On Thursday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to let corporations spend as much money as they want on campaign contributions. Companies can all buy commercial time to run commercials right through the election. This is great news for the American people.
Some may call this a case of activist judges running amok, but I believe this is what the founding fathers wanted when they first incorporated this country. As a congressman, I have frequently found myself wishing that insurance companies and banks could make their voices heard so I would know how they feel on certain issues—now I can finally hear their side of things. It is great to know that industry can finally have its voice heard.
My father was thrilled to find out that he would no longer have to finance 90% of my campaign alone. For those of you who have been sending in campaign contributions, you have my gratitude, but it is no longer necessary. You can stop sending me money. This is a victory for the little guy to because it was thanks to large organizations like Freedom Works that the Teabag movement was funded.
To corporations I would like to say, “I’m listening.” If there is anything you need, my door will always be open to you. I am very interested in selling the naming rights to my seat in congress much like professional sports teams do. Every time I am interviewed on television, instead of saying Jack Kimble (R-CA) it could say Jack Kimble (R-CA-Citibank) or Jack Kimble (R-CA-PNC). This is tremendous news for democracy and for the robocall industry. After all, corporations who need other corporations are the luckiest corporations in the world.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Saturday, December 26, 2009
My new Spanish Language Commercial
I believe strongly in reaching out to all my constituents. As a fluent Spanish speaker and wrote and did the voice over on this campaign ad myself as a way of trying to show my support for the Mexican community. We still have a lot of Spanish in California from when the state used to be Mexico and we must reach out to them to grow the Republican Party.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Christmas Wishes from Congressman Jack Kimble
To all my constituents in the 54th District and throughout the country, I wish to extend my warmest Christmas wishes to you and yours. While some of you may not be Christians, I feel perfect comfortable wishing you a Merry Christmas because Jesus saved all mankind and not simply Christians.
To Jews who celebrate Hannukah on the 25th, I wish you a blessed day on the most sacred day on the Jewish calendar. I think the fact that both Christianity and Judaism celebrate the exact same day says a lot. It is important we respect all religions as Christianity is not the only path to the light of Jesus Christ.
I know how truly blessed I am to be able to be a congressman for the greatest district in the greatest country in the world. In the year ahead, we must all make an effort to stand up and be counted. It doesn't matter if you have expensive clothes, or a fancy high school diploma, or even all your teeth. Until the Democrats in Congress and the White House hear from the everyday people in this country, they will continue to try and provide government health care and other services with our hard earned tax dollars. When the government gives it's people the most basic necessities of life, it can also take them away. This is what socialism is all about.
Have a joyous holiday and a blessed 2010. I will continue to try and fight the good fight in Washington, but we definitely need the help of the people back home if we are to put this country back on the right path it was on under President Bush.
Congressman Jack
Friday, December 11, 2009
Chapter Two of my Memoirs
It's hard to find the time to write. I'm trying to do 2,200 words per week. This is about halfway through the second chapter.
Chapter Two
The Kimbles of Rancho Podrido
Rancho Podrido was a great place to be born. The name in Spanish means beautiful oasis and it was named this by California’s first settlers because of it’s lush fertile fields and a curious odor from the wild flowers that grow in the area. Mom and dad still live there on the original property that my great great grandfather John Kimble first purchased in 1869. My great great grandfather who was a Vermont Yankee had gone down South to make his fortune after the Civil War helping to rebuild the Confederate states. He had done quite will for himself before a disagreement had sent him West.
When he arrived in California, he fell in love with a drink called the Martinez which was the forerunner of the modern martini. The drink called for an olive and for my grandfather, it was love at first sight. He immediately began growing olives on his property. Unfortunately, at this time olive pitting was still done by hand and it was extremely dangerous. Farm workers frequently lost their fingers in olive pitting accidents and loss of life was sadly not uncommon. In 1874, my great great grandfather changed all that with his invention of the Kimble Olive Pitter. That was the beginning for our family’s fortune and prosperity. When John Kimble died in 1915, his estate was valued at over $6,000,000.
With such a sizable fortune, it would have been very easy for the Kimbles to get complacent over the years, but there was always a compulsion towards not only building wealth, but towards service as well. After a large chunk of the Kimble fortune was lost in the Great Depression, my grandfather Warren and his brother Calvin built it right back up and then some through public service.
December 7, 1941 was a dark day for United States. With a surprise attack, the Japanese had thrusts us into the middle of World War II, but America responded. As Hitler told one of his aides, “we have awoken a sleeping giant.” California was put into a turmoil because many in the state felt that they were the next target of the Japanese. This led to incredible tensions between the regular people of California and the many hard working Japanese who lived there.
As you might imagine the Kimble men were at the forefront of public defense. They organized air-raid preparedness drills, sold war bonds, and led drives to bring in much needed rubber and scrap metal for the troops overseas. They lobbied hard to get the Japanese in California relocated to camps for their own safety as well as the safety of the normal residents. When the word came down that President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066 mandating that all Japanese be placed in internment camps, Calvin and Warren celebrated. Still, they could not help but feel sorry for the many hard working and patriotic Japanese who risked losing everything. The Kimble men rode to the rescue. They bought the homes and businesses of countless Japanese people, giving them needed money for the camps while at the same time striking good bargains for themselves. By the end of the war, the Kimbles were one of the wealthiest families in California.
When my father was born, Joseph Kimble knew that the size of the family’s holdings would require him to work full time just to manage our own wealth. He knew this would close many doors to him, but he had dreams for his children. I have already mentioned his work with the Robert Barid Society, but he was involved with all aspects of the California government and was a personal friend of celebrities like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant. Still he hoped that one day, one of his sons would grow up to become President.
My mom Angela had been something of a beauty queen. She had competed in the Miss Corn Dog and the Miss Olive pageants, but the happiest day of her life she always told us was in 1956 when she won the Miss Quick Draw Pageant. It wasn’t as large as some of the other competitions my mom had entered in, but she was intrigued by the scoring which replaced the question segment of the contest with target shooting. It was at the gun show where she competed that she first met my dad. We may have gotten our love of politics and conservative values from my dad, but it was our mom who instilled in us our love of guns and our good looks.
Growing up, I had two brothers and one sister. Joe Jr. was the oldest Kimble and expected to be the one to go on to glory. He had movie star good looks and he was a straight A student while playing quarterback for the football team. Robert was my younger brother who was both brilliant and a terrible pest. My sister Gladys rounded out the family. I think she’s around my age. I know she was a couple of years ahead of me in school.
When it came to raising us boys, my parents followed one simple philosophy. Give children guidance, but let them make their own mistakes. My parents did not coddle. My father was so busy with his politics and his work and my mother was always so occupied with her social responsibilities and her Miltown and Librium. They simply refused to coddle us. They would let us do our own thing and then only get involved if there were problems or repercussions for our actions. I couldn’t count how many tough situations my dad got us out of by a shrug of his shoulders, a sigh, a “boys will be boys”, and an open check book.
Rancho Podrido was a sweet start in life. The weather can be brutal when driving rains and mud wash out Sutter Street or the fires in the hills threaten to encroach on the beautiful and pastoral landscapes of the town below. There is something special about the salty smell of the ocean air and the way it mixes with the fumes from the carpet factory in the autumn when contemplation is best. The sunsets are a bright and vibrant shade of burnt orange that exists nowhere else on the planet. My mother has been trying to dye her hair that color for 30 years, but it simply cannot be done.
When I think back to my childhood I remember walking by the town’s taverns with my brothers looking for drunks who had passed out so that we could poke them with a stick. I remember little league games and my father yelling at the coaches, umpire, and other parents. I remember Catholic School and arguing with the nun that taught math class that borrowing was a ridiculous concept when three minus five was negative two and borrowing would simply incur unneeded debt.
I shared a bedroom with my brother Robert while Joseph Jr. had his own bedroom and Gladys slept in a closet I think. Trying to get to bed with Robert around was nearly impossible. He would keep you up half the night with questions and then when you had just drifted off to the first moments of slumber, he’d have another question to ask and you’d never be able to get back to bed.
We didn’t have Little League in Rancho Podrido, but we did have baseball. After World War II, a farmer by the name of Charlie Pickens created 2 very nice baseball fields on his land and Pickens League baseball was started. When Charlie passed away in 1964, the town bought the land from his widow. By then Pickens League baseball was drawing 50 players every year between the ages of nine and twelve for a league. My older brother Joe had been a star pitcher for his team and led them to the championship in 1970 and 1971. Unfortunately, Bobby and I weren’t as talented as Joe was.
The four teams in our league were called The Braves, Indians, Red Skins, and Savages. They had originally all been sponsored by a cigar shop with an Indian motif. My team was the Savages and we were inept. Our coach was a nice man and a very positive role model named Frank Kraft. Unfortunately, Frank always seemed more interested in us learning how to do things the right way, exhibiting good sportsmanship, and having fun, that we were the laughing stock of the league. He refused to yell at his players no matter what they did. It got so bad, that fathers and the occasional mother in the stands would have to hold up the game to run out on the field and berate their own child. The whole time Frank is in the dug out yelling things like, “Good try Jeremy. You’ll get them next time.”
My dad tried to get Kraft to resign as coach without luck, but he wouldn’t budge. Fortunately, my father didn’t give up either. When my dad bought new uniforms for every team in the league, they agreed to let him be co-manager. Calling Frank Kraft and equal decision making partner with my dad would be like saying Dick Cheney consulted with President Bush on the tough decisions he had to make to run this country during his eight years as Vice-President. The truth is my dad had such a powerful personality that Kraft soon learned to keep himself occupied keeping score and redrawing the chalk lines on the base paths.
When my dad took over as manager, the first thing he did was to let my brother Bobby and I pitch. Frank Kraft had refused to let us pitch because we had trouble getting the ball anywhere near the plate, but my dad used that as a strength. He hired the 16 year old boys who umpired our games to work for him and immediately the calls in our games improved. Bobby and I soon became star pitchers in our own right as we found ways to pitch the ball where it would be called a strike, but where nobody could possibly reach it. I specialized in bouncing it in to home plate just under the hitters bat.
My dad was inspired by the way his own father had helped the Japanese-Americans in World War II to try to do something for the Mexican workers in his own fields. He believed that nothing could help Americanize the boys like the game of baseball could. I remember how shocked I was when five Mexican boys showed up at our field one day during practice. At first I thought they were there to mow the grass. These boys looked nothing like us. Their skin was a leathery brown from being in the hot sun all summer. Three of them were six feet tall. Two had mustaches. My dad informed me, “Mexican boys just mature faster.” At first there was a big stink created by the parents on other teams. This was my first experience with prejudice first hand. These were good kids, no different from me or my friends—only Mexican. Jorge was so in love with his new country that when he was drafted in June, he went to Vietnam instead of telling the draft board that he was only 11. We could have really used his bat for the championship.
Vinnie, Ivan, Guillermo, Ricardo, Bobby, and I won the championship in the summer of 1973. The season taught me that if you want anything bad enough you can achieve it through teamwork and cooperation. It taught me that losing is for losers and that any game worth competing in, is worth winning. Above all, it instilled in me the love of athletics and youth sports that I still have to this day.
I went to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Grammar School where discipline and academic excellence were the order of the day. Our Lady had a long tradition of excellence and fiscal conservatism which was refreshing to see in a religious school at the time. The school’s principal was Sister Agnes who had first joined the convent after breaking up with her fiancé at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She stood less than five feet tall and she had to use a cane, which made a very effective weapon for intimidating unruly 8 year old boys like me. Being called into her office meant a hard grilling not just on what you did, but on your faith as well. I will always remember when I got in trouble for stealing from the missions, “Your crime Jack, isn’t that you stole a dollar, it’s that you wasted it,” she said, “What if you had bought four candy bars with that dollar and sold them for fifty cents each. You could have repaid the mission with interest and still kept a generous cut for yourself.”
In the 1960s and 1970s the Catholic Church was going through a very tough time trying to find its way after the sweeping changes of Vatican II. My father, in particular, was very freaked out by the priest now facing the congregation. He insisted for over a decade that our pastor was spying on him. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows seemed very far removed from this new wave of change spreading through the Catholic Church like small pox through an Indian reservation. Economists nowadays would say that what the nuns taught us was supply side economics, but the term hadn’t even been invented yet. What they taught us was good old fashioned morals and a faith that the best way to help people and follow Jesus was not to throw money at poor people who in desperate times would simply be tempted to spend it all on booze. Instead, we should do what we could to help the responsible members of our community who owned businesses and would be able to hire the homeless if only we would lower the taxes these businessmen paid.
When I finally graduated grammar school in 1977, we had to go immediately after the ceremony to return our caps and gowns in the school gym. This also gave our teachers a chance to pass on that final pearl of wisdom to us before we went out into the world. I still remember talking to Sister Agnes after the ceremony.
“I’m proud of you Mr. Kimble,” said the diminutive nun.
“I’m proud of me too sister, but you don’t have to call me Mr. Kimble,” I responded.
She tilted her head, “You’re becoming a man Jack. I see big things in your future. I can see you as a member of the United States House of Representatives or even as President someday after an ineffectual, but groundbreaking Democrat suffers through a terrible one term administration.”
“Wow sister!” I said excitedly, “I don’t know if I could ever be a congressman. Those people are so smart.”
“You’re smart in your own way too Jack. The only reason your classmates said otherwise is because they were jealous of you. You have a very special kind of intelligence. I want you to do something for me,” she said.
I proudly told sister, “anything I can do for you sister, just name it.”
She responded, “You know, Jack I wasn’t always a nun. When I was but a young girl I had wanted to get married more than anything in the world. I met a very young boy from a very well to do family named Jonathan Cole. His family was very prosperous, but when the 16th amendment was passed, he no longer had enough money to marry me. I did the honorable thing and broke up with my Johnny to become a nun, but I still think back to what might have been.”
“I’m so sorry sister,” I said choking back my own tears.
“I don’t have many days left on this world Jack, but I’m asking you from the bottom of my heart, if you ever do become a congressman fight with all you’ve got to keep taxes low so that others won’t share my fate.”
“I will sister,” I promised with all my heart.
From that day on, I swore that if Sister Agnes believed in me, maybe I should consider a life in politics. My dad already seemed to be grooming my brother Joe as the family’s political hope. I mentioned my brother’s prowess on the baseball field, but as a junior at Heritage Valley High School, Joe was the starting quarterback on the football team and was just elected to become the Student Council President. Between the two of us, we would run things at that school. Joe would lead the student council, the football team, and the baseball team. I would lead the chess club, the audio-visual society, and the Teenage Republicans. Joe had the good looks of a young James Dean or Barry Williams and I couldn’t wait until I grew out of the awkward phase that I was stuck in. Joe promised me that it would happen soon enough.
Having a brother at the school made Heritage Valley High much less intimidating for me and a year later for Bobby too. Because there was no convenient Catholic School nearby, I also had a lot of friends follow me from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Some of these boys like John E. Lee and Andrew Harding would prove important to my future life as well. Defending each other from a couple of members of the field hockey team determined to shove us into our own lockers wasn’t much different than defending each other against unsubstantiated Democrat political attacks or unwarranted FBI investigation.
The chess club is where I truly came into my own. Like many kids my age, I was caught up in the excitement of Bobby Fisher and when I heard the best players were from the Soviet Union, I was determined to do whatever it took to crush them. I often fantasized about being a famous chess player on a good will tour in Russia and using that cover to assassinate the Soviet leaders. Of course, that fantasy passed when Ronald Reagan liberated the Eastern Block from its Soviet Overlords.
My brothers were much better tacticians than I was. Bobby would plan 10 steps ahead when he played chess. I wasn’t equipped with anything close to their natural talents, but I once overheard my coach tell my dad that he’d never had another chess player work harder. Overhearing those words was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Maybe God didn’t give me a naturally tactical mind--other players were smarter, more creative, had better hygene—but I loved competition. I loved pushing myself sometimes even through pain to reach a goal. My gift was determination and resolve or actually I guess that’s really two gifts, but they’re gifts I’ve relied on ever since.. At the chess table I learned how to use a scowl, trash talking, or a sharp kick in the shins to take my opponent of his or her game. If I found out the student I would be competing against had just broken up with a girlfriend or had a parent pass away, I knew I was not going to lose that match. I was getting nearly as many accolades as a freshman chess prodigy as my brother Joe was getting from the athletic fields. That all changed on one horrible day July 17, 1978.
Chapter Two
The Kimbles of Rancho Podrido
Rancho Podrido was a great place to be born. The name in Spanish means beautiful oasis and it was named this by California’s first settlers because of it’s lush fertile fields and a curious odor from the wild flowers that grow in the area. Mom and dad still live there on the original property that my great great grandfather John Kimble first purchased in 1869. My great great grandfather who was a Vermont Yankee had gone down South to make his fortune after the Civil War helping to rebuild the Confederate states. He had done quite will for himself before a disagreement had sent him West.
When he arrived in California, he fell in love with a drink called the Martinez which was the forerunner of the modern martini. The drink called for an olive and for my grandfather, it was love at first sight. He immediately began growing olives on his property. Unfortunately, at this time olive pitting was still done by hand and it was extremely dangerous. Farm workers frequently lost their fingers in olive pitting accidents and loss of life was sadly not uncommon. In 1874, my great great grandfather changed all that with his invention of the Kimble Olive Pitter. That was the beginning for our family’s fortune and prosperity. When John Kimble died in 1915, his estate was valued at over $6,000,000.
With such a sizable fortune, it would have been very easy for the Kimbles to get complacent over the years, but there was always a compulsion towards not only building wealth, but towards service as well. After a large chunk of the Kimble fortune was lost in the Great Depression, my grandfather Warren and his brother Calvin built it right back up and then some through public service.
December 7, 1941 was a dark day for United States. With a surprise attack, the Japanese had thrusts us into the middle of World War II, but America responded. As Hitler told one of his aides, “we have awoken a sleeping giant.” California was put into a turmoil because many in the state felt that they were the next target of the Japanese. This led to incredible tensions between the regular people of California and the many hard working Japanese who lived there.
As you might imagine the Kimble men were at the forefront of public defense. They organized air-raid preparedness drills, sold war bonds, and led drives to bring in much needed rubber and scrap metal for the troops overseas. They lobbied hard to get the Japanese in California relocated to camps for their own safety as well as the safety of the normal residents. When the word came down that President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066 mandating that all Japanese be placed in internment camps, Calvin and Warren celebrated. Still, they could not help but feel sorry for the many hard working and patriotic Japanese who risked losing everything. The Kimble men rode to the rescue. They bought the homes and businesses of countless Japanese people, giving them needed money for the camps while at the same time striking good bargains for themselves. By the end of the war, the Kimbles were one of the wealthiest families in California.
When my father was born, Joseph Kimble knew that the size of the family’s holdings would require him to work full time just to manage our own wealth. He knew this would close many doors to him, but he had dreams for his children. I have already mentioned his work with the Robert Barid Society, but he was involved with all aspects of the California government and was a personal friend of celebrities like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant. Still he hoped that one day, one of his sons would grow up to become President.
My mom Angela had been something of a beauty queen. She had competed in the Miss Corn Dog and the Miss Olive pageants, but the happiest day of her life she always told us was in 1956 when she won the Miss Quick Draw Pageant. It wasn’t as large as some of the other competitions my mom had entered in, but she was intrigued by the scoring which replaced the question segment of the contest with target shooting. It was at the gun show where she competed that she first met my dad. We may have gotten our love of politics and conservative values from my dad, but it was our mom who instilled in us our love of guns and our good looks.
Growing up, I had two brothers and one sister. Joe Jr. was the oldest Kimble and expected to be the one to go on to glory. He had movie star good looks and he was a straight A student while playing quarterback for the football team. Robert was my younger brother who was both brilliant and a terrible pest. My sister Gladys rounded out the family. I think she’s around my age. I know she was a couple of years ahead of me in school.
When it came to raising us boys, my parents followed one simple philosophy. Give children guidance, but let them make their own mistakes. My parents did not coddle. My father was so busy with his politics and his work and my mother was always so occupied with her social responsibilities and her Miltown and Librium. They simply refused to coddle us. They would let us do our own thing and then only get involved if there were problems or repercussions for our actions. I couldn’t count how many tough situations my dad got us out of by a shrug of his shoulders, a sigh, a “boys will be boys”, and an open check book.
Rancho Podrido was a sweet start in life. The weather can be brutal when driving rains and mud wash out Sutter Street or the fires in the hills threaten to encroach on the beautiful and pastoral landscapes of the town below. There is something special about the salty smell of the ocean air and the way it mixes with the fumes from the carpet factory in the autumn when contemplation is best. The sunsets are a bright and vibrant shade of burnt orange that exists nowhere else on the planet. My mother has been trying to dye her hair that color for 30 years, but it simply cannot be done.
When I think back to my childhood I remember walking by the town’s taverns with my brothers looking for drunks who had passed out so that we could poke them with a stick. I remember little league games and my father yelling at the coaches, umpire, and other parents. I remember Catholic School and arguing with the nun that taught math class that borrowing was a ridiculous concept when three minus five was negative two and borrowing would simply incur unneeded debt.
I shared a bedroom with my brother Robert while Joseph Jr. had his own bedroom and Gladys slept in a closet I think. Trying to get to bed with Robert around was nearly impossible. He would keep you up half the night with questions and then when you had just drifted off to the first moments of slumber, he’d have another question to ask and you’d never be able to get back to bed.
We didn’t have Little League in Rancho Podrido, but we did have baseball. After World War II, a farmer by the name of Charlie Pickens created 2 very nice baseball fields on his land and Pickens League baseball was started. When Charlie passed away in 1964, the town bought the land from his widow. By then Pickens League baseball was drawing 50 players every year between the ages of nine and twelve for a league. My older brother Joe had been a star pitcher for his team and led them to the championship in 1970 and 1971. Unfortunately, Bobby and I weren’t as talented as Joe was.
The four teams in our league were called The Braves, Indians, Red Skins, and Savages. They had originally all been sponsored by a cigar shop with an Indian motif. My team was the Savages and we were inept. Our coach was a nice man and a very positive role model named Frank Kraft. Unfortunately, Frank always seemed more interested in us learning how to do things the right way, exhibiting good sportsmanship, and having fun, that we were the laughing stock of the league. He refused to yell at his players no matter what they did. It got so bad, that fathers and the occasional mother in the stands would have to hold up the game to run out on the field and berate their own child. The whole time Frank is in the dug out yelling things like, “Good try Jeremy. You’ll get them next time.”
My dad tried to get Kraft to resign as coach without luck, but he wouldn’t budge. Fortunately, my father didn’t give up either. When my dad bought new uniforms for every team in the league, they agreed to let him be co-manager. Calling Frank Kraft and equal decision making partner with my dad would be like saying Dick Cheney consulted with President Bush on the tough decisions he had to make to run this country during his eight years as Vice-President. The truth is my dad had such a powerful personality that Kraft soon learned to keep himself occupied keeping score and redrawing the chalk lines on the base paths.
When my dad took over as manager, the first thing he did was to let my brother Bobby and I pitch. Frank Kraft had refused to let us pitch because we had trouble getting the ball anywhere near the plate, but my dad used that as a strength. He hired the 16 year old boys who umpired our games to work for him and immediately the calls in our games improved. Bobby and I soon became star pitchers in our own right as we found ways to pitch the ball where it would be called a strike, but where nobody could possibly reach it. I specialized in bouncing it in to home plate just under the hitters bat.
My dad was inspired by the way his own father had helped the Japanese-Americans in World War II to try to do something for the Mexican workers in his own fields. He believed that nothing could help Americanize the boys like the game of baseball could. I remember how shocked I was when five Mexican boys showed up at our field one day during practice. At first I thought they were there to mow the grass. These boys looked nothing like us. Their skin was a leathery brown from being in the hot sun all summer. Three of them were six feet tall. Two had mustaches. My dad informed me, “Mexican boys just mature faster.” At first there was a big stink created by the parents on other teams. This was my first experience with prejudice first hand. These were good kids, no different from me or my friends—only Mexican. Jorge was so in love with his new country that when he was drafted in June, he went to Vietnam instead of telling the draft board that he was only 11. We could have really used his bat for the championship.
Vinnie, Ivan, Guillermo, Ricardo, Bobby, and I won the championship in the summer of 1973. The season taught me that if you want anything bad enough you can achieve it through teamwork and cooperation. It taught me that losing is for losers and that any game worth competing in, is worth winning. Above all, it instilled in me the love of athletics and youth sports that I still have to this day.
I went to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Grammar School where discipline and academic excellence were the order of the day. Our Lady had a long tradition of excellence and fiscal conservatism which was refreshing to see in a religious school at the time. The school’s principal was Sister Agnes who had first joined the convent after breaking up with her fiancé at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She stood less than five feet tall and she had to use a cane, which made a very effective weapon for intimidating unruly 8 year old boys like me. Being called into her office meant a hard grilling not just on what you did, but on your faith as well. I will always remember when I got in trouble for stealing from the missions, “Your crime Jack, isn’t that you stole a dollar, it’s that you wasted it,” she said, “What if you had bought four candy bars with that dollar and sold them for fifty cents each. You could have repaid the mission with interest and still kept a generous cut for yourself.”
In the 1960s and 1970s the Catholic Church was going through a very tough time trying to find its way after the sweeping changes of Vatican II. My father, in particular, was very freaked out by the priest now facing the congregation. He insisted for over a decade that our pastor was spying on him. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows seemed very far removed from this new wave of change spreading through the Catholic Church like small pox through an Indian reservation. Economists nowadays would say that what the nuns taught us was supply side economics, but the term hadn’t even been invented yet. What they taught us was good old fashioned morals and a faith that the best way to help people and follow Jesus was not to throw money at poor people who in desperate times would simply be tempted to spend it all on booze. Instead, we should do what we could to help the responsible members of our community who owned businesses and would be able to hire the homeless if only we would lower the taxes these businessmen paid.
When I finally graduated grammar school in 1977, we had to go immediately after the ceremony to return our caps and gowns in the school gym. This also gave our teachers a chance to pass on that final pearl of wisdom to us before we went out into the world. I still remember talking to Sister Agnes after the ceremony.
“I’m proud of you Mr. Kimble,” said the diminutive nun.
“I’m proud of me too sister, but you don’t have to call me Mr. Kimble,” I responded.
She tilted her head, “You’re becoming a man Jack. I see big things in your future. I can see you as a member of the United States House of Representatives or even as President someday after an ineffectual, but groundbreaking Democrat suffers through a terrible one term administration.”
“Wow sister!” I said excitedly, “I don’t know if I could ever be a congressman. Those people are so smart.”
“You’re smart in your own way too Jack. The only reason your classmates said otherwise is because they were jealous of you. You have a very special kind of intelligence. I want you to do something for me,” she said.
I proudly told sister, “anything I can do for you sister, just name it.”
She responded, “You know, Jack I wasn’t always a nun. When I was but a young girl I had wanted to get married more than anything in the world. I met a very young boy from a very well to do family named Jonathan Cole. His family was very prosperous, but when the 16th amendment was passed, he no longer had enough money to marry me. I did the honorable thing and broke up with my Johnny to become a nun, but I still think back to what might have been.”
“I’m so sorry sister,” I said choking back my own tears.
“I don’t have many days left on this world Jack, but I’m asking you from the bottom of my heart, if you ever do become a congressman fight with all you’ve got to keep taxes low so that others won’t share my fate.”
“I will sister,” I promised with all my heart.
From that day on, I swore that if Sister Agnes believed in me, maybe I should consider a life in politics. My dad already seemed to be grooming my brother Joe as the family’s political hope. I mentioned my brother’s prowess on the baseball field, but as a junior at Heritage Valley High School, Joe was the starting quarterback on the football team and was just elected to become the Student Council President. Between the two of us, we would run things at that school. Joe would lead the student council, the football team, and the baseball team. I would lead the chess club, the audio-visual society, and the Teenage Republicans. Joe had the good looks of a young James Dean or Barry Williams and I couldn’t wait until I grew out of the awkward phase that I was stuck in. Joe promised me that it would happen soon enough.
Having a brother at the school made Heritage Valley High much less intimidating for me and a year later for Bobby too. Because there was no convenient Catholic School nearby, I also had a lot of friends follow me from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Some of these boys like John E. Lee and Andrew Harding would prove important to my future life as well. Defending each other from a couple of members of the field hockey team determined to shove us into our own lockers wasn’t much different than defending each other against unsubstantiated Democrat political attacks or unwarranted FBI investigation.
The chess club is where I truly came into my own. Like many kids my age, I was caught up in the excitement of Bobby Fisher and when I heard the best players were from the Soviet Union, I was determined to do whatever it took to crush them. I often fantasized about being a famous chess player on a good will tour in Russia and using that cover to assassinate the Soviet leaders. Of course, that fantasy passed when Ronald Reagan liberated the Eastern Block from its Soviet Overlords.
My brothers were much better tacticians than I was. Bobby would plan 10 steps ahead when he played chess. I wasn’t equipped with anything close to their natural talents, but I once overheard my coach tell my dad that he’d never had another chess player work harder. Overhearing those words was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Maybe God didn’t give me a naturally tactical mind--other players were smarter, more creative, had better hygene—but I loved competition. I loved pushing myself sometimes even through pain to reach a goal. My gift was determination and resolve or actually I guess that’s really two gifts, but they’re gifts I’ve relied on ever since.. At the chess table I learned how to use a scowl, trash talking, or a sharp kick in the shins to take my opponent of his or her game. If I found out the student I would be competing against had just broken up with a girlfriend or had a parent pass away, I knew I was not going to lose that match. I was getting nearly as many accolades as a freshman chess prodigy as my brother Joe was getting from the athletic fields. That all changed on one horrible day July 17, 1978.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
First Chapter of My Memoirs
A few people have been after me to write my memoirs for awhile now. Palin's book has been very successful and Obama's helped lead him to the White House. I thought that I'd give it a shot. This is a very rough draft. If you think it has potential let me know. If you don't, please let me know that too. There's an obvious rewrite that needs to happen. Without further adieu here is the beginning of the first chapter:
Chapter One
Andy Griffith is a Democrat?
It was the Corn Dog Festival in Hampton, August 2005 with the gray dilapidated water tower rising like Olympus above the House of Spaghetti. I breathed in a summer bouquet of corn dogs, elephant ears, and hard working Joes and Janes. The corn dog is the most Republican of foods. You take something delicious like a hot dog, but then you make it better by frying it and you put it on a stick so you can eat it while you work. That’s why corn dogs sell so well in red states like Texas.
As I walked through the park, I could breathe in the fragrant bouquet that the great melting pot of the golden state was cooking up on that afternoon. Foot-long hot dogs and cotton candy. Nachos and egg rolls. The toothless banjo players on the rugged wooden stage and the carnies—always the carnies, those descendants of the cowboys of the old West finding their manifest destiny hitched to the back of an old truck with a 30 year old tilt-a-whirl.
Inching through rivers of people like a salmon drawn to spawning grounds, I saw young carefree teenagers and a young couple holding a small homely baby. There were many older folks who had seen Hampton go from a small town of 3,800 in 1970 to its current size of nearly 14,500 today. These were good honest folk, the kind that America had been built on.
“Hey Jack! You sure love a good corn dog.”
“Oh wow Jack! You sure are ruggedly good looking in a sauce and sophisticated way.”
“When are you going to get into politics Jack? Isn’t it time you gave something back to the state?”
The sun was beginning to really beat down and I wiped the sweat from my brow thinking back to the long day’s on the family’s olive farm when the heat of the sun could turn your skin to leather. As I wound my way through the crowd, a high school dance troupe took the stage and the music began to blare much to the chagrin to the crowd of seniors who had been enjoying the banjo music. I stopped by the Right to Life booth where they were selling homemade fetus shaped butter cookies. I plunked down a dollar and took one of the cookies. As I ate it, I thought of how precious human life really is.
It also reminded me of how impatient I was with politics. I was so tired of politicians raising my taxes to pump up social programs for the people of California when there were so many people who were never born. Why wasn’t anybody doing anything for them? Politics were tricky. I was connected enough with grass roots conservatives that they all asked me when I was going to run for office, but I wasn’t connected enough with the state Republican Party that they’d ever endorse me for congress in the 54th District.
A friendly volunteer from the Robert Baird Society poked his head out of his booth and beckoned over to me. It had been over 40 years since my father had been one of the 12 founders of the group that helped lead the fight against world wide communism, fluoridation of drinking water, the infiltration of the civil rights movement by our country’s enemies, the domestication of cats, and the United Nations. I had hated that way that political machines and their pals in the media had distorted things to make the group seem irrational. I admired the brave volunteers who manned the booth knowing the jeering and heckling they would endure from liberal hippies who protested their goal of trying Bill Clinton for war crimes. If men like these were crackpots because they wore tinfoil underneath their baseball caps or bottled their own urine, then maybe we were all crackpots.
I couldn’t help wonder if I was a little nuts for opening myself up to the same kind of criticism my dad had. A run for public office would be difficult and not all my views were popular with the liberal elite. My father could have easily ignored the dangers of an emerging new world order and lived a happy and prosperous lifestyle. His grandfather’s invention of the Kimble Olive Pitter and our land holdings had made the Kimble very wealthy. However, the Kimbles had always been brought up on the grand tradition of service to others.
It seemed that real public service, crafting policies that were good for business, had been derailed by politics and its infernal machines. I wanted to help people and I had a business in government. It was an interest that had first been awakened as a small child by watching Ronald Reagan and the way he had stopped the Air Traffic Controllers from striking and had brought democracy to Central America. Pursuing public service is what had brought me to Indiana to study at Notre Dame where I received both my BA and MBA in business administration.
Most people starting out in politics have to start at the bottom. I was lucky because with my father’s connections and financial support I knew that the United States Congress could be within my reach. California’s 54th District is rather unusual in that it has a small Hispanic voting population, but the majority of the district is white, wealthy, and over 60. They had been served in the House by Jerry “Hoop” Hooper for a dozen years and like most of the district he was older, white, and wealthy. He also wasn’t terribly influential in the House. In a Republican district, he seemed to have no trouble voting with the Democrats. I knew I could beat this guy.
And so, on that hot August night, I took the stage before an America cover band came on and I faced the electorate and I looked them square in the eye and let them know that I would be running for Congress and needed their support. A whole lot of things could have happened and most of them were bad. I knew that a lot of things could have happened at that moment and most of them were bad. Then I saw a young woman who couldn’t have been more than 25 years old in a white floppy hat. She tucked her corndog in the crook of her arm and began clapping. Then, like a polio outbreak, the applause began to spread through the entire crowd.
I began to stop and smile at the audience and they returned my enthusiasm. As the band behind me began to play the opening chords of Sister Golden Hair, I felt like I was a rock star. I had committed to the race and there was no backing out now. I had developed a strategy that I thought would win in this district, but I needed to implement it well.
I had done a little bit of research before entering the race and I knew that although Jerry Hooper was a popular representative who did well in a hypothetical poll with any opponent, his support was neither deep nor committed. I asked my childhood friend John E. Lee to run my campaign for me, but I made it very clear to him that I had some ideas of my own and I would not be the type of politician that is handled. That wasn’t for me.
John and I had become good friends in 5th grade when we both got our heads stuck in opposite sides of a bike rack when we dared each other to do it. It was November and the wind had a bite to it as we screamed for dear life out on the playground. When the janitor finally sawed us loose he called us “the braniac twins”. Somehow, the name just kind of stuck. Nobody would ever pick on John though because he had a reputation for being mean and if you got in a fight with him, you knew he would bite your nose or ear if he got a chance. Oh yes, he loved to choose noses.
As an adult, John was not all that much taller than he was in 5th grade. At only 5’9” his waist was always spilling out of his pants like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. At 35 years old, he was bald and wore thick glasses, but what he lacked in looks, he made up for in loyalty and an attack dog ferocity which I needed if I was to bring up Hooper’s negatives.
As a fiscal conservative, Jerry had made a major miscalculation when he had argued against a wage increase for home health care workers to $6 an hour. The move was very popular with many of the seniors who voted. Unfortunately, the 54th District has a large number of absentee votes and you can be sure that many of them were filled out by those very same nurses that he was putting down.
Nobody was more popular in my district than the actor Andy Griffith. He didn’t live in the area or even the state, but Matlock reruns on syndication drew higher ratings than first run network programming. One of the local stations had a Tuesday night lineup of Matlock at 5PM, a two-hour Matlock movie at 7PM, followed by another episode of Matlock at 9PM. Jerry had been a bit too friendly with a group of people who were interested in turning that station into a WB affiliate.
The crowning glory of my election strategy would be Andy Griffith’s endorsement. My dad had a friend who played golf with Andy Griffith’s agent. I knew that a picture with Andy Griffith and an endorsement would go quite far in getting me instant credibility with many of the seniors in my district. I had found out when Andy Griffith would be coming to California and I made plans to meet with him to see if I could get him to support my candidacy.
After spending 4 hours driving to Los Angeles and another 3 hours waiting for Griffith to arrive, I finally got to speak to him in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Despite his advancing years, Andy Griffith moved with a spryness that belied just how close to death’s door he really was. We shook hands and I gave him my pitch. I told him how I was pro-business and in favor of the types of wholesome family values that he had always advocated on his shows. I promised him that I would help protect our country from terrorism and the liberal agenda. He sat patiently as he listened to me speak, but then finally stopped me to say, “I’m sorry son, but I’m a Democrat.”
Needless to say, I stood there slack jawed in stunned silence. John immediately lunged at Andy Griffith, but between myself and Mr. Griffith’s assistant we were able to hold John back and hustle Andy Griffith out of the room. I still remember everybody looking at the scene as I screamed frantically, “Cover your nose Mr. Griffith! Cover your nose!”
I had learned a valuable lesson in doing proper research before hand. It turns out that Andy Griffith was well known as a Democrat and the folks in North Carolina had even unsuccessfully tried to convince him to run against Jesse Helms for Senator once. Needless to say, I not only didn’t get an endorsement, but with John frothing at the mouth and trying to bite him, I didn’t get a picture with Andy Griffith that day either. I had no better luck with Angela Lansbury whose grandfather was once the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.
Unfortunately, with the primary slated for October 4th, I had less than 2 months to campaign due to my late entry. Head to head results showed that I trailed Hooper 55% - 41%. I don’t think the founding fathers ever meant for getting elected to be so hard. We tried to hammer Hooper on the issues, but we were only getting so far. I tried to assure that voters that while Hooper had voted for the war in Iraq, that I was even more in favor of it and while Hooper wanted to lower taxes, I wanted to get rid of them altogether, but I couldn’t seem to get much above 40%. Then I like to believe Jesus intervened because what happened next was surely a miracle.
Jerry Hooper was living the American dream. At 62, he was not only serving as a member of the United States House of Representatives, but he was financially well off and his daughter Karen was about to marry Al Giamoti, the son of an Italian immigrant who had graduated Stanford Law School and was doing very well in intellectual property law. Little did Jerry know that his whole world would be crashing down around him.
It was during a late night strategy session when John who first noticed that Al Giamoti sounded an awful lot like the Arab name al-Jamati. At that moment all we had was the inkling of a seed of an idea, but perhaps we would be able to use this to our advantage. The next day during a campaign stop, an older woman asked me if there was anything a liked about Congressman Hooper. I told her I thought he was lacking as a congressman, but was a great person and added that I was really impressed with him as a father. I said I admired his open-mindedness that in the middle of our war on terror, he would not stand in the way of his daughter marrying Mister al-Jamati was a wonderful gesture of international peace and understanding. I also pointed out that al-Jamati was not under federal investigation at this time.
Poor Hoop never saw it coming. Al had dark Italian features and to the voters of my district, he must have looked as Arab as they come. We hired a telemarketing firm to call people and ask them questions about their opinion to the wedding designed to get them to wonder why Congressman Hooper’s daughter was marrying a Islamic extremist. By the primary day, 7 out of 10 Republican voters in the 54th District believed that Al Giamoti was actually an Islamic scholar named Khalid al-Jamati who had ties to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. By the time Congressman Hooper distanced himself from his future son-in-law it was too late.
Congressman Hooper was too old school to really compete with the strategy that John and I employed. He kept trying to talk about his experience and service to the people of the district. These are the sort of things that sound great on paper, but that voters haven’t really cared about since Gerald Ford was President. When he claimed I was dangerously inexperienced, I bragged about my outsider status. When he said my dad was behind my campaign, I claimed my dad was behind his campaign too. He had no idea how to react to that one.
Push polling is a very controversial technique, but I’m not too proud to admit that we used it. In push polling, you have one of your staff show up early at a polling place and dress like a worker for your opponent. That worker then searches for somebody sympathetic looking who is voting for you. They will engage your supporter in heated conversation before eventually pushing them. If you can find a pregnant woman or a senior citizen, they make the best targets. We learned that it’s generally best to avoid veterans, when one of the greatest generation knocked out one of our young interns who tried this. The trick is to not push hard enough for them to press charges, but hard enough that everybody at the polling place that day will be talking about what a jerk you opponent’s campaign worker was. This technique can really swing a close election.
We did everything we could to squeeze out every vote we could. If our staffers found somebody driving obnoxiously or with loud music playing, my staffers were under instructions to follow that driver and when the care finally parked to put a Hooper bumper sticker on it. That way, when the obnoxious driver cut somebody off, they’d see the Hooper bumper sticker.
When the smoke finally settled, I won a very hard fought 49% to 43% victory in that primary. My next stop would be the general election where I would face a real liberal or at least a moderate named Bill Joyce. Jerry Hooper called to congratulate me, but I’m sorry to say that the call was terse and not the gracious concession that I had hoped for from a man I always admired.
“Mr. Kimble, it’s me Jerry Hooper. I’m calling to concede the primary,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t happy.
“Hey Jerry, I was expecting to hear from you. Can you believe how well I’m doing? Pretty wild isn’t it?” I said trying to cheer him up.
“It’s a Goddamned crime is what it is Jack. I had thought better of the voters than this,” he said.
At first I laughed at his joke, but then pulled back as I realized he wasn’t joking. There were a few moments of very awkward silence.
“Well, you won the Republican nomination. I have no doubt the party will be happy to get behind you. Good luck Mr. Kimble,” he said.
“Great Hoop. I hope I can count on your support. I’d love for you…”
Unfortunately, we were disconnected. My staff and I had settled into the ball room at the Bristo Camino Holiday Inn to hear the election results come in. When I announced that I had just got off the phone with Congressman Hooper, the room exploded into applause. An election is hard work and it meant so much to those people that all the time spent passing out leaflets, making phone calls, going door to door, slashing tires, going to rallies, and getting out the vote had not been in vain. The wedding band that I had hired played Kool and the Gang’s song Celebration and we got down Republican style. The energy in that room was pulsing. You could literally feel it. Together, we could change Washington.
There is an unfortunate footnote to the primary. Karen Hooper and Al Giamoti stayed married for a little less than two years. I felt bad for whatever small part the campaign might have played in their breakup. I’m sure it can’t be easy for a couple of young people to build a life together when the bride’s father is forced to distance himself from his future son-in-law for fear of scandal. I wish those two kids all the best. Jerry seems to be doing well since his retirement from Congress. He’s become a regular at a local bar called Schultz’s. I’ve seen him around a few times and he seems much happier without the stress of politics in his life.
Chapter One
Andy Griffith is a Democrat?
It was the Corn Dog Festival in Hampton, August 2005 with the gray dilapidated water tower rising like Olympus above the House of Spaghetti. I breathed in a summer bouquet of corn dogs, elephant ears, and hard working Joes and Janes. The corn dog is the most Republican of foods. You take something delicious like a hot dog, but then you make it better by frying it and you put it on a stick so you can eat it while you work. That’s why corn dogs sell so well in red states like Texas.
As I walked through the park, I could breathe in the fragrant bouquet that the great melting pot of the golden state was cooking up on that afternoon. Foot-long hot dogs and cotton candy. Nachos and egg rolls. The toothless banjo players on the rugged wooden stage and the carnies—always the carnies, those descendants of the cowboys of the old West finding their manifest destiny hitched to the back of an old truck with a 30 year old tilt-a-whirl.
Inching through rivers of people like a salmon drawn to spawning grounds, I saw young carefree teenagers and a young couple holding a small homely baby. There were many older folks who had seen Hampton go from a small town of 3,800 in 1970 to its current size of nearly 14,500 today. These were good honest folk, the kind that America had been built on.
“Hey Jack! You sure love a good corn dog.”
“Oh wow Jack! You sure are ruggedly good looking in a sauce and sophisticated way.”
“When are you going to get into politics Jack? Isn’t it time you gave something back to the state?”
The sun was beginning to really beat down and I wiped the sweat from my brow thinking back to the long day’s on the family’s olive farm when the heat of the sun could turn your skin to leather. As I wound my way through the crowd, a high school dance troupe took the stage and the music began to blare much to the chagrin to the crowd of seniors who had been enjoying the banjo music. I stopped by the Right to Life booth where they were selling homemade fetus shaped butter cookies. I plunked down a dollar and took one of the cookies. As I ate it, I thought of how precious human life really is.
It also reminded me of how impatient I was with politics. I was so tired of politicians raising my taxes to pump up social programs for the people of California when there were so many people who were never born. Why wasn’t anybody doing anything for them? Politics were tricky. I was connected enough with grass roots conservatives that they all asked me when I was going to run for office, but I wasn’t connected enough with the state Republican Party that they’d ever endorse me for congress in the 54th District.
A friendly volunteer from the Robert Baird Society poked his head out of his booth and beckoned over to me. It had been over 40 years since my father had been one of the 12 founders of the group that helped lead the fight against world wide communism, fluoridation of drinking water, the infiltration of the civil rights movement by our country’s enemies, the domestication of cats, and the United Nations. I had hated that way that political machines and their pals in the media had distorted things to make the group seem irrational. I admired the brave volunteers who manned the booth knowing the jeering and heckling they would endure from liberal hippies who protested their goal of trying Bill Clinton for war crimes. If men like these were crackpots because they wore tinfoil underneath their baseball caps or bottled their own urine, then maybe we were all crackpots.
I couldn’t help wonder if I was a little nuts for opening myself up to the same kind of criticism my dad had. A run for public office would be difficult and not all my views were popular with the liberal elite. My father could have easily ignored the dangers of an emerging new world order and lived a happy and prosperous lifestyle. His grandfather’s invention of the Kimble Olive Pitter and our land holdings had made the Kimble very wealthy. However, the Kimbles had always been brought up on the grand tradition of service to others.
It seemed that real public service, crafting policies that were good for business, had been derailed by politics and its infernal machines. I wanted to help people and I had a business in government. It was an interest that had first been awakened as a small child by watching Ronald Reagan and the way he had stopped the Air Traffic Controllers from striking and had brought democracy to Central America. Pursuing public service is what had brought me to Indiana to study at Notre Dame where I received both my BA and MBA in business administration.
Most people starting out in politics have to start at the bottom. I was lucky because with my father’s connections and financial support I knew that the United States Congress could be within my reach. California’s 54th District is rather unusual in that it has a small Hispanic voting population, but the majority of the district is white, wealthy, and over 60. They had been served in the House by Jerry “Hoop” Hooper for a dozen years and like most of the district he was older, white, and wealthy. He also wasn’t terribly influential in the House. In a Republican district, he seemed to have no trouble voting with the Democrats. I knew I could beat this guy.
And so, on that hot August night, I took the stage before an America cover band came on and I faced the electorate and I looked them square in the eye and let them know that I would be running for Congress and needed their support. A whole lot of things could have happened and most of them were bad. I knew that a lot of things could have happened at that moment and most of them were bad. Then I saw a young woman who couldn’t have been more than 25 years old in a white floppy hat. She tucked her corndog in the crook of her arm and began clapping. Then, like a polio outbreak, the applause began to spread through the entire crowd.
I began to stop and smile at the audience and they returned my enthusiasm. As the band behind me began to play the opening chords of Sister Golden Hair, I felt like I was a rock star. I had committed to the race and there was no backing out now. I had developed a strategy that I thought would win in this district, but I needed to implement it well.
I had done a little bit of research before entering the race and I knew that although Jerry Hooper was a popular representative who did well in a hypothetical poll with any opponent, his support was neither deep nor committed. I asked my childhood friend John E. Lee to run my campaign for me, but I made it very clear to him that I had some ideas of my own and I would not be the type of politician that is handled. That wasn’t for me.
John and I had become good friends in 5th grade when we both got our heads stuck in opposite sides of a bike rack when we dared each other to do it. It was November and the wind had a bite to it as we screamed for dear life out on the playground. When the janitor finally sawed us loose he called us “the braniac twins”. Somehow, the name just kind of stuck. Nobody would ever pick on John though because he had a reputation for being mean and if you got in a fight with him, you knew he would bite your nose or ear if he got a chance. Oh yes, he loved to choose noses.
As an adult, John was not all that much taller than he was in 5th grade. At only 5’9” his waist was always spilling out of his pants like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. At 35 years old, he was bald and wore thick glasses, but what he lacked in looks, he made up for in loyalty and an attack dog ferocity which I needed if I was to bring up Hooper’s negatives.
As a fiscal conservative, Jerry had made a major miscalculation when he had argued against a wage increase for home health care workers to $6 an hour. The move was very popular with many of the seniors who voted. Unfortunately, the 54th District has a large number of absentee votes and you can be sure that many of them were filled out by those very same nurses that he was putting down.
Nobody was more popular in my district than the actor Andy Griffith. He didn’t live in the area or even the state, but Matlock reruns on syndication drew higher ratings than first run network programming. One of the local stations had a Tuesday night lineup of Matlock at 5PM, a two-hour Matlock movie at 7PM, followed by another episode of Matlock at 9PM. Jerry had been a bit too friendly with a group of people who were interested in turning that station into a WB affiliate.
The crowning glory of my election strategy would be Andy Griffith’s endorsement. My dad had a friend who played golf with Andy Griffith’s agent. I knew that a picture with Andy Griffith and an endorsement would go quite far in getting me instant credibility with many of the seniors in my district. I had found out when Andy Griffith would be coming to California and I made plans to meet with him to see if I could get him to support my candidacy.
After spending 4 hours driving to Los Angeles and another 3 hours waiting for Griffith to arrive, I finally got to speak to him in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Despite his advancing years, Andy Griffith moved with a spryness that belied just how close to death’s door he really was. We shook hands and I gave him my pitch. I told him how I was pro-business and in favor of the types of wholesome family values that he had always advocated on his shows. I promised him that I would help protect our country from terrorism and the liberal agenda. He sat patiently as he listened to me speak, but then finally stopped me to say, “I’m sorry son, but I’m a Democrat.”
Needless to say, I stood there slack jawed in stunned silence. John immediately lunged at Andy Griffith, but between myself and Mr. Griffith’s assistant we were able to hold John back and hustle Andy Griffith out of the room. I still remember everybody looking at the scene as I screamed frantically, “Cover your nose Mr. Griffith! Cover your nose!”
I had learned a valuable lesson in doing proper research before hand. It turns out that Andy Griffith was well known as a Democrat and the folks in North Carolina had even unsuccessfully tried to convince him to run against Jesse Helms for Senator once. Needless to say, I not only didn’t get an endorsement, but with John frothing at the mouth and trying to bite him, I didn’t get a picture with Andy Griffith that day either. I had no better luck with Angela Lansbury whose grandfather was once the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.
Unfortunately, with the primary slated for October 4th, I had less than 2 months to campaign due to my late entry. Head to head results showed that I trailed Hooper 55% - 41%. I don’t think the founding fathers ever meant for getting elected to be so hard. We tried to hammer Hooper on the issues, but we were only getting so far. I tried to assure that voters that while Hooper had voted for the war in Iraq, that I was even more in favor of it and while Hooper wanted to lower taxes, I wanted to get rid of them altogether, but I couldn’t seem to get much above 40%. Then I like to believe Jesus intervened because what happened next was surely a miracle.
Jerry Hooper was living the American dream. At 62, he was not only serving as a member of the United States House of Representatives, but he was financially well off and his daughter Karen was about to marry Al Giamoti, the son of an Italian immigrant who had graduated Stanford Law School and was doing very well in intellectual property law. Little did Jerry know that his whole world would be crashing down around him.
It was during a late night strategy session when John who first noticed that Al Giamoti sounded an awful lot like the Arab name al-Jamati. At that moment all we had was the inkling of a seed of an idea, but perhaps we would be able to use this to our advantage. The next day during a campaign stop, an older woman asked me if there was anything a liked about Congressman Hooper. I told her I thought he was lacking as a congressman, but was a great person and added that I was really impressed with him as a father. I said I admired his open-mindedness that in the middle of our war on terror, he would not stand in the way of his daughter marrying Mister al-Jamati was a wonderful gesture of international peace and understanding. I also pointed out that al-Jamati was not under federal investigation at this time.
Poor Hoop never saw it coming. Al had dark Italian features and to the voters of my district, he must have looked as Arab as they come. We hired a telemarketing firm to call people and ask them questions about their opinion to the wedding designed to get them to wonder why Congressman Hooper’s daughter was marrying a Islamic extremist. By the primary day, 7 out of 10 Republican voters in the 54th District believed that Al Giamoti was actually an Islamic scholar named Khalid al-Jamati who had ties to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. By the time Congressman Hooper distanced himself from his future son-in-law it was too late.
Congressman Hooper was too old school to really compete with the strategy that John and I employed. He kept trying to talk about his experience and service to the people of the district. These are the sort of things that sound great on paper, but that voters haven’t really cared about since Gerald Ford was President. When he claimed I was dangerously inexperienced, I bragged about my outsider status. When he said my dad was behind my campaign, I claimed my dad was behind his campaign too. He had no idea how to react to that one.
Push polling is a very controversial technique, but I’m not too proud to admit that we used it. In push polling, you have one of your staff show up early at a polling place and dress like a worker for your opponent. That worker then searches for somebody sympathetic looking who is voting for you. They will engage your supporter in heated conversation before eventually pushing them. If you can find a pregnant woman or a senior citizen, they make the best targets. We learned that it’s generally best to avoid veterans, when one of the greatest generation knocked out one of our young interns who tried this. The trick is to not push hard enough for them to press charges, but hard enough that everybody at the polling place that day will be talking about what a jerk you opponent’s campaign worker was. This technique can really swing a close election.
We did everything we could to squeeze out every vote we could. If our staffers found somebody driving obnoxiously or with loud music playing, my staffers were under instructions to follow that driver and when the care finally parked to put a Hooper bumper sticker on it. That way, when the obnoxious driver cut somebody off, they’d see the Hooper bumper sticker.
When the smoke finally settled, I won a very hard fought 49% to 43% victory in that primary. My next stop would be the general election where I would face a real liberal or at least a moderate named Bill Joyce. Jerry Hooper called to congratulate me, but I’m sorry to say that the call was terse and not the gracious concession that I had hoped for from a man I always admired.
“Mr. Kimble, it’s me Jerry Hooper. I’m calling to concede the primary,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t happy.
“Hey Jerry, I was expecting to hear from you. Can you believe how well I’m doing? Pretty wild isn’t it?” I said trying to cheer him up.
“It’s a Goddamned crime is what it is Jack. I had thought better of the voters than this,” he said.
At first I laughed at his joke, but then pulled back as I realized he wasn’t joking. There were a few moments of very awkward silence.
“Well, you won the Republican nomination. I have no doubt the party will be happy to get behind you. Good luck Mr. Kimble,” he said.
“Great Hoop. I hope I can count on your support. I’d love for you…”
Unfortunately, we were disconnected. My staff and I had settled into the ball room at the Bristo Camino Holiday Inn to hear the election results come in. When I announced that I had just got off the phone with Congressman Hooper, the room exploded into applause. An election is hard work and it meant so much to those people that all the time spent passing out leaflets, making phone calls, going door to door, slashing tires, going to rallies, and getting out the vote had not been in vain. The wedding band that I had hired played Kool and the Gang’s song Celebration and we got down Republican style. The energy in that room was pulsing. You could literally feel it. Together, we could change Washington.
There is an unfortunate footnote to the primary. Karen Hooper and Al Giamoti stayed married for a little less than two years. I felt bad for whatever small part the campaign might have played in their breakup. I’m sure it can’t be easy for a couple of young people to build a life together when the bride’s father is forced to distance himself from his future son-in-law for fear of scandal. I wish those two kids all the best. Jerry seems to be doing well since his retirement from Congress. He’s become a regular at a local bar called Schultz’s. I’ve seen him around a few times and he seems much happier without the stress of politics in his life.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
My Thanksgiving Wish to You
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holiday. It's a wonderful time to have the whole family together and follow our own particular traditions. I always like to think of the Pilgrims celebrating that first Thanksgiving nearly 300 years ago at Plymouth Rock. Because Christians were being persecuted in Europe, they had to come to America where they could be free to worship.
Times were very hard for the Pilgrims. They arrived in the winter and they didn't have a lot of food on their ship to eat. However, somehow they made it through the winter in this strange land called The United States of America. When Fall came, they invited over the strange red men they had met called Indians to partake with them in a feast. At this time there were still too few to conquer the Indians, but that would come eventually. Instead, they used the holiday to look for any weakness in the savages.
Those brave pilgrims and their ancestors would soon go on to conquer not only those Indians, but all the Indians from sea to shining seas. I see that same can do spirit in America today. I hope you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and enjoy good food and togetherness. The economy is in a slump now and if your Thanksgiving table seems a bit more sparse this year, please remember all of those who have nothing. It'll make you remember just how delicious your turkey truly is.
Times were very hard for the Pilgrims. They arrived in the winter and they didn't have a lot of food on their ship to eat. However, somehow they made it through the winter in this strange land called The United States of America. When Fall came, they invited over the strange red men they had met called Indians to partake with them in a feast. At this time there were still too few to conquer the Indians, but that would come eventually. Instead, they used the holiday to look for any weakness in the savages.
Those brave pilgrims and their ancestors would soon go on to conquer not only those Indians, but all the Indians from sea to shining seas. I see that same can do spirit in America today. I hope you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and enjoy good food and togetherness. The economy is in a slump now and if your Thanksgiving table seems a bit more sparse this year, please remember all of those who have nothing. It'll make you remember just how delicious your turkey truly is.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
URGENT: Small Children Wanted
As you know, the Senate is voting on Health Care this coming Saturday. It is very urgent that we stand up to the Obama/Pelosi agenda to take over health care in this country, but we can't do this without your help. The vote will be televised live in prime time and as we saw during our vote in the House, the sight of a member of congress holding a small child to argue against health care is a very powerful image. Unfortunately, we have a shortage of small children. What we are looking for is cute children, preferably between ages 2-4 who are potty trained and not criers. Please, no ugly children--they just won't be as effective on camera. We will return your baby safe and sound after the vote. If you have a baby please either phone 202 863-8500 or email Leadership@rnc.org. Please put Cute Baby Available in the Subject line.
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