One of the *ahem* “perks” of registering to vote as “decline to state” is that you get political propaganda from all sides. But this is far beyond anything I’ve seen before.
Someone from the NRCC Business Advisory Council called me, at work, to invite me to the “annual dinner with President Bush.” (Not surprisingly, the NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee.)
Someone really missed the boat on that research.
(Meanwhile, having looked at their website, I’m trying to figure out how an agenda can be both progressive and conservative.)
Admittedly, the Democratic party doesn’t line up perfectly with my ideals either, but they seem bigger on things like civil liberties, good citizenship (at home and internationally), consumer rights, and—in a bizarre twist—financial responsibility than the Republicans are these days, and the Libertarian party is too far on the “business can do no wrong” side to be taken seriously. Even small-l libertarianism doesn’t work for me: while I like the idea of small government, I also like the idea of government-as-watchdog, making sure businesses don’t totally screw us over. (Even then, they can go too far, like the eternal cries of “Comic books/movies/TV/video games are corrupting our youth!” that never stop, just jump to a new medium every decade or so.)
I suspect I will eventually find a party I agree with, but there will only be three other members, none of whom want to run for office.
Someone from the NRCC Business Advisory Council called me,
Yecch!
at work,
Yeesh!
to invite me to the “annual dinner with President Bush.”
Triple yecch!!
I suspect I will eventually find a party I agree with, but there will only be three other members, none of whom want to run for office.
Read: engage in a brutal popularity contest in which the tactic regarded most effective is not to publish what your goals (however unrealistic) are, but to wait for the other guy to do so, snap it up and publicly tear it apart in the most vicious manner possible, deriding them for how unrealistic their stated goals are (but mum on what your goals may be, of course). This is a simplistic point of view, I know, but what few election campaigns I haven’t been able to avoid lately are (weren’t they always?) based around the concept of “don’t vote for them” rather than “vote for me”.
Yeah, I know what you mean. For all his faults, I actually liked Clinton. Gore and Kerry both had as their key characteristic the fact that they were not George W. Bush. State elections have been about trying to get Pete Wilson out (though I suspect I’d rather have him in the White House than Bush), or trying to keep Simon out, not about voting for Davis or…whoever was running against Wilson.
I guess I first started paying attention to politics (beyond the “here’s how elections work” lessons we got every four years in elementary and middle school) in 1991-1992. It was a confluence of things, really: I was a teenager, we’d just gone through the Gulf War, I started getting into Model United Nations, and the 1992 election was just plain unusual in that a third-party candidate was taken seriously right up to election day.
And a line from one of Clinton’s 1992 campaign speeches still resonates: “There is no them — there is only us.” And yet people had “Impeach Clinton” bumper stickers very early in his first term — much earlier than I started noticing “Impeach Bush” stickers, and with much less cause.
Someone from the NRCC Business Advisory Council called me, at work, to invite me to the “annual dinner with President Bush.”
Hehehe. Out of curiosity, how much is it a plate for the privilege of attending the annual dinner?
Unfortunately, I didn’t get that particular detail. They called the general number and asked for me, and the coworker who answered the phone asked me, “Do you want to talk to the Business Advisory Council?” I ran through our list of clients, and couldn’t think of anyone who sounded remotely similar, so he sent it to my voice mail instead.
Eventually I got tired of the light blinking, played the message, and was just astonished at the level of irony. I know there are people in this office who would be much more suited for (a) any group calling itself the Business Advisory Council and (b) a Republican fundraiser.