Overview - Outside the Box Thinking
This is a brief overview of my plan to win the November 3rd election and become theRepresentative to the 106th Congress from the Sixth District of Georgia. My opponent inthis election is Newton Leroy Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich is a master politician and has thusfar found a way to beat all the politicians who have opposed him since he first tookoffice. He has the backing of many Washington special interest groups, and together theywill fight very hard to retain their privileged status in our system. It will take nothingshort of a revolution for us to regain control of our government
A revolution need not necessarily be secretive. In fact, there is ample precedent whichsuggests that early openness may well bring forward a more widespread support than would aseries of smoke-filled-room strategy sessions. John Hancock apparently shared thisopenness concept of revolution when he signed the Declaration of Independence large enoughfor the King to see without his spectacles.
I thought for a while that the fact that I am not a politician was a liability. I'veabout reached the conclusion that it may be one of my strengths. It is very surprising forme to learn that there seem to be some 'standard' wisdoms associated with politicalcampaigns. Many of these seem illogical to me. For example, "You can't run a campaignwithout conducting an opinion poll." Otherwise, according to the pro's, you won'tknow what to say to beat your opponent. While this sounds a little bit like having nooriginal thoughts of your own, until you know what sells, I guess there's probably a morebenign explanation. There are clearly dozens of factors that are worthy of considerationas you decide whom to vote for. There is certainly some economy to be achieved if you canlearn which of your positions resonate most fully with the electorate.
But It seems to me that an equally efficient way to learn the voters' interests is toask them. By collecting a large enough number of free form comments, without the structureof a canned survey, I think I can get a better feel for what our voters want, and need.. Ihope to use this web page to get as much feedback as I can.
We can divide our campaign into three tasks:
Deny Meaningful Intelligence but Communicate Fully Within the Organization
It appears that the career politician relies much more heavily on poll results than weordinary citizens realize. They take polls to determine the relative strength of theirposition versus their opposition, the groups where they need some concentration, issuesthat they need to change their positions on. There appears to be no moral or ethical limitinhibiting Mr. Gingrich's use of polls, and he certainly has all the money he needs toconduct as many polls as he wants. Along the way I've been told that my opponent will runa series of surveys to determine how the electorate is reacting to my candidacy and mymessage. I think it important that, from the beginning, we deny Mr. Gingrich anymeaningful feedback in this regard.
I went to a meeting last week where I was the only candidate not on the coordinator'sagenda. He let me introduce myself and, as a way of clearing the air, I said that I wasthe Stealth Candidate, trying to stay below the radar horizon for as long as I can.Everyone laughed, and it even made the newspaper. But it seems to me to be a pretty goodidea.
I think that it would be a good idea for everyone who hears of me and chooses tosupport me to continue that low profile approach. Please answer all surveys that youbecome a part of, that you have never heard of me. I can live with the insecurity thatwill create in me, if it also creates an unwarranted self assurance in my opponent. Sincehe will undoubtedly read this paragraph, be prepared to counter his further probingquestions.
Avoid the temptation to engage in a debate with the surveyor. The only contest we wantto win is on November 3rd.
With the same strength that you withhold comment to our opponents, I urge each of youto think about what's important to you in making a choice between me and my opponent. Letme know what you think, how your values map onto the general issues which we all can list,what new issues you see that may not have yet been raised, but which are especiallyimportant to you. Give me as much feedback as you can. Let's use this web page for a newkind of two way campaign communications. That's pretty revolutionary, too, isn't it?
I am writing this for the purpose of communicating with my supporters, and uncommittedvoters who are interested in learning about the candidates. I believe we might wellprepare for some superficially unfriendly challenges among ourselves until we get to knowone another. There is no reason to believe that every person who reads this document willagree with it. Building trust and accepting differing views is a beginning and continuingchallenge for each member of this revolution.
Build our resources
Everyone tells me that the most important part of campaigning is fund raising. I don'tbelieve that, although I am coming closer to that position every day.
I understand the Supreme Court's position that to limit campaign contributions is tosomehow restrict speech, but I am not completely won over to the notion that those withthe biggest bull horns are entitled to the most free speech. We do need some money, andthe best way to get that is to show that we have a committed force of volunteerssupporting with their sweat equity the same principles we're seeking financial supportfor.
I do think that the most effective form of communication is face-to-face. In adiscussion I had recently with a seasoned campaigner, he told me that, although he wasworking 16 hour days seven days a week, through the whole 5 month campaign, he and hisworkers estimated that he actually stood in front of about 6% of the total number ofpeople who voted for him.
The technological alternative is TV advertising. I expect we will have to find some wayto do some of that, but I will not allow my campaign to be reduced to a duel of soundbites.
A more effective alternative to candidate face-to-face meetings with constituents iswhat I am calling the ripple effect. It may well be the lost link in politics which willbring us back to control of our government.
If you have ever had the opportunity to see a sizeable body of water completely atrest, at least on the surface, you know that even the smallest drop of water falling onit, or a bird lighting, or a twig or pebble falling on it, creates a series of concentricripples that expand from the point of disturbance for an unbelievably long distance. Theinitial height of that ripple is directly proportional to the significance of the initialimpact; its range and endurance is related to the viscosity (or physical memory) of thepond's surface.
In politics, the strength of the initial ripple is a function of the effectiveness ofthe speaker, something I an working on. The resonance and range of the message is a directfunction of you the listeners, your receptiveness, persistence, and perseverance.
I am working very hard to become better educated in matters likely to affect thiselection, and I am honing my speaking skills to try to convey the messages I feel verystrongly about. I have people scheduling me into every kind of group I can conceive of sothat I can at least start as many ripples as possible in the next 4 months. I welcome yourconstructive feedback on all aspects of my presentations.
Without your active help, I might as well be spitting into the wind. (As an old salt,that is not the first metaphor which came to mind.) You hold the key to my success in thiscampaign. And you also are the only way I will ever reach more than 3-6% of the totalnumber of voters participating in the election.
Enhancing the Ripples
You can, and I hope will, catalogue your feelings about the Sixth District of Georgia,and what it needs as a representative. When you've done that, and I hope you'll tell mewhat you feel is important in the 106th Congress' representative, then you need to decideif I am the better choice for you.
Reservaciones online de hoteles baratos HelsingorIf I am the better choice in your mind, then you need to understand several things.
First, you have only one vote. However important that one vote is, it is only one amongthe 200,000 that will likely be cast on November 4th. However, as a ripple, you have theopportunity to magnify that vote a hundredfold.
Think about how you, as someone politically interested enough to have slogged your waythrough this document up to this point, felt when you read that last paragraph. It wasintentionally made negative so that you could feel, at least for a minute, thehelplessness and hopelessness that fully half of our electorate feels.
Of the 497,000 voters in the Sixth District, fully 450,000 of them don't know how manyvoters there are in their district. They probably know generally that the district runsacross the top half of metro Atlanta, and Atlanta has about 2.5 million people in it, sothe sixth district probably has a third or a fourth of that amount. They are convincedthat the only choices on the ballot for each contested office are between two self-servingpoliticians, and that their votes are insignificant anyway.
That same 450,000 will receive a half dozen pieces of junk mail every month from now'til November from various politicians. Almost all of it will be trashed without lookingat it. They will get about 10 phone calls from political boiler rooms either askingpolling questions, or seeking donations. What the vast majority will learn about thecandidates in this district will come from the 30 second TV spots that interrupt theirSeinfeld reruns.
Unless you become a ripple.
If you become a ripple, and in my campaign that can mean a neighborhood foot soldier, aprecinct platoon commander, a staff segment coordinator, or a countywide battalioncommander, you can help me and yourself leverage your political views into the impact wewant to see in November.
You, and you alone, can reach the 450,000 turned off, disgusted voters in our district,and get them out to vote. You work with them every day. You have coffee with them, meetthem at the water fountain. You bowl with them, you car pool to little league games withthem, you say hello to them at the apartment complex's central mail boxes. And that's howwe communicate.
Our Strengths
I do not like Mr. Gingrich. I believe that he is amoral, and interested exclusively inhis own aggrandizement.
That said, I do not believe that our success will turn on Mr. Gingrich'scharacteristics. I am astonished to see the strength of emotion which this man elicits inour society. Quite frankly, I believe that the strength itself of these emotions shoulddisqualify him to occupy public office. However strongly you may feel against Mr.Gingrich, you must accept, as I do, without understanding where the emotion comes from,that there is a very large number of citizens who believe that he is perfect, that he cando no wrong.
I believe that I offer a clear choice, and, as objectively as I can view it, a betterchoice for the Sixth District than Mr. Gingrich. I can group my strengths in threecategories, Experience, Motivation, and Integrity.
Experience
Mr. Gingrich probably will assert that he has the experience necessary, and I havenone, since he has been in the government since the 80's. I think it is important for usto point out that the only experience Mr. Gingrich has in his whole life has been as anemployee of some government unit or other, and that his legislative experience is just thekind of under the table dealing which the majority of us is fed up with. The experience weneed in our representative is someone who has worked his whole life for a living, whoknows the concerns of the average family.
I am 62 years old. I was educated to serve my country in the military, and I did so foreight years. I joined IBM and worked for them for 24 years, retiring in 1988. I went toschool at night in Washington; I got my MBA while I had a full time job. When Joyce and Imoved to Atlanta, we both went to night school while we had full time jobs, in order toget our law degrees. Since my retirement from IBM I have been practicing law, and in 1994my wife and I opened a small law office in Marietta.
Mr. Gingrich went straight from high school to college. After graduating he went tograduate school, and stayed a student until he had written his dissertation on Educationin the Belgian Congo. He immediately took a public teaching job. While drawing a full timesalary from the state he began his political career, running for the House. He finallywon, and has been there ever since. He has never had a private sector job; he has neverhad to find the money to make a payroll. He has never had to develop a business plan, orfigure out how to keep the doors open, and the employee's jobs safe.
My business experience, in a gigantic company, and now in a mom and pop small business,suggest to me that our government is making a serious mistake not taking a look at thismerger mania which has gripped American business. The six largest mergers in our country'shistory have all taken place in the last year. Chrysler, whom we once thought wasimportant enough to our national defense interests to spend public money to keep out ofbankruptcy, has now been merged into Mercedes, a large foreign car maker. How can we standby and watch this happen without asking some serious questions? I do not think that makingalready non-responsive corporations
significantly larger and still less responsive is in the best interests of
our average citizen.
Motivation
My nickname is Bats, but I don't fit well in the role of caped crusader. I am at theage where I want to close down my law practice and start sorting out 49 years ofphotographs and negatives stacked in various places around my house.
But I'm writing this now, trying to get used to the bifocal glasses that I've had fortwo years. The medical plan that the world's largest computer manufacturer, IBM, providedfor its retirees has been unilaterally changed and reduced almost from the day I retired.When I retired, I got progressive lenses under my medical plan; now IBM won't do thatanymore. Just a cost decision, they explain.
Six months ago the medical regulations required us to go on Social Security in order toget Medicare. We haven't retired yet, but we've been forced into Social Security in orderto have medical coverage. That doesn't make sense. And we still don't have any assuranceat all that our future medical needs will be addressed by our government or our company'sinsurance carrier.
As a matter of fact, as I revise this at the beginning of the fourth of July weekend, Ilearned last night that a very close friend, who with her husband has been dreading, butplanning for some heroic surgery involving his spinal column, was called by the surgeonlate Thursday afternoon. The surgeon had scheduled the surgery for next Tuesday morningwith the husband checking in Monday morning for prep'ing and final tests. The surgeon'soffice said the hospital had just called, cancelling the surgery, because the insurancecompany had just told them it was denying coverage on the grounds that it was apre-existing condition. Now, in addition to being scared to death about the outcome of thesurgery, they get to spend a holiday weekend trying to uncover the nameless bureaucrat whomade this 11th hour decision when the procedure had been scheduled for more than threemonths. This is not the America that I was trained to defend with my life. Mr. Gingrich'shouse has carefully sidestepped any effort to address the health care issue.
I suppose this fits as well under motivation as anywhere else. I smoked for close to 20years, but I quit. (Twice) Last November, I watched my mother-in-law, tethered to some ofthe most powerful medical devices known to man, gasp for breath for two weeks in anintensive care unit as a result of her 50 years of smoking. She took her last breath,thankfully, on Thanksgiving Day, ending her suffering.
When she started smoking, we didn't know how harmful it was, although there isnow some evidence to suggest that maybe the cigarette manufacturers did. We do knownow how serious it is, and we see that the tobacco industry is spending millions ofdollars to make sure that our 'representatives' don't act on that knowledge.
What we still don't know is how successful the tobacco lobby has been with Mr.Gingrich's Congress. The massive pork bill, the Transportation Bill of 1998, was passed bythe House, including some disgraceful payoffs for its supporters; the house sponsor of thebill had the tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike nullified at the two exits which happen tobe at his home, and his office. What Mr. Gingrich didn't tell us was that,imbedded in this 403 page bill was a section labeled "Veterans' Benefits", wherethe treatment of conditions arising from "tobacco use" was removed from the listof things a veteran could expect treatment for. The Government Accounting Office hascalculated this to be a $17 billion savings to the government, and consequently, a $17billion reduction in liability to the tobacco industry. Not a bad tobacco bill, when youstop to realize that Mr. Gingrich hasn't even mentioned it.
Yes, I'm motivated. But I'm not motivated to using this job to have a platform foraggrandizement. I'm not looking forward to higher office, a better place at the publictrough. All I want to do is try to get this government back in the control of the peopleand not the special interests, so that I can retire, and rely on being treated as well asmedical science knows how to, when I get to the point where I need their attention.
Integrity
There are lots of stories about Mr. Gingrich and some personal decisions and actions hehas taken. It amazes me how people react to these. Some people collect them and othersignore them. However much they suggest the actions which we have observed in his publiclife, I hope that we will be able to move beyond them in this campaign. But it isimportant it seems to me that Mr. Gingrich stand before us with the label which hiscolleagues in the House of Representatives have branded him. He was convicted of lying tothem, and fined $300,000. Surely in a land of honorable men and women, lying isdisqualifying.
I've not had an opportunity to sign a $4.5 million book deal with a man whose businessaffairs would clearly be the subject of upcoming legislation. I'd like to think that Iwould apply the same principles to making that decision that I've used all my life, asapparently did Mr. Gingrich.
The way to judge integrity, it seems to me, is to inquire of others who know the personyou're inquiring about. Some of the links in this set of web pages go to articles in whichformer associates of Mr. Gingrich discuss his integrity. I suspect that they have theirown axes to grind, so I suggest that you try to discount personal bias and see if you canstill find some grain of truth in what they say.
You should do the same with me. Talk to the judges, prosecutors with whom I've workedthese past ten years. Talk to IBMers who knew me before then. I've made my share offriends, and yes, I guess enemies, too. But there is not one of them who has any basis toquestion my integrity. In fact, saying what I mean has probably been the greatest sourceof others' irritation with me.
Conclusion
I learned a long time ago that, if you're going to do anything well, you have to knowyour purpose and focus on it. You cannot serve two masters. I want to represent you andhelp re-establish participatory democracy. I do not want higher office; I have no desireto amass a fortune. I simply want to turn this country away from the notion of democracyas a spectator sport, so that I can then rest and catalogue my photos.
I have a laundry list of things I'd like to get done (see above, re business oversight,tobacco industry control, health care) but I don't think it's realistic to expect toaccomplish all those goals in the term of office. The one thing I will focus on, and theone thing that your support of a campaign such as this will guarantee, is campaign reform.
When we demonstrate that the mighty can be felled, simply by the coordinated effort ofthe people, we will start a movement that, within two years, will reach across thiscountry, and foster candidates in every state in this union dedicated to , and supportedby, concerned citizens, rather than gigantic interest groups.
Let's begin, then. The solution is, at one and the same time, simple and complex; easyand difficult; direct and obscure. We simply need to believe. We need to know that thereare better leaders available for us; there is a better way to select our leaders from apool of dedicated, qualified prospects; there is no legal or logical impediment keeping usfrom exercising our God-given, inalienable rights to do this. We have the power to makethe difference. We can win.
We will win.