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.
With the 1990 CNIP test successful, a bit more money, and the goal of covering the entire congress and presidential races in 1992, we needed more space and a lot more help.
I tried to convince The University of Arizona’s modest Political Science Department, but it was a no go. They thought I was just doing what I was doing as a platform to run for congress again.
When other universities found out that we were looking for a home, Rutgers, Duke, the University of Florida, Cal-Berkeley, New York University College of Law, the University of Washington, and a dozen others offered a minimum of 2000 sq. ft. of office space, all utilities and computer support. The picture was clear: I was moving.
The number of offers was great for my ego, since my lofty senate aspirations had deflated it much the same way as the Hindenburg. In the twenty-some schools I visited one problem became apparent: no one could understand the name Center for National Independence in Politics, nor could they fully remember that name when it became useful to do so in a spoken sentence.
I only recalled the story of my creating that acronym during a racquet ball game for one unfortunate soul competing to house CNIP. The University of Denver. His jaw dropped out so loosely that I thought it might not have a bone attached, while his eyes clearly betrayed his instant regret that U. Denver had made an offer at all.
Exposed as the idiot I still worried I was, I never repeated the tale again. On more than one occasion, even I would hesitate a bit before our full name rolled off my tongue. Even you, right now, reading these words will need to review its mention in the prior paragraph before coming up with it. The name would have to go!
A name? Something easy to remember with a new logo would be nice. Perhaps something suggesting smarter voters? Vote Smart was born. So, it would be and although I immediately filed it with the IRS as an “also known as or AKA,” only the earliest involved would remember our primary: Center for National Independence in Politics.
PROJECT VOTE SMART
VOTESMART.ORG
We would end up choosing Oregon State University, not because it was the most prominent, it wasn’t, but because they committed up to 100 students per semester to work on the effort. Located in Corvallis, Oregon, it had advantages: a cheap place to operate and a retired former Oregon Senator named Mark Hatfield, serving on our board, committed to making sure things went smoothly there.
So, we cut a deal, loaded up our files, office equipment and a well needled cactus given me by a friend as the means to discipline myself in preparation for all the self-serving political pricks who would attempt to puncture the effort.
Oregon State gave us a prime location smack in the center of campus, convenient for students and big enough to handle all the interns who signed up to help with research.
We set up our administrative office a half mile away in the center of the most idyllic town I had ever seen. Corvallis is the kind of town that Norman Rockwell memorialized in countless paintings. Its only failing would be its lack of appreciation for diversity and the quiet racism that over the coming years would expose itself in such a crude manner that it would become a big problem for Project Vote Smart and any black hoping to be an accepted member of their community.
So excited, we couldn’t move fast enough: new, real offices, all the interns we could need, enough money for a dozen staff –maybe not experienced professionals but at least idealistic, high energy, trainable, recent grads. Before my imaginative eyes, so on my way that I felt I could almost reach out and touch it, there it was: the Grail.
Lorena O’Leary, my original and greatly underappreciated staff member, grabbed her two-foot ruler, joined me and off we went. Shopping at Goodwill and the University’s surplus equipment barn we put together the needed desks, tables, chairs, used computers and other necessities within a few days. While doing it, we also managed to hire staff. If you could breathe, speak, dress yourself, make it to the bathroom in time, and the one absolute requirement, idealistic, you were given a shot.
We divided up the effort into various departments:
Research – covering biographies, contact information, and campaign finances.
Voting Records – collaborating with an organization called Congressional Quarterly to select key votes. An association they would later nastily regret in that “me, me, only” consuming view of the world.
National Political Awareness Test – Testing each candidate’s willingness to answer issue questions citizens wanted answers to and they would face if elected.
Performance Evaluations – collecting the evaluations of candidates done by hundreds of liberal-to-conservative selfish interests that graded candidates on their willingness to support their me-me causes—a kind of report card.
Toll-Free Voter’s Research Hotline – enabling any citizen to access the data through their own personal intern researcher over a free phone call.
Fundraising – seeking supportive members and cultivating foundation support.
Administration/Training – Lorena and I
I was off on a child’s white horse, like Captain America, galloping off with my fact shield to save America.
My wasteful youth was past. The life’s work that would happen “another day” had arrived and it would greet me every morning for the rest of my days – well almost. I was making my life worth the living of it.
Besides, the way I saw it, there were only two reasons to go to bed. One was to sleep, which I had little use for, and the other, consumed my every thought, because I had left her behind in Tucson.
The vast majority of Hotline callers’ questions were much the same as any employer might ask. They focused first on backgrounds, then actual job performance (voting records), followed by issue positions, then more distant ratings, with campaign contributors bringing up the rear. Occasional calls came in from the cynical, wanting to know what sinister outfit we worked for. Rare were the obnoxious, but often enough so that we had to train researchers how to handle them. “We must act like automatons,” I warned. “Do not respond with any emotion, no matter what the question. Simply give the facts. If you are asked for a fact we do not have, just say, ‘We do not have that information at this time.’” Lorena O’Leary, who trained the volunteers, handled calls best:
North Carolina caller with a deep southern drawl: “I jus have one queston fer ya honey.”
Lorena: “Well we are here to help. What information can I help you with?”
Caller: “Can ya tell me how long Harvey Gantt’s dick is?”
Lorena: “I am sorry sir, but we do not have that information available at this time.”
A couple of weeks later, the election was over and we held a little party with a few awards. We had managed to successfully handle over 7,000 calls, more than we thought we could, and more than any foundation thought we would. Lorena was a wonder and got the most prized award, an odd two-foot-long golden ruler, along with some rubber gloves.
The timely success of the test was enough to generate a $25,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation and the number of excited callers gave us the notion that voters themselves just might be willing to chip in too. I had big dreams: Build this until we could cover every race from the Presidency down to city council. A central source of every fact on every candidate, so trustworthy that any citizen, conservative or liberal, could turn to it, use it and trust it; at their whim, instantly get that accurate, abundant, relevant, factual information on any elected official or anyone campaigning to replace them. It would take years, but we could start building with the 1992 presidential and congressional contests.
Surprisingly, if not shockingly, we discovered that virtually every other governance non-profit, like the League of Women Voters, Taxpayers Union, Common Cause, PBS, NRA, AARP, publications, church groups, and on and on, sold their members like chattel on an auction block. It was why, if you donate to one organization, your mailbox, phone number and email address is soon filled with so many others groveling for help.
So, I purchased names and contact information from two of those organizations. Then Jack Greenway, a friend and owner of the most delightfully unpretentious old elegant hotel you could ever know, the Arizona Inn, did the unthinkable. He allowed me to take over one of his hotel dining rooms and have what I jokingly called a champagne and caviar mailing. I wrote a letter about what our new organization was up to, purchased 5000 envelopes and stamps. Then I hit Safeway and got two 2 oz. jars of the cheapest caviar and spread it thinly over 10 pounds of cream cheese. That, along with some Ritz Crackers and two dozen bottles of Andre champagne, selling at $2.90 a bottle, would do the job.
I got a hundred or so former campaign workers and friends to do the kind of mind-numbing, monotony that must have come to Sisyphus rolling that rock up the hill. They sat for hours folding, stuffing, sealing, and stamping those thousands of letters. People willing to do such tedious tasks they are not required to do, when so many more pleasant entertainments are available, were always a marvel to me. Anyway, they did it, and I and you should love them for it.
I was sitting there stamping and sealing as fast as the best of them when Richard Kleindienst walked in. This “disgraced” U.S. Attorney General from the Nixon Administration I am proud to say was my friend and for my money the least corruptible of the stupefyingly corruptible lot that led to Nixon’s resignation. This is, of course, a half century before Trump, when stupefying, corruptible, nor any other word in any language is adequate to describe how dangerously gruesome it has all become.
Anyway, Kleindienst loved the idea of CNIP and had suddenly appeared to cheer my fellow envelope stuffers on. He walked from table to table giving everyone encouragement, talking of the corruption in politics and the rampant hypocrisy in campaigns. An ironic commentary for sure. Sixteen years earlier, most in the room who were my Democratic campaign workers would have trampled each other for a chance at clubbing him to death. But time can calm almost any tempest, so he was appreciated, even enjoyed. Who better to talk about CNIP’s need to expose truth than someone out of an administration that so dramatically concealed it?
Six days later there they were, two envelopes addressed to CNIP in my box. One had a check for $25, the other had one for $10 but included a long two-page letter. The letter writer said that he was old, had been working in politics his entire life, but this was the best idea he had ever heard. I was instantly galvanized with fresh purpose. Over the next two weeks letters stuffed my box. We raised more than it had cost us to do the mailing and I wiped my brow, thankful that I had gotten the money back and a bit more.
A few years later, I would hear from people in mail order businesses that such returns were spectacular. Turns out that once you find your supporters, the real money comes in the renewals that come again and again, year after year. Had I been smart enough to see that at the time I would have hawked my kidneys to obtain every penny I could for more mailings, but I was just thankful that I got the money back.
I did start purchasing more lists from organizations that pimped out their unknowing fans, but I did so very cautiously. After all, the money I was now spending was not just my own. I could hardly bear parting with a single cent these strangers were sending in to help.
I was still substitute teaching for basics like food and rent but with the class time to fold, stuff and stamp. My efficiency increased to a thousand pieces a day, which now included a crude brochure. This was, of course, back when you had to lick the stamps and envelopes, something I preferred over a wet sponge for speed purposes. When using a sponge, you are never sure you’re getting ju.st the right touch of dampness. Too much and it drips down the envelope, too little and the envelope may not stay secure. Licking ensured just the right amount of moisture each, and every time. Now, you wouldn’t know this, but halfway through a thousand stamps licked your retch reflex kicks in. On the day that I rudely interrupted the student film by chucking in the waste basket, I decided to save the licking for an at home ordeal. There, I discovered that a sip of scotch now and then was just what the Post Office ordered.
With growing support and blooming visions of the possible, other board members came through with cash. My favorite congressman sent me $5000. Republican Congressman Bill Frenzel, few will now recall, was arguably the most respected member in Congress. This was back in a day when some members still earned respect and deserved it because it was they who somehow kept congressmen from devouring one another and coughing up each other’s blood.
Foundations suddenly seemed less reluctant to meet with me. I hopped a plane and headed back East for meetings with Carnegie, Markle, MacArthur, Revson, Pew, Markle and a few smaller foundations. Even a few corporate funders were willing to meet: Prudential, AT@T, MCI. I was happy to get cash anywhere I could, but the corporate ones bothered me. A great deal of support for the nation’s largest institutional non-profits comes from corporations and were rightfully under attack for being influenced by the corporate source of their support.
I thought a great deal about this when I returned home and decided that if CNIP was to be a success, it had to be trusted and completely above suspicion. So, I adopted a number of rules to insure public confidence, the three most important being:
No one with a political reputation could serve on CNIP’s board without a political opposite or as I became fond of saying, “a political enemy.” Thus, President Ford joined with President Carter, Senators McGovern with Goldwater, Representatives Ferraro with Gingrich, me and Senator McCain, and so on.
No money would be accepted from corporations, unions, political action committees or special interests of any kind. It would be funded by foundations (old robber baron foundations no longer attached to the corporate source of their funds), and individual citizens, or it wouldn’t be funded at all.
The staff would be primarily student interns whose only pay would be academic credit, a recognized plus at universities that saw CNIP as a great classroom they didn’t have to pay for. The staff that were paid would operate much like the Peace Corps: They would sign on for a two-year election cycle tour and receive just enough to live on.
It was through protections like these that an increasingly cynical public would find confidence in the Center for National Independence in Politics (CNIP), a name I chose no one could remember or understand, which now included me.
I had $20,000 in savings I would put to the effort. I have always been odd about money, you either had some, or you did not, but if I could eat, I was good to go either way. Besides, I was on a mission to make my life worth living and that was all the resource anyone really needs.
In time I shared my notions with a great many people: activists, journalists, senators, representatives, governors, and a couple of presidents.
OUR FOUNDING BOARD
President Jimmy Carter President Gerald Ford
Senator Barry Goldwater Senator George McGovern
Governor Michael Dukakis Senator John McCain
Senator Mark Hatfield Senator Gorden Smith
Senator Bill Bradley Senator Edward Brooke
Senator David Boren Senator Max Baucus
Senator Frank Moss Senator Charles Mathias
Senator William Proxmire Senator Bill Frist
Rep. Newt Gingrich Rep. Geraldine Ferraro
Rep. Jim Leach Rep. Pat Schroeder
Rep. William Clinger Rep. Ron Dellums
Rep. Esteban Torrez Rep. Claudine Schneider
Rep. Nancy Johnson Rep. Morris Udall
Att. Gen. Richard Kleindienst Archivist Adelaide Elm
CNIP President Richard Kimball
and 13 Other National Leaders
To a few, my idea of forcing candidates to fill out applications of employment seemed dreamy and hopeless, but as long as I didn’t expect their money or their time, they were happy to lend their names onto a piece of stationery. In years to come most did more, some a lot more, opening their wallets, influence, and reputations to raise millions, but for now it would fall to me and volunteers.
Collecting all the factual data and sorting it so that any citizen, liberal or conservative, could easily access it and find what they wanted to know was the challenge. Was it really possible?
At one early meeting, Bill Frenzel, a prominent Republican Congressman of his day, suggested that rather than build a new “googoo” organization to take on this mammoth task, maybe one already existed that could be convinced to take it on. “Googoos” was a condescending term used by some foundations when referencing non-profits interested in good government.
Anyway, that started a series of meetings in Washington, D.C. with other national good government groups, the first “googoo” being the League of Women Voters (LWV).
Her name was Peggy Lampl and she was the League’s National Director. “Fabulous idea, if it can be done,” she wondered. “I will bring this up with our board.”
Turns out that the League’s board would have nothing to do with it, nor any other “googoo”, just “too difficult” they all contended. But Peggy and the former League President, Lucy Benson, became so excited over the notion that they joined our board.
Years later, after we found some success, the LWV decided we were competitors and became the only organization in the country that refused to let us tell their members that we existed or what we were attempting to do. That kind of “me, me, only me” mentality was just beginning to bite into the mind set of everyone in politics.
It would be six months before the “googoo-ey” inklings from my grass hut began to take hold, just as I was running out of money again.
At first, I lived quite happily on my earnings teaching as a substitute and a few classes at a local community college. Now, I fear that my listing the number of times I went broke in this story may make me sound crazy generous. I was not crazy generous! I was just locked into a Quixotic exciting adventure to save democracy. I was going to bring home the Grail. Besides, as I said, I never worried about money, but then I had never experienced hunger, cold or periods without clothes or shelter. I just didn’t have much or as Thoreau, a nineteenth century philosopher, suggested: make yourself rich by making your needs few.
I had volunteers, lots of them, friends that helped in my Senate run who still believed in me. Some were new friends who became supporters after hearing commentaries I made on the local PBS television and the all-news radio station that I was having some fun with on the side. I arranged a series of mini TV debates against the Chairman of the Republican Party and Richard Kleindienst, a wrongfully vilified former Nixon Attorney General. Sometimes I would debate, sometimes I did simple commentaries. I enjoyed them all, particularly my last one when the station decided my services were no longer necessary.
Chomping down on one of my mother’s favorite childhood meals, a baloney and margarine sandwich, I turned the TV on to a religious program featuring a fellow by the name of Robert Tilton. This guy, so sleazy, with religious gimmy-gimmy so disgusted me that it became difficult to down the childhood slop in my mouth.
So, I teed off with that afternoon’s commentary:
“What is the most disgusting thing you can think of? Is it waking up one night to find a fat tick suckling from the tender tissues of your armpit? Perhaps it would be licking the bottom of a bus station toilet seat. For me it is neither of those things. For me it is television preachers, who prey on the old, sick and lonely for what money they can swindle them out of……”
I was told that my comments received a record number of caller complaints, that the station had never seen anything quite like it.
“Mr. Kimball, I am afraid we can no longer air your commentaries,” said an impressed but apologetic station manager, “Was it the toilet seat comment?” I asked? “Was it a bit over the top?” As I relistened to my commentary, YEAH, the toilet seat – that was over the top.
Fourteen hundred candidates were running for federal offices alone. Gathering facts for all that, would be a considerable undertaking for dozens of trained well-paid professional staff, of which we had none.
Again, I thought perhaps we might design collaborations between a few large “goo-goos” willing to work together for the common good. But that was a notion that would remain as successful as trying to hitch a ride to the moon on a gnat’s wings.
I began to focus our fundraising on foundations that I thought would surely want to give this idea a go. I asked two students (former volunteers on my Senate campaign) to research and list every foundation that seemed to have any interest in civics education. A week later they returned with a list of 130 such foundations.
Then I set up a system to write grants that would be overseen by a professor that taught grant writing at the University of Arizona. In the end we pumped out those 130 grant requests. One hundred, twelve foundations didn’t respond, with all those that did rejecting us. Dumbfounded, I called each and every one of them. Of the few that had taken the time to consider the proposal, most thought no one would use the data even if it could be collected. As one major foundation said, “It’s just not sexy enough, Richard. It is too academic, too cerebral, voters won’t use it.”
More exposing, I noticed that in the pile of rejection letters there were many curiously identical, almost word for word. Ahhaa! Foundation staffs were clubby.
Getting grants required getting in the door. You had to know people or know people who knew people if you were going to pry any funds for a new “Goo-goo” – it was politics. I knew politics and started camping in cities, until I pried open some of those doors. Only then did they start to think about it.
As the elections of 1990 approached, there was no possibility of covering 1400 congressional candidates. With an all-volunteer staff and no office other than my living room, I would need to “throw down,” if we were going to move on.
I sold my house and used the money to operate. I rented a small leaky-roofed apartment near the University of Arizona. We converted the apartment into offices while I used a room in the back to sleep in. For $4.50 an hour I hired my most loyal campaign volunteer, a wonderful young women named Lorena O’Leary, who I would abuse for the next eight years in every way you can abuse someone except sexually. She worked like a dog, almost as hard as I did. We got our hands on two IBM Selectrics, the cutting edge end of the typewriter world, put in a couple of phones, about 40 pounds of paper and index cards to collect and organize data on, and a couple of trash cans that served the dual purpose of collecting trash and the rain that would drip through the ceiling on the infrequent occasions of rain in Tucson.
We caught a lucky break right away. A break that would deliver a badly-needed piece of equipment and inform me that I had been celebrating my birthday for some 40 years on the wrong date.
An astrologist, a faith I have little patience for, walked through our office door. She was covered with scar tissue from some undiscussed horrid event of long ago. Seeing her walk in, carrying a big box, I feared my expression might give away the shock I felt at her appearance.
Three quarters of her face and neck, along with both arms were covered with heavy latticed scar tissue. After helping her with her box and reaching to shake hands she said, “I have a computer I would like to donate but I have a condition?”
A computer would save us a great deal of work. “That would be great,” I said, “What is it I can do for you?” She became unsettlingly serious, “I want to do your star chart and I need the time and day you were born.”
It was not the kind of quid pro quo I had become accustomed to in politics. With such a strange but simple request I told her that I was born on October 20th, 1948, but that I did not know what time of day. “That’s all right, if you know what hospital it was, I can find that out.”
I told her the hospital, thanked my lucky stars as she headed out to research that moment in my mother’s life when she decided to give me that one last wailing groaning push. I had been a big baby.
The computer was such a prize that we gave it a name, George, and when it was retired less than a year later, I insisted that it remain in our archives for decades.
That odd mystical lady was to return a week later a bit upset. She told me that she could not get what she wanted because the hospital had a fire back in the 1950s and the original records no longer existed. The best she could do was an old newspaper clip from Tucson’s morning newspaper.
It appears that the paper got a big break from some heavenly source the day before I was born and reported my October 20th birth in the October 19th edition, thus announcing my coming a day before I came, beating everyone, including my mother, to the event.
Although my travels put us on some foundations’ radar, there wasn’t nearly enough money to cover all the congressional races to demonstrate voters’ willingness to defend themselves if they had a source with which to do so.
I chose to limit our research to just 24 congressional candidates in two states, North Carolina and Nebraska. They both had heated senate races with one being of particular interest in North Carolina. It was between an old, entrenched, anti-civil rights, anti-voting rights, race baiter named Jesse Helms and a new progressive and black former mayor of Charlotte named Harvey Gantt.
With friends and volunteers, the research progressed quickly in all five categories, comparing detailed biographies, ratings, campaign contributions, voting records and current issue positions as best as records showed.
The delivery method selected was named The Toll-Free Voter’s Research Hotline, a 1-800 number that would be staffed by trained volunteers around the clock to look up any information on any candidate a caller was interested in.
To do that would require more space, phones, computers, and less indoor rain.
We moved into a couple of rooms in a dumpy two-story office building with a little available space upstairs should we hit pay dirt and need more phones.
Sandwiched between an insurance agent and some fellow who repaired sewing machines, the rent was just above what we had, so I decided to give up the apartment we had used as an office and sleep in a bag under my desk. No big deal, it wouldn’t be a quest if you got to dine on foie gras and sleep in silky sheets.
Senator Bill Proxmire, D-Wisconsin, and Congresssman Jim Leach, R-Iowa, two early joiners of our board flew to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina and Lincoln, Nebraska, held press conferences, and announced what we had created, and that if North Carolinians and Nebraskans were tired of the political commercials and want to get the facts on candidates, just call CNIP’s Toll-Free Voter’s Research Hotline.
We did not need to wait long. The announcement appeared in a number of papers, and a couple of late-night political talk show hosts adopted the Hotline, calling out its number like some mantra.
The two phones we had rang so often that we couldn’t make outgoing calls. We had hit pay dirt. It was then that I said good-bye to my retirement savings, rented the upstairs office and put in six more phones. It was not enough; all six lines would often light up at once. This required us to set up a red emergency button on a central table upstairs, strung out the door, down the stairs railing and to a buzzer in the downstairs office. Hit it, and all Hell broke loose where all researchers would burst out the door and run up the stairs to help with the phones. It happened every time some media person in Nebraska or North Carolina mentioned our number.
Thankfully, no one in the complex complained about the noisy clamor that occurred every time someone hit the red button. By the last week of the election, when the vacuum guy, insurance agent and a few other offices caught on to what we were trying to do, they would run out with us and give us a cheer as we launched ourselves up the steps to save voters with the facts.
Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of knowledge. Political preachers cast out their spurious nets each day to capture more devotees and then suffuse them with hatred toward any that disagree.
It is the poison in our democracy and what can lead to the intractable Hell in the Middle East.
Israel has known no peace, nor is it likely to ever know peace surrounded by political preachers whose mantra is “death to the Jews.”
As consequence, Israel does what it does or dies!
And so it goes, more terrorists created than killed.
The only alternative would take years of flaunting our humanity while expunging the hideous with selective attacks, thus cleaving the population from Hamas and the politics of hate.
Tossing power out to the mob was not done lightly by America’s founders. All of Europe thought the Americans’ revolution crazy. As one Scottish historian explained: “If you start with bondage, that might lead to the courage of revolution in America and if the revolution is successful that will lead to great abundance. But over time abundance will turn to selfishness and greed, and that will eventually turn to apathy and complacency. Once they become apathetic, dependence will follow and lead them right back to bondage.”
As good fortune would have it, America had better thinkers:
“If the nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the character and conduct of their rulers.” John Adams
“A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” James Madison
European pessimism back then, which rings with such worrisome truth today, was not ignored by America’s Founders, particularly the implied selfish factions sure to develop. “Factions” was their term for selfish interests. The fear was that if power was tossed out to the people, the people would simply form “factions” and then do battle over the rewards they could gift themselves.
Having miraculously won power from the greatest power the world had ever known and then tossed that power out to the people was an astonishingly brash and ludicrous thing to do in their time and may well finally prove to have been so in our time.
Our Founders were not gods, not perfect, but they designed a plan to head civilization toward equity, tolerance, and a forced consideration of one another. It was the Grail and I meant to get us back hard on track toward it.
Would you have done it?
Would you do it right now?
Say you were George Washington and could become King, would you decide to throw it away, and instead cast power out to millions of strangers, people you do not know, will never know, in some spectacularly trusting, very peculiar notion that they will be good to you?
It was an unnatural act then and it is so now. For all human history, people—thinking, feeling, laughing, crying, family-raising people just like you and me—lived in bondage, under rules in which they (you) had no say and if you did not obey, you were taxed, maimed, imprisoned or dead.
It was largely a Genghis Khan world, a clever fellow who essentially rode into town one day with his friends and said, “Give me everything you have.” When they refused, he slaughtered every man, woman and child and rode off to the next town. Again, he said, “Give me everything you have.” When they refused, he hacked them to death and rode on. Eventually towns got the message and gave him all they had. It was once in just that method that the world’s greatest empires were created, including the largest, which was Genghis Khan’s. In his homeland they still find in him a source of adulation.
The idea of a self-governing people was not new with America, but it was those Americans that gave it legs to stand on, and then WOW!
List all the human advances you can, for all human time up to 1776. There are some, and arguably the most important — the printing press, which allowed generations to speak to one another across time.
Take another moment and list all the advances since 1776 when the human spirit becomes unbridled.
Greece and the Roman Empire gave wondrous glimpses of the possible. Then came 1776 and human enterprise was unleashed on a global scale. With little thought, your list would be dozens then hundreds, and still most of us would not think of, know of, or understand the breadth and depth that knowledge has brought us. Your list would make those of the prior 40,000 years seem devoid of advance in either human comfort, health, convenience, or nourishment. Almost regardless of your circumstance, if you live in America today you live with benefits and comforts beyond the imaginings of any ruling King or Queen through the millennia. This relationship between freedom and advance is not merrily a coincidence.
Pride in our forebearers should ooze from every American pore. Little wonder why so much of the world has copied our struggle to self-govern, even when with some whose brutish cultural heritage make notions of freedom and human equality repugnant to their tradition.
One incorruptible source for the facts. A source void of opinion or interpretation that both the right and the left could turn to in absolute confidence for the documented records on those who govern or wish to replace those who do.
Detailed biographical, educational, financial and voting records, comprehensive public comments made, and evaluations by dozens of conservative and liberal groups were available to anyone caring enough to gather them. All could easily be made searchable by name and issue of interest.
Like a bat to the head, it struck me: a candidate could be forced, with or without their cooperation, to provide a detailed application of employment, just the way all people must do—only better.
Hell, I thought, voters wouldn’t have to listen to all the self-promotional nonsense milking the people’s emotions. Voters could clearly see what candidates had done in the past and then know what would be done for them or to them if elected. Frustration would no longer be a citizen’s only alternative; they would mob such a system.
In February 1988 I left my grass hut and by March the Internal Revenue Service received an application for a new non-profit called the Center for National Independence in Politics.
An absurd meaningless name for sure! Such things can make sense after passing a barber shop called SNIP and when out of oxygen during a challenge match of racquetball with an older brother. That is exactly how I came up with an acronym before I came up with an actual name. I wanted something that would fit the logo I had in mind:
That is to say, I made some mistakes. Although my idea was a great one, it had a bit of slop stuck to it.
With just a few former campaign volunteers who still had faith in me we could test the idea in a couple of states. That, and finding some prominent people of both major parties to back up the work and you had the makings for a cure to all the choreographed chicanery of then-day American Politics. Everyone in politics knew this cancer was now eating away at the heart of our democracy.
Yes, this would work, I was certain of it. I was excited, I had something to do, something important to do. I felt like I had seen the Holy Grail off in the distance. All I had to do was go get it and bring it home to a needy nation. So, I caught that train and headed home.
As it would turn out, I had little trouble finding the Grail. Bringing it home would prove difficult, and once it arrived a few million instantly used it. But as I would discover, the other 200 million or so just wanted to enjoy whatever their version of a Barco Lounger, beer and a football game was.
Back home I had to find some means to earn a bit of money that didn’t take much time so I could work on CNIP. Substitute teaching and teaching a few classes at a community college would be perfect, only it required a college degree. So, I took my Mexico walkabout to visit the Dean of the Languages School at the University of Arizona. It seems that my crude, largely street slang Spanish impressed him so much that he passed me out of my two-year language requirement on the spot. So, twenty years after entering the University as a wholly irresponsible young man I got my degree. When I mentioned it to my mother, she was not so much surprised as she was in disbelief. I think many mothers always see their children as they were when young. In her mind she still saw her children as the nitwits we would forever be, and in my case not without some reason.
The only thing pressing on my mind when I returned from Mexico was my need for an office to work on my idea and some place to live. Either one would also serve as the other. I purchased an old liquor warehouse which had been on the wagon run from Mexico to Tucson in the 1800s. It had 12-foot ceilings, thick adobe walls and was located in a poor neighborhood, filled with down on their luck men smelling of malt liquor, and bottom rung strung out prostitutes. It was all I could afford, but I loved it. At the same time, I started doing that teaching work to pay some bills.
Being a substitute teacher was perfect. As it turned out substitutes don’t do anything, certainly no teaching. You were expected to show a film or whatever time-consuming monotony had been assigned by the absent teacher to keep them busy. Most often I simply sat in the back of a class writing letters and stuffing envelopes to everyone I could imagine might help me with my vision, while National Geographic played on a screen or kids wrote reports, usually on one of three things: What I did with my summer, what I got or gave for Christmas, what I plan to do with my summer, all depending on the season.
As a result, I got some money to eat on and a lot of time to map out a strategy to bring home the Grail.
Education, the staple of human advance, is in large part due to teachers. After all, next to parents and perhaps peers, they have the greatest impact on child development and each generation’s ability to achieve bigger, better, and cheaper. I always got great support from teachers’ unions. Like all special-interest, labor or corporate unions, teachers want more money. But it wasn’t until I became a teacher that I experienced how ruinous our lack of support for teachers had become. Teachers are no longer supported or have any standing in their communities. With funding often anchored to attendance, schools are more dependent upon students being in the classroom than they are teachers being there.
Classrooms are stuffed, not with teachers (outgoing money), but with students (incoming money). As a result, students are now in control and teachers suffer the slings and arrows as if responsible for every imagined social ill.
Public schools are often built and managed like prisons. They need to keep students (money) in. Substituting back at my alma-mater, Tucson High, where my father was student body president, it was easy to notice all the new fences and locks. The administration told me that it was to keep the unwanted (drugs, weapons and such) out. But that was not actually true. It was instantly clear to all that fences couldn’t keep anything out, but it could keep students in. That was the point, the administration wanted to keep its students inside, their funding depended upon it. Even if they ditched all their academic classes, which a good number did, they got funding if they were at school in any sort of organized class. So, for those that did not want to learn any geometry or what a constitution was, or even how to read it, the administration had a day long GYM class where the willfully ignorant could play basketball and other games all day long.
I always wanted to be sent to the schools where substitutes often refused to go. They were always in troubled neighborhoods where broken homes and alcoholism were common. At 6’ 4” and 260, I could look intimidated and had no problem being assigned to the toughest schools. Had I been a petite gentler soul, as most teachers were, . . . well, I don’t know how they could do it and my respect for them grew enormous.
In one, I was assigned 8th graders for a week who had to take their class in a portable classroom that had been erected out on the playground because of overcrowding. As typical, I started the class with roll call. Also, as typical with students hitting their first teen years, they quickly recognized a “substitute-free day” and were a little unruly—many sitting with their backs to me on top of their desks, blurting out some form of “here” when their name was called. When told to sit down some objected that they did not need to listen to me and one simply refused and told me to “fuck off,” to the laughter of a few of his friends. I asked again and got a “go fuck yourself.”
The inevitable slip was written out, he was shown the door and directed to go to the principal’s office.
For the next 40 minutes I wavered between abandoning a classroom of unrulies and running outside to stop the “go fuck yourself” student from pelting the portable with bricks. Just as the bell ending class was about to ring, the air conditioning unit took a direct hit and began to smoke. As I unplugged it the bell rang, students streamed out the back door with me quickly following to find the vandal. Seeing me coming he ran around the unit with a couple of his friends. As I chased them, they ran back into the classroom through the front door trashing all the papers and desks and back out the rear door as I entered.
As I cleaned up, my next class entered. Each student looked at me and immediately took their seats – might have had something to do with my countenance. I went on with my day.
At this miserable day’s end, I stood at the one and only exit to the school and saw my thirteen-year-old, “go fuck yourself,” vandal approaching. I stood in his path and said, “You need to come with me to the principal’s office.”
As I blocked his escape, making a path to the principal’s office, his only road, he began a torrent of expletives and descriptions of me that were evidence I was with a prodigy. He was, without question, a young and highly skilled linguist. The unending vulgarity cascading from his mouth was a real marvel to behold. During our walk to the principal’s office, I became a “fucker, mother fucker and a fucker’s fucker,” along with being a “queer, bastard, homo, and shit faced cock sucker,” sprinkled with occasional requests to “suck his dick” or “lick his balls.”
Through the school’s halls and breezeways to the administrative offices we went.
The school’s principal came out to investigate the disturbance. When I told her what had happened, she became annoyed, said, “I have no time for this now,” and exited the building. The smiling little snot quickly followed her lead.
In my portable the next morning there was a note, “Report to the principal’s office immediately.” As I entered her office, seated across from her was the couple that had bred the little snot, all claiming that I had twisted the little darling’s arm when I walked him.
With an apologetic, hopeful smile the principal said that such behavior was not tolerated at the school and that she had called me in to prove it so. Then with a glare at me she spat, “Your services are no longer required here Mr. Kimball, pick up your things and go.”
Did she know me? Did she hate my politics? Or was she so unsupportive of all her teachers? Stunned, and more than a bit confused I stammered out a quick defense, saying that I never twisted any arm, or acted angrily at all. Halfway through the principal’s repeated order to leave, another teacher entered the room, then another, and another until the room was jammed with a dozen or so. They, too, were angry and ready to unload. For a moment I thought it was at me and I had re-entered some other unworldly Twilight Zone.
But it wasn’t at me that the teachers focused their anger, they had the principal in their sights. They had apparently heard I was being discharged and were now surrounding her desk.
It turns out that my focus the afternoon before was so riveted on keeping the little snot on the road to the office that I never noticed all the teachers up and down the hall who had come out to investigate the little angel’s torrent of obscenities.
The principal was still seated at her desk and now a bit flustered herself when the commentary flew from one mouth, then another and another.
“You are not firing this man!”
“I have never witnessed anyone subjected to such disgusting abuse as Mr. Kimball was.”
“He never got angry or even raised his voice at (whatever that snotty, con-to-be’s name is).”
“He was completely calm, unbelievably calm, never touched that kid.”
“Did you go see what that kid did to the classroom, to the air conditioning unit?”
And then my favorite:
“He took that horrid abuse with a dignity that was as awe inspiring to me as it should have been to (the snot’s name again).”
In the middle of this most amazing and gratifying release from the Twilight Zone, someone said, “Hey, they’ve gone!”
The snot and his breeders had vacated the building.
Most importantly, the Grail: In those classes I found that I was very good at signing and stuffing envelopes. In fact, even 30 years later I still held two Grail seeking records: One was my ability to sign 1000 letters in 20 minutes, the other was to fold, seal and stamp them by the time Johnny Carson went off the air.
WALKABOUT: noun A short period of wandering Bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work.
For months after the Senate campaign, I did nothing. My frenzied life over the years suddenly ended and I was completely unprepared for what was laid out before me. What was before me was an enormous pile of zilch.
If your training is in politics, you’re not trained for any real people work. With no job, no degree, a small home and about $8,000 in retirement I was done.
Some people suggested I could beat the local Republican just elected to our Congressional seat. A good fellow I had served with in the State Senate. It was either that I thought, or strap on a backpack with a few necessities and do my “walkabout” somewhere with a lot of different.
Now before America’s craving for illegal drugs fed, watered, and fertilized blood-thirsty cartels willing to sell them to us, before overdose deaths tripled, and before half of all Americans over 12 years had or were seeking illegal drugs, disappearing in Mexico was pure vagabond enchantment.
Using legs, buses and trains, I backpacked for months, meeting an amazing assortment of wonderful people with a sprinkling of crooks tossed in. I had a loose itinerary where I would show up in cities and towns from the American to Guatemalan border where I knew that the Mexican presidential candidates (the crooks) would be speaking. I fell in love with the Mexican people, their innocence and heart melting unpretentious charm offered up in town after town, even as the civic culture punished them for that innocence and made me long for the relative integrity of the U. S. variety. Not having taken Spanish at the University, I could understand little of what those I met said.
So, when I stopped in a place called Cuernavaca and met a family willing to give me a room, bed and meals for next to nothing, I went to school for a month of intense Spanish training. I worked at it hard. Every day after classes I would give myself assignments that forced me to use that day’s lesson.
On a Sunday, I saw this enormous mango tree bursting with plump ripe fruit. The tree towered over a little brook in a lush postcard pasture, simply bursting with butterflies. Since my oldest brother and been collecting butterflies almost since birth, I decided my assignment that day would be to go around town talk to people about mariposas and purchase all the necessary things needed to construct a net to catch them. When it was done, I returned to the pasture to see what I could catch. Ten minutes into my chasing and swiping I heard children laughing. I stopped and looked up the hillside to see an elderly woman, young mother and two children giggling at me. It was instantly clear what a sight I must have been. This 6’4” 240 lb. clumsy American stumbling through a pasture swatting at insects. I started to laugh too.
Anyway, we started up a conversation. I could say just enough to communicate the basics of my enterprise, mariposa and coleccion. I understood little of their Gatling Gun fast responses, but it was clear they wanted to see what I had caught, so I showed them the three or four I had managed to capture in a little box. Then the children asked, and somehow I got it, would I like to see their coleccion too? I followed them down a path to their home on the muddy bank of the stream. Dozing in a hammock near an open fire, where what looked like a giant pizza tin was heating up, was the father. He sat up, smiled, while pointing his finger at what was his tree stump-of-a-seat offering. The home was nothing more than a few boards with cardboard panels tacked along the sides. The roof was a combination of old, rusty, twisted up tin sheets and palm fronds.
One of the little girls disappeared into the vegetation while the others kept jabbering so fast I could not pick out the words, but it was clear they were talking about me. The smiles, laughter and friendliness were a joy to watch and be a part of. They clearly did not often have visitors. If it had not been for the shack of a house, dirt floors and pounds of laundry hanging on wires strung through the trees, these folks could have been stars on a Mexican version of The Brady Bunch and I might have accepted their offer to let me stay with them.
Then the one little girl returned, arms filled with a half dozen little glass jars, each one holding a dead, largely decayed snake in some sort of fluid. That was the collection they wanted to show me and I examined each with real wonder. They all continued to spew out words so fast, I had to ask them to speak more slowly in the hopes I could pick out a few. After numerous requests for them to “repetir,” and considerable effort to patch together some meaning, I finally got it. If I had understood every word, the conversation would have gone differently, but I didn’t so it went something like this: They had been asking me where I was staying. I had been responding with the word “no,” meaning I did not understand what they were saying, but they decided I had “no” where to stay. The same miscommunications happened regarding my eating. When all was said and done, I suddenly realized that they were now asking me to dinner, offering their hammock as my bed and saying I could stay with them as long as I needed.
Such were the people I met all through Mexico, wonderful, generous with all they had, which for the hideously disadvantaged by their so-called democracy, was nothing.
The only exceptions to these wonderful people were their “on the take” politicians and one diminutive old lady at an unusually uncrowded train station. On a quiet Sunday I was getting on a subway in Mexico City to go to Maximilian’s Castle, when it seemed that all the few others waiting chose the same door as I to get on the train. It was a tight squeeze and I did what had been my habit and put my hand in the pocket where I knew my wallet to be. Only this time I found another hand in my pocket with my wallet in it. I turned to see who it was and it was a tiny little lady somewhere in her 40s or maybe 70s (ages can be hard to tell in Mexico), who looked up at me with an embarrassed expression and said “Oops.”
“Oops?” I repeated, “Is that Spanish or English?”
One of the Mexican presidential candidates came to the little town I had chosen for my Spanish lessons. A fellow who would become Mexico’s president named Salinas de Gortari. His party, PRI, had planned a celebration and parade down the main street. I went a little early to get a good view. Maybe one or two thousand people were milling about on both sides of the long avenue. I waited some twenty minutes past the appointed hour. Then a hint that the parade was in progress—a small group of four or five musicians that walked by dabbing at their musical instruments. Following them there was just a bunch of stragglers, mostly in suits walking and talking with each other. I only knew it was the president-to-be by the back of his head. He was balding in a distinctive pattern that I recognized from his pictures. No one cheered; there was no commotion whatsoever as he passed down the street. Once passed, the crowd began to quickly disperse with a long line forming in front of some folding tables that had what I thought was some kind of petition to sign. When I asked what it was, I discovered it was for teachers. They had closed the town’s schools on the condition that the teachers and their families show up on the parade route and sign in to prove they had actually attended the parade.
A couple of weeks later I found myself in Oaxaca, Mexico to see another serious contender. I could not tell if he was a crook or not, but there was zero doubt that he was the candidate when he arrived. He was scheduled to give a speech in the town’s zocalo or central park. Again, I went early to get a good view. I was lucky I did. The place was flooded by thousands of noisy cheering supporters. Being taller than just about every other person in the crowd I saw the candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, arrive in a short line of cars about 100 yards away. He was immediately incased in a circle of bodyguards who had locked arms to keep his mob crowd of fans from ripping some souvenir out of his clothing. No rock star ever had a more enthusiastic mass of frenzied supporters. I knew then and there who would win or should win.
Some weeks later the election was held. I read that all of the state-run computer systems failed and when they were brought back online . . . well, I was glad and thankful that I was back home, where we would never allow corruption on that scale to stand. Right?
Near what was to become the end of my “walk-about,” I found myself in a sleepy tropical fishing village. It had no electricity, no phones, no roads to it. If you got there at all, you got there by boat. Surrounded by mountains, it was perfect for me, and so there I stayed under a palm-thatched roof with an open-air toilet and propane grill, in my cheese- clothed bed swinging from ropes, for a few dollars a night. I would return there several times over the years. But it was on that first visit, with thoughts of politics still eating away in my brain and American’s inability to see or deal with what politicians, their hacks, and the major parties were doing to it, that I got smacked with what would become my life’s work.
For decades I have been arguing about the power of ONE. I argue with “doubt I will vote” citizens: “A vote is like a little hard chunk of power, if you don’t use it, it doesn’t disappear it just makes everyone else’s chunk more powerful.”
And as a long forgotten influential once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
