it part that conquered voter cynicism, their disbelief and growing lack of trust in any political organization.
Smith’s Money World generated hundreds of calls but on the evening The NewsHour played their Vote Smart segment things went a bit differently. I was so distracted with other work and so certain that it was merely a tiny taste of the feast to come that I did not watch. While all the staff and students were over at our university Hotline office, I was working in our main downtown office alone and that is how I came to answer the phone after hours and savor such sweet angry words.
“What the Hell is this Project Vote Smart?” the caller obnoxiously demanded. The Vice President of Northwestern Bell, the telephone operating company covering the seven-state northwestern region of the country, our region, was not happy. “Why, want’s the problem?” I asked. It turns out that ten seconds after The NewsHour program ended the telephone company was hit with 35,000 simultaneous calls to one number, our toll-free Hotline. That spike caused Bell’s computers to crash. I offered a somber apology even as my brain squealed in delight.
I hung up and called the campus office. It was busy. I kept hitting redial, busy, busy and busy. I grabbed my coat and jogged over to campus. Everyone was on the phones or running around like excited ants in a sugar bowl.
Again, we slept with the phones, we did not want to miss a single caller, “Where have you been, I have been calling for two hours?” Followed by the most wonderful words, “How can I help.” Over the next seven days, thousands of new supporters and tens of thousands of dollars joined the effort.
The 1992 election day drew near, and no other network program had called to do a story, so we began to call them so often we became an irritant. We thought we were the perfect election season NPR story, but they just got irritated at our staff. “Do not call us anymore! We are aware of you. We talk about you in the halls. Stop calling us!” The very next day their program, “All Things Considered,” made what they “considered” clear. It was late October, a week before the election, when a thankful nation finally learned what to do with all those gooey pumpkin seeds.
Oh yeah, there were a local radio shows and a few syndicated, my favorite being the G. Gordon Liddy program. You may recall this guy who during the Nixon days impressed people by putting cigarettes out on his forearm saying, “The trick is not minding.” He loved Vote Smart, which for me suggested we had crossed the Rubicon into the extremist camps.
At 5am on Election Day ABC News, the network standard for accuracy set by Edward R. Murrow during World War II and then Walter Cronkite for a few decades showed up at our Hotline office with its new version of cutting-edge journalism called Good Morning America. This nuevo, goofy, happy news film crew knew nothing nor cared anything about what we did or how we did it. They just wanted some early morning color to kick off their Election Day coverage.
They gave us a few seconds to point at the phone bank, then filmed the students dealing with voters calling for help. When I asked if we could tell them how we were doing what we did, they said that would be inappropriate – “Too supportive,” they said. Supportive of what I thought? Getting the same accurate information that your reporters are using.
One thing these news organizations did do was use us. During the campaign journalists started calling us to do the research they used to have to do for themselves. They took so much of our voters’researcher time that it was impacting our ability to handle actual voters’ calls. One such reporter stimulated an idea that would for some years be enormously useful to all political journalists, academics, and anyone else with an interest in doing an accurate accounting on a candidate or issue. He was an anchorman for CBS in Chicago and had been given the assignment to do a story explaining the workings of the Electoral College to the citizens there.
Intern: “Project Vote Smart, can I help you?”
Reporter: “Yes, I am doing a story for CBS on the Electoral College and have a few questions.”
Intern: “Of course, what can I help you with?”
Reporter: “Well I need some background. First, can you tell me where the College is located?”
Such questions from these Murrow/Cronkite replacements heralding the demise of journalism became a great source of amusement for our staff and interns.
At the suggestion of Peggy Giddings, a conscientious PBS journalist, we created a Reporter’s Source Book that contained both a “Golden Rolodex” of experts on the various sides of national issues available to interview but also a synopsis of the major issues facing the nation and the options being debated for dealing with them. Up to 6,000 of them were sent each election year to journalists and academics that wanted to do their job.
Our phones just didn’t stop ringing. There was no way we would be able to help the thousands of callers slamming our phone bank on Election Day. We simply did the best we could that first year and did handle almost a quarter million callers. A good number of them were from people standing in voting booths pulling out their cell phones and asking, “Who is this guy?”
There is a special spot at the Nation’s capitol reserved for doing television interviews where you will notice this figure standing behind most as you watch the news. I don’t know if journalists choose the spot intentionally, but I hope. As the figure looks down on the participants, I can almost hear him tell another joke. A short sampling from Will Rogers about a 100 years ago. See if you spot any that still apply today?
“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
“The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.”
“If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.”
“The problem in America isn’t so much what people don’t know; the problem is what people think they know that just ain’t so.”
“We always want the best man to win an election. Unfortunately, he never runs.”
“I remember when being liberal meant being generous with your own money.”
“America has the best politicians money can buy.”
“I hope there is some sane people who will appreciate dignity and not showmanship in their choice for the presidency.”
Well now he’s done it. Promised, if elected to “root out all vermin” that disagrees with him. People like General Milley, Pense and so many other former friends he wants put to death.
I am not very liberal, but I am proud to stand by his vermin, a term first used in the 14th century referring to animals that are difficult to control.
I don’t think he can control me or you, or any thinking conservative or liberal, unless of course you’re amidst the mindless goosestepping boot lickers that are making him possible.
