A half-century passes, and 28 women have accused him of sexual assault.
He finds pleasure in “grabbing them by the p###y.”
He forced his fingers up her privates in a dressing room, and a jury of his peers forces him to pay $80 million.
His former wife and an Apprentice contestant file lawsuits over his sexual onslaughts.
He claims “he can get away with” intruding on a Miss Teen pageant’s dressing room to see contestants undressed, because he owns the pageant.
A flood of pictures appears with him and his friends Jeffery Epstein and his child solicitor, Ghislaine Maxwell. He deep sixes the evidence on this high priestess of pedophilia and provides her with a cushy incarceration.
Yet most white women, 53% support him to be leader of the free world.
Don’t enter politics unless you like to make sausage. In politics, laws are made from the leftover meat scraps of what might have been a good idea, then adding organs, connective tissue, skin, even bones and other parts not fit for human consumption.
I once lived in this process, both in the nation’s capital and my own state’s. I hated working for elected officials, but not as much as I hated being one. The discussions were rarely about what was right or best, but what advantage could be gained over the opposition.
That was long ago, when sausge making was largely corralled by known truths. As one of my early bosses famously said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Today, truths have disappeared, not because they do not exist, but because the trusted arbiters of what is fact and what is not, are now blended in with opinion to lure larger audience and the advertising dollars that come with it. In time, without trusted sources for the facts, Lincoln’s, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people,” would parish from the earth.
Lincoln’s “by the people” can only lead if they have some means to acquire abundant, accurate, relevant information about those they choose as representatives.
My dream came in a hut (no joke), in a little fishing village without cars, streets or phones.
First, find political enemies who thought as I did, that facts mattered. I found two former presidents and a few dozen Senators and Congressmen each partnered with one of opposing views. Even my own opponent for Goldwater’s seat in the U.S. Senate, a young congressmen named John McCain joined in the effort, along with Barry himself.
Second, use teams of students and volunteers to collect reality: the candidate’s bios, stated issue positions, financial sources, public statements, voting records, even the reviews of every opposing interest that existed. In time thousands joined in the effort.
Third, don’t use tainted money. Nothing from selfish political interests, no corporations, unions, lobbyists of any sort. It had to be funded by the American people or not at all.
Fourth, no mistakes. Every documented fact had to be checked and double checked. Each would be entered and then proofed three times, at least once with known errors to make sure the proofing caught all the known errors and nothing else at all.
Fifth, no interpretation, no opinion of any sort, just the facts.
Over three decades the system slowly gained traction, growing from hundreds of thousands into the millions and then into the tens of millions.
It was a success by everyone’s measure but mine. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was on the horizon, and it forecasted an ability to defend democracy with the truth or an ability to confuse, manipulate and destroy that one requirement of successful self-governance: The people’s need for a trusted source.
In my 70s, I entered discussions with Google about how to protect facts, even increase their numbers and usefulness with AI. But I knew I was out of my element and the political world I had known and was so familiar, was crumbling under my feet.
It was time for me to back away and turn my dream over to younger leaders, who might be better in that new realm, and I did.
Turned out that they had different dreams and what was mine, is no longer.
“WHAT WE LEARN FROM HISTORY,” said Warren Buffett, “IS THAT PEOPLE DON’T LEARN FROM HISTORY.”
I have spent almost all my life thinking women were brighter, more thoughtful and compassionate than men.
I suppose that was due to my mother, who was tough but fair in her launching four difficult Kimball boys on her own, into successful lives.
But my view has taken a precipitous drop late in life for many reasons, almost entirely due to white women. So many easily manipulated, flock to jam about this slight or that, then in such parroted confusion as to who’s at fault, most will support a felon convicted of sexual abuse to lead the nation and their families’ lives.
So, it goes in Kerr County Texas where dozens of young women die fighting for their lives due to a bit of money, continually refused for a warning device that would have saved them all. Despite the loss of lives there from a flood just 10 years earlier.
Their Governor, says don’t point fingers at anyone, as he maintains steadfast support for reductions in Medicaid and the end of FEMA whose principal mission is “helping people before, during and after disasters.”
As we are schooled to fight each other, I plead with you to “just follow the money,” an expression I adopted forty years ago, when I was in politics. If you do, you will see the flood of cash flowing to those that least need it from those that most need it.
It is important to remember that the aged are going to forget. That may be why decaying Presidents and Congressmen are endlessly flipping and then flopping on the opposite side of their former selves.
That will be my excuse for letting this all happen.
The Founders, feared authoritarian government above all else, thus constructed a firewall against any possibility of an authoritarian government. Amongst those few who still know, it was the separation of powers splitting power between the three legs of a stool, that gave government balance and prohibited anyone leg from attaining absolute power over the people.
“If you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will fallow,” a forecast that hung in the Nixon White House now cemented in a Congress where their leg of the stool has mortified into water fetching lackies.
Trump now goes for the second leg that bars absolute control.
Today, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance condemned the judiciary, attacking their legitimacy, the final pillar of the separation of power’s protection against an authoritarian.
As the Vice-President said, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” While Musk added, judges who oppose him should be impeached.
When the people finally get it, don’t expect Democrats to defend you. As Hakeem Jefferies, the House Minority Leader suggests, we need to wait for the pitches we can hit or Martin, the Democratic Parties new leader, who says we need to find more billionaires to keep up with the Republicans.
This is WAR, and opposition has yet to find a leader to enter the field of battle believing that The People can govern for themselves.
In a normal world someone standing at the apex of political power going to prison for 11 years would saturate the news. After all, Bob Menendez was charged with leading foreign-policy, and overseeing billions in foreign aid, the sale of arms to foreign powers, holding confirmation hearings, NOT the cash discovered stuffed in his boots and pockets or the gold bars anointing him with his nick name.
I have witnessed such sliminess at every level both as a Congressional staffer, State Senator, Corporation Commissioner, a non-profit leader, and as me.
Sometimes the payouts were enormous from those willing and able to dip the largest shovels into special interest public projects.
While others just getting started get their beaks wet with offers of free trips, premium seating or just some movie tickets. I loved movies, and although I refused all others, I went to see a few free films.
It is a cycle, little known, little written about, but contagious with those elected. You grow a big head; think you are somehow worthwhile and more deserving than those that voted for you.
His Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: “His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited.”.
His Chief of Staff, John Kelly: “A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law… God help us.”
That was the furious, in my face, response to a speech I once gave about the need to provide voters with easy access to accurate relevant facts about candidates that anyone, conservative or liberal, could turn for the truth in absolute confidence.
That quote was from Arizona’s representative on the Democratic National Committee, the “The oldest continuing party… leading with its values…” says their website. It is exactly that horror of hypocrisy that has led to the frustration that Trump feeds and grows on.
Are you going to be a problem
It is not too late. Do your homework. VoteSmart.org, the organization I had been referring to in that speech, is still a place that can help you do it.
Much like me, “I never met a person I didn’t like,” said Will Rogers a century ago.
It’s a sad lesson learned by life’s end that, that feeling is not always reciprocal. As such, it was with Will who later said, “There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like someone exposing (what they really think of you)”
A slap me in the face awareness of this, first smacked me when opening my mail as a State Senator and this dropped out:
Turns out that the slug was from my campaign manager who thankfully also threatened then President Jimmy Carter, bringing in the Secret Service to hog tie him.
People you trusted can be taught to blame or hate from sources you never realized existed for reasons so foreign to your experience, you never, even in your darkest thoughts, fantasized where there.
So it is that most of my fellow Americans, who I trusted and have been so proud and encouraging of, MAY turn to the dark side on Election Day and unleash the lesser, angrier, more hateful selves that nests within us all.
I have been saying that every election for years. There are all sorts of polls of course and some, like say in health care, can be good, good for all of us.
But think about it, are those done by candidates used to find out what you think so they can thoughtfully represent you, or are they used to learn what you want to hear and tailor messages to fit?
If you think those polls are not used to manage you, manipulate you, well then, you are in the modern La La Land of every disingenuous candidate’s dream.
So, I say, lie to political pollsters! What fun it would be if they couldn’t finger who you are and were forced to be what they are?
The headlines tomorrow will NOT use the words intelligent, thoughtful or useful.
Political slapstick has NOTHING to do with leadership. The debate may generate great interest as its promotion has saturated the news coverage day after day after day, but you will only get a picture of what each candidate’s directors, producers, editors and even costume designers have labored over many weeks.
If you want the best vessel to deliver a product, whether it be Cambell’s soup, Kellogg’s cereal or a President, this is the show for you.
When last did any of us have an intelligent thoughtful conversation on a political issue?
I once lived on politics. At parties, dinners, or gatherings of any sort I so enjoyed the give and take of anyone foaming forth with political opinion. I enjoyed it most when secretly agreeing, I would take an opposing view and put the greatest value when my view of things had been changed. Nothing engages more than that moment in an argument when you realize you are wrong.
My wife referred to it as my “party games.”
It is such no more. Most have simply become what they choose to listen to and what they listen to is what they want to hear.
Political discussion has devolved into angry, simplistic argument, regurgitating this self-serving media source or that. Who speaks loudest, most fervently often feels victorious but only hardens what might be a less demagogic, respectful opposition. Views are never changed.
You can look back over the past decades and witness how thoughtful conversation evaporated into slogans, or in today’s vernacular “narratives” successfully punching their way into the public mind, like easy to grasp, quickly satisfying Big Macks.
Absurdly, there is no longer communion on facts. It is no longer a world as one of my past employers put it on the Senate floor, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Today everyone claims the facts. Without a trusted source of what is fact and what is not, voters simply choose the facts they like.
There will never be more Lincoln Douglas style debates that consume the nation’s interest, no longer the hours long arguments atop soap boxes in public squares that followed the American revolution and certainly not the long thought out through examinations of public issues discussed in Greece or the Roman Forum – times and places where the art of argument was a studied and appreciated art that enabled an attentive citizenry capable of self-governance.
Today, a voter’s political discussion is what remains after Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, TikTok and a thousand more attractive entertainments consuming their time. For most, the time left for the “downer” politics has become, is just enough to get a Big Mack loaded with the simplistic self-satisfying nonsense some cook gets voters to eat.
It pained Aili every time I told her story, making her a greater prize for it. Her Vote Smart work was, of course, exceptional, and years later after going on with her life, she became both a great success and one of Vote Smart’s major contributors.
As it turned out, Aili was unusual but not unique. There would be other brilliant, committed young and old steaming through our doors, far more applicants than we could possibly accommodate.
So many interns, and member volunteers were flooding the ranch that the entire office staff agreed to move to town, 26 rough miles away to make room.
I couldn’t keep up with the media recognition they received coast to coast, so I hired a clipping service to capture stories and mentions of their work. Imagine one of those New York Ticker Tape parades burying Broadway somewhere underneath, only with all the tapes smothering our office ceiling.
Usage of our data was going into the millions but none of it seemed to increase our contributions. Were we too academic? Was the truth, the facts just too boring? Was non-partisan politics unstimulating and unappreciated Was outrageousness winning the day? Was what we were doing wrong, what was I doing wrong?
Was I not advertising it enough? I paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times ($90,000) and PSAs that played on dozens of radio and TV stations across the country.
Full page ad New York Times
Was we too complicated. It took almost ten seconds per issue. I had the staff build Political Galaxy, an interactive tool where a user would only need the name of a candidate and any issues they were interested in, and everything associated would instantly appear.
More users, but still little financial help!
The accolades continued to come, the users continued to grow, but the funds were stagnant, running about one million to $1.5 million a year, a whole lot of nothing when compared to the billions now being spent by candidates to manipulate emotions.
My first thought was it was because the “Greatest Generation” was dying off? Then maybe because civics education had been decimated and people had no sense of what it takes to self-govern?
Vote Smart could only keep doing what it was doing and hope that new term “viral” would eventually apply to us.
I was miserable and a noxious poison to everyone. I just did not get why we were not hitting what I called “critical mass,” where every citizen understood they did not have to take it anymore.
For eighteen years our Ranch operated without adequate funds necessary to hire experienced hotel, maintenance, food, or recreational managers. We existed because I put more pressure on interns and staff who were willing to take it for a time. The best of them, those who could stand the line doubled down on their efforts. With some I was able to combine departments or slice the very best, brightest, and most committed right in two. They would spend their days doing what they were terrific at—research–and their nights trying to keep the whole place organized, doling out domestic chores, cooking, maintenance or simply hand holding the homesick or the partiers sick on snuck in booze.
Aili, Cornelia, Jessica, Sara, Becky, Lisa, Josh, Brandon, Brian, Ruth, Jerry, Kathy, Sally, Pat, Steve, J. J., Al, Jean, Jim, Marsha, Aaron, Laura, Goldie–even Good Bunnie and Bad Bunnie, nick names staff gave to two of our member volunteers named Bunny, all come to mind in advancing us toward the Grail.
Hope Springs Eternal: Despite the financial issues, I continued to build as if user success would develop financial success, tomorrow, and if not, then the next day.
We built additions to offices, new cabins, a library, saved the historic 1800’s homestead cabin, built a basketball/tennis court, new bridges, a horse barn, boat dock, a two-story tree house and two-story gazebo with rocking chairs and swinging seats overlooking the river and wilderness to enjoy for the hundreds coming to help over the years. For those less adventurous we constructed a beautiful library overlooking our lake with thousands of books and a bus – well the buss was not for enjoyment it was for work and took off one day going thousands of miles from coast to coast stopping everywhere they were invited which seemed everywhere.
National Bus Tour
Everyone struggled, everyone gave and boy, did they hang together.
Take BOO BOO, a name she earned one excruciating night, an exceptionally talented intern in both the office and out on various wilderness roads, where she would run enormous distances after work, including that night she never returned.
As the sun began to set, panic set in. My first call was to local Search and Rescue where I was told they did not work after dark – “too dangerous at night,” they said. That would not stop her friends, which were everybody. I put together water bottles, flashlights, and whistles to organize teams of three to go out on likely routes. But word of Search and Rescue’s refusal got out before I could gather them. I had to chase down her besties who had headed out on their own without any of those things. I planned routes to search, times to report back, for fear we would have not one, but a dozen youngsters out lost or hurt in the dark, with no knowledge of where they went.
A half dozen teams were organized and sent out, on specific trails outlined on my map with a specific time to be back, or else others would go out looking for them, a rule I gave as a threat.
The searches went on through the night – no sign of BOO BOO. Four hours in, I had to make a second call, the most horrid of calls, to her parents.
With dawn the local Search and Rescue team finally arrived in a room full of the disheartened, limp-legged young people. The very first words they said were, “It was probably a mountain lion.”
The wails and tears instantly pounded the lodge walls. I did what I do on some occasions: I boiled, ordering the rescuers out of the lodge to go do whatever it was they do.
It was 10 am when “BOO BOO” walked in the door. One of our search teams had found her walking down a remote dirt road. I immediately had to excuse myself and go blubber on my own where no one would see me.
“BOO BOO” had gotten lost by mistaking a path that was a long deer route, typical in Montana, eventually petering out. As darkness fell, she did what her Eagle Scout twin brother had once told her, “Find the biggest tree, it will cast your odor out the furthest for the search dogs and cover yourself with any leaves, pine needles or whatever you can to insulate against the cold.”
She did just that. In the middle of the night when a couple of bears paid her a visit, she successfully defended her bed of forest rubbish by growling two little ghostly words: “BOO! BOO!”. Thus her new name.
The staff and interns made things GREAT even in the dead of winter. One year they organized the Cold As Hell National Football League where lunches were spent fighting it out in the snow. They even had a Commissioner who kept each player’s statistics, in case you think these people weren’t great at stats.
It is an odd thing when you lose your second parent, no matter what your age, you instantly sense an orphan’s loneliness in the world.
Maxine Christy Kimball’s four sons secretly spread her ashes around the old family home, the home she had sold a couple dozen years before and I would buy back in a dozen more.
The first ten years at Oregon State and Northeaster Universities were exciting times, and we completed many of our initial startup plans. Some mistakes were made, like the time we gave $40,000 to a mailing company to print and mail out 300,000 of our brochures and letters to potential supporters, only to find zero interest or return on the mailing. An impossible result. The cocky youngster I had hired to run our Membership Department reported that all had gone smoothly with the mailing company and that she had simply misplaced the Post Office receipt, our insurance that the mailing was actually mailed before paying.
On a following weekend, I drove to the town where the mailing company was located and stopped in to get a copy of that receipt. No one was there but the place looked more closed than just closed for the weekend. I walked around the building, looking in the windows. The place was filthy, and I could not make out any equipment. Then through a back window, squinting I could make out rows of stacked and banded envelopes and recognized our logo even at a distance. They had not mailed any of the 300,000 letters. On Monday I returned, the place was as closed as it had been the day before. They would never open again, we would never see that $40,000, and suing a bankrupt company seemed bad money chasing bad money.
I let the Membership Director go, lending to a sense amongst young staff that covering up a mistake might not be better than owning up to it, maybe even $40,000 better.
I was tough on everyone. “Bigger, Better, Faster, Cheaper” says the Daffy Duck statue on my desk. I lived by that motto, and drummed it into everyone every day.
When I saw anyone wasting anything I would pull out my wallet and read three notes, amongst the hundreds that had been written to me by contributors. The first one was from a mother who had clearly sealed up her letter, thought again, reopened it, and added a P.S. in another color pen:
“Dear Vote Smart:
I am sorry! I am an unemployed, single mother of three and simply cannot afford to give you anything. But I wanted you to know that what you are doing is just wonderful and how much I appreciate it.
What you are doing is so long overdue.
Sincerely,
Mrs. McGillicutty
P.S. I have decided that I can’t afford not to contribute. Enclosed is my $35.”
——
Dear Vote Smart:
I have been in government for 27 years and you folks are the first really good thing I have ever seen. I am now retired and living off Social Security which is just enough to cover my food and medicine. I decided I can do without the medicine this month. Enclosed is my $35.
Bill Thomas
——
Dear Project Vote Smart:
I can’t afford $40. I lost my husband and have been in the hospital for a month. But I can give you $10. God bless every one of you.
Mary Mitchell
I would read one of these to a careless staffer or student and ask, “What do you think Mrs. McGillicutty would say if you spent her $35 that way?”
It was very effective. Mrs. McGillicutty gave us $35 and saved us thousands.
Over those first 10 years we were doing well, had climbed to over 40,000 members, but our annual budget was a paltry 1.2 million, or less than one percent of what citizens spend helping congressional candidates’ trash each other.
Years earlier when I was Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission, a conservative columnist who I thought disliked me, wrote a piece referring to me as Daffy Duck. The article was shockingly flattering, ending with “All is ducky at the Commission.” That started a torrent of Daffy Duck gifts for the next thirty years. I would eventually name my log office, which had a short door, The Duck Inn, which had double meaning to any staff or intern invited in.
I hoarded every penny and demanded more, much more, a kind of slavishness that would envy Scrooge. In retribution, the staff presented me a statue. I lived by its motto and relentlessly drummed it into everyone, every day.
Our staff had grown from one to 36 but the number of interns was dropping because all those who qualified for internships had already finished them.
We decided to try and extend our internships to other universities across the country in a National Internship Program and advertised the internship opportunities at our two campus offices.
The applications poured in, far more than we could accept, with most of the young wanting to dip their beaks into the high mountains, volcanos and beaches many had never seen in the Pacific Northwest of Oregon rather than Northeastern.
National Interns working full-time for 10 weeks were far more productive than the local students coming in for just a few hours each week, as if Vote Smart were just another class. Adding to the bonus, National Interns became a great source of new pre-trained staff once they had graduated.
What we needed was more space. Both universities had doubled our space, but we needed far more if we were going to continue on track and start covering primaries and local races.
To build our own research facility and with a bit of inheritance from my mother, I purchased a gorgeous nine-acre property covering both sides of the Alsea River about 30 minutes from the Oregon State campus.
I thought it perfect, nestled in the mountains in what I considered a short drive from campus. As I walked the property line, the sounds of children splashing in the river added to my confidence. When I approached the river I pushed back the shrubs lining it and peered through the mist to see no children at all.
Dumfounded, I began to turn back when from nothing at all I saw a wave rise and travel most unnaturally upstream.
It was fast and magical, then suddenly as it approached falls tumbling over a large boulder, the wave broke and into the air it flew.
I never saw a salmon run. It was mesmerizing. A good omen I thought, something else swimming against the flow, out on a quest for its version of the Grail.
Turned out that a thirty-mile commute into the mountains was not what Vote Smart staff or students were hoping for. Many having seen my “children” splashing in rivers before.
The second effort to buy a place of our own was a large 5000 sq. ft. home being sold for back taxes. Located at the end of a cul-de-sac, it had a back deck casting a view over some of the most luscious productive land in the world—what the Oregon Trail led to—the Willamette River Valley.
The owner happened to be in prison, not so much for the taxes owed as for the factory set up in his basement to build weapons of mass destruction, or what the 2nd Amendment had been written for: The sale and distribution of automatic weapons of mass death with armor piercing bullets.
Anyway, I thought this site perfect too. Adelaide, my wife, not so much. With a look that mixed pity with disbelief, Adelaide questioned, “You see it is in a neighborhood, don’t you?” “Yes” I responded, “Once they find out what we are up to, they will be proud to have us operating next door. I’ll bet most of them will come over as volunteers!”
This is what Adelaide was up against. Sometimes my ability to be out of touch with reality was in every conceivable dimension so astounding as to suggest a pre-frontal intervention by Cuisinart. You probably thought as much yourself from that prior story, but I tell you this, the whole truth here, I simply thought what we were doing was so clearly needed, so glorious, so momentous that every American would instantly understand, would want to play a part, be a part, any part, of this historic re-birth of democracy.
Turns out that the prison guy still had some say and hoped to get out and revive his business in gore.
It is unfortunate that I could not close that deal. It would have provided me with the education that Vote Smart so needed me to have about my species.
When we finally did purchase property, this time with Vote Smart resources, I got that education and an exposure to the ugly in our natures.
Ten miles from campus on the Mary’s River, a creek really, we found what all would think the most private of settings.
The property was down a dirt track that disappeared into a forest of Oaks, crossed a tiny single lane bridge, dead ending at a large barn and small house on a 50-acre farm without a neighbor or other structure in sight.
We purchased the property and named it Agora Farms after the original spot in Greece where many of our notions of democracy came to be.
We began fund raising with our members to pay it off, renovate the barn into offices and living quarters, and began the zoning process to build a research facility the hill side. It seemed such a simple thing. It never occurred to me that anyone would fight the permit, but I had overestimated my own kind – educated, comfortable, self-righteous, progressive, white people.
Will democracy end Nov. 5th because it promoted equality for all, empowering the least educated, least accomplished, least ambitious, dupable to rise up and overwhelm the knowledgeable, experienced few?
