We're With Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics by Alan Huffman & Michael Rejebian

Author:Alan Huffman & Michael Rejebian
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Political Science
ISBN: 9780062015778
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Michael

In between campaigns, during a busy summer of research, I’m able to take a short retreat to the mountains of Colorado. There, in a wood-framed watering hole in a tiny mining town, I meet Paul. He’s preparing to put back a shot of tequila when I introduce myself and ask him how he’s doing.

“Well,” he says, “I’ve got a morphine suppository up my ass and I’m doing great.”

I like him immediately, and even more so when he tells me that he enjoys a pastime of blasting bowling balls into the sides of mountains from a cannon he built himself. So the following day, I meet Paul next to a mountain as he prepares a demonstration involving sixteen pounds of round hardened plastic, gunpowder and a homemade howitzer.

Dressed in a bowling shirt and a shiny helmet with a steel spike protruding from the top, he shouts a warning from an electronic megaphone to any errant hikers who might have unwittingly wandered downrange of his mortar. Then, with a laugh, he ignites the weapon. As the bowling ball gains altitude, traveling at least a half mile into the air, Paul looks over and shouts, “Listen when it starts coming down because those finger holes will catch the wind and that ball will begin to whistle.” Sure enough, it does. And the awe I felt just moments before turns to nervousness and mild panic as the sixteen pounder begins a high-pitched descent in a direction that seems precariously close to me and the other onlookers who’ve gathered for the show. How do you escape the path of a screaming bowling ball hurtling from the heavens when you have no idea where it’s going to land? In the end, you just watch it as it grows larger and larger and hope it doesn’t make its final resting place in your head.

It occurs to me, a few days later when I’m back researching one of our own candidates, that political campaigns can be a lot like dodging bowling balls. You never know who is out there, gunning for you, armed with what, or from which direction the attack will come. Further complicating matters, the campaign managers often don’t know their own candidates, and sometimes it’s hard to tell where the candidates themselves are coming from.

When hired for what’s called “self-research,” Alan and I have a responsibility to examine our candidates as energetically as we do their opponents, which is crucial, yet perilous. We’ve researched our share of candidates who were not born leaders, and who resented our finding information about them despite the fact that the other side would likely discover the same things. Candidates have even gone so far as to actually ask us whose side we’re on.

One sitting congressman got quite miffed at Alan for discovering that he was in default on his property taxes, and had previously paid them late on numerous occasions. Alan thought he’d want to know that not only did the records reflect several late payments, but that he was late now, as in: Maybe you should go pay your taxes.

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