matters

Dear HillBuzz,

The other night I had dinner with my friend Jessie, where we talked about her applying to law school and how best to structure her application essay to maximize its appeal to the “We Are the World”-styled admissions committee (which, at every university or college, has to be “as diverse as possible”, with a Hispanic, a black, an Asian, a Native American, someone in a turban, a Romulan, a Muppet, conjoined twins, either a flaming gay man or a very angry lesbian (but not both), you name it, on the panel, with as few old straight white men as logistically possible). Jessie’s a Republican, and when I read her first essay draft, it was a standard well-written paragraphed resume of her professional accomplishments — which is what I’d expect a Republican to submit.  But, the United Nations of Political Correctness empowered to decide who gets in and who doesn’t at these schools doesn’t care so much about accomplishments as it’s completely obsessed with NARRATIVE. 

Liberal (and let’s be honest, almost 100% Democrat) admissions committees don’t want to hear about your running your own fashion design company, surviving as best you can in an adverse marketplace and tough economy.  They want to hear about your growing up poor, being abused as a child, overcoming some personal hardship related to your race, gender, sexual preferance, or religion, and essentially seeing how well you manipulate society’s violin on your shoulder, beggar’s cup in hand system. 

Jessie, in the middle of dinner, took a call from her mother and told her she was at dinner with me, and then both she and her mother laughed about something that Jessie explained to me once she told her mom she’d call her back. 

“I told her I was out tonight with my friend Sebastian, who she doesn’t believe is real because she always hears about but has never met on any of her visits up from Texas.  And she said, “Oh, you need to listen to him about law school.  I remember what you said he told you, ‘Listen, I’m a lifelong Democrat, and as a lifelong Democrat I know how to work the system while Republicans don’t have the first clue in Hell.’  That is so true.”  Remember that?”

Of course I remember that because it’s true. 

As a lifelong Democrat, I’m frequently perplexed by some of the behavior of all the Republican friends I made during the McCain/Palin campaign when those of us here at HillBuzz led Democrats for McCain efforts with our whole heart and soul.  

Republicans give up so damn easy at just about everything. 

That’s surprising to me, because on the whole, Republicans I know tend to have a lot more money than my Democrat friends, so maybe they have more fortitude when it comes to spreadsheets than they do with front line action in the real world. 

But it does jive with what Michael Steele said to me a few months back when I met him here in Chicago, and he talked about how Republicans don’t bother thinking about an election until they are almost right upon it, and then the day after the victory party, no matter what the result, they completely forget about politics, organizing, lobbying, you name it until two or four years later when they hobble together an effort again. 

Democrats never stop campaigning. 

The day after an election, we gear up for the next contest. 

If you tell a Democrat “no” to something, we immediately think of (1) how to appeal, (2) who we know that can turn that no into an insta-yes, and (3) what government agencies we can involve to make you do what we want. 

Have a problem?  The government will fix it.  But you just need patience to work the system, and have to invest yourself in writing letters every day until you get what you want, appearing in public with a bunch of signs and recruiting people to stand outside nondescript buildings or busy street corners in the middle of the day screaming and yelling about whatever it is you are mad about. 

I can’t even tell you the number of times one of my Democrat friends have called me up and asked, “Hey, can you come down at 11am tomorrow and dress up in a clown suit and dance around in front of the county building because I want to protest the clowns inside who wouldn’t renew my driver’s license.”  

Sure!

Because this is what Democrats do.  This is what Al Sharpton, the biggest clown in all of clown town, is a childish prodigy at. 

And Republicans haven’t a clue. 

The reason Al Sharpton can get Don Imus fired in a few days is because Democrats, especially black Democrats, increase the pressure on corporations, in particular, every day that they do not get what they want.  Whenever the Al Sharpton call for race-baiting goes out, and the black community joyfully screams RAAAAAAAAAAAAACIST! over a cartoon that wasn’t even about the current president (but was about the idiots in Congress), or Sharpton alleges someone didn’t get a job because that person is BLAAAAAAAAACK!, or threatens anarchy because policemen shot a black youth with a gun who would have killed the cops, every day more and more people in the black community come on board and create a festival atmosphere to the protest. 

Democrats see this as fun, while Republicans see protests as an alien annoyance: something that must be done because the situation at hand is so bad, but not something they would want to be seen reveling in. 

Democrats have no problem whatsoever with such revelry, and they know the more noise they make, the faster they will get what they want. 

Take David Letterman for example, and the vile joke he made about statutory rape this week.  Letterman said, on 6/8/09, that the Palin daughter attending the Yankees game was “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez.  The only Palin daughter at that game was 14 year-old Willow Palin.  The joke could not have been about the oldest Palin daughter, as Letterman weakly claimed yesterday, two days after the perverse “joke” aired, because Bristol Palin was thousands and thousands of miles away from the baseball game Letterman was talking about. The joke about the baseball game and the forcible impregnation Letterman claims happened there makes no sense if it’s not indeed about the Palin daughter who was actually in the proximity of Yankees player A-Rod. 

Now, the MSM is trying to spin this for Letterman, and all the usual suspects are out there defending him, including Joy Behar on The View and the White House propaganda team that is MSNBC, CNN, etc.  

Republicans will let them get away with this spin, I’m sure; Al Sharpton would only scream louder and drown this spin out. 

To be honest, there probably wouldn’t even be any spin at all if this was an instance of the black community calling someone a RAAAAAAACIST!  Because they are so vocal, so well-organized, and so persistent, “explanations” like the one Letterman delivered on his show last night are never even allowed.  

If this whole episode involved the current President’s daughters, Malia and Sasha (just three years younger than Willow, FYI), Letterman would not be able to claim he was talking about “some other daughter” or “someone else”.  If Letterman made any sort of joke that Sharpton et al could construe as RAAAAAAACIST, he would indeed most likely be forced into early retirement because CBS and its advertisers know the black community, and Democrats who support and enable them, never, ever gives up. 

Republicans, I’ve noticed, might get riled up about something for a day or so, and then they say, “there are more important things to talk about” or “I have other things I have to do now”. 

Democrats never have other things to do, and seldom think anything’s more important than whatever’s right in front of them. 

And I AM A LIFELONG DEMOCRAT TELLING YOU THIS. 

Boycotts, letter writing campaigns, protests, this is totally what I am all about, because this is what I was always taught as a child to do whenever I felt someone wronged me or someone I care about. 

And. I. Love. The. Palins. 

Sarah, Todd, Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and most of all, Lil’ Trig.  You mess with any of these people and I respond emotionally, channeling that anger into action by way of mental and muscle memory recalling all of the protests and various campaigns I’ve been involved in since childhood. 

In grade school, at a Democrat Catholic School in Cleveland, we used to write letters every week in class to various companies complaining about their use of styrofoam or whatever that was bad for the environment. In high school, my Democrat teachers had me write similar letters to various companies arguing against their support for various political candidates we didn’t believe in or other causes my teachers didn’t like.  College, grad school, DITTO.  

Southwest Airlines left my friend Mary’s suitcase on the tarmac on a 95-degree day, so all of her cosmetics melted and ruined absolutely everything in the bag.  Being a good, make no trouble Republican with better things to do, Mary called Southwest, got frustrated when they wouldn’t pay for her bag (since their excuse was, “we didn’t lose it, Ma’am, because you admit you have it.  It’s not our fault your luggage melted.  That’s never happened before”), and just decided to give up, “because I have better things to do. Here if you think you can make them budge, then you have a go at it”. 

It took me two weeks, but I got everything in that bag covered by Southwest, including the bag itself, and a free flight for her trouble.  

And all I did was write three letters to everyone on Southwest’s Board of Directors and the entire C-suite.  I stayed professional and polite, but kept hitting Southwest with the facts, including the inconvenient truth that Mary looked out the plane’s window and saw her bag just sitting there on the tarmac — where it was removed from the loading trolley by a Southwest employee so he could sit on it like a chair while he waiting for some problem to be fixed so he could load the plane’s cargo on board.  Mary knew the truth: that Southwest’s employee did something he was not supposed to do, forgot about her bag, and nothing inside would have melted if not for that. 

What Mary didn’t do was press her case enough.  She just gave up at the first puff of resistance. She kept complaining, of course, but didn’t want to really do anything about it. 

And that’s what I see in Republicans in general.  Sure, they’ll go to Redstate.com, Ace of Spade, or Michelle Malkin and complain about Democrat activists like Lettterman getting away with brutal attacks on women, but do they do anything about it?  Maybe they make a few calls one day…maybe they write a letter…but they don’t understand that working the system requires persistence…and that every day that goes by with thousands and thousands and thousands of letters flooding into Mars Candy, The Olive Garden, Kelloggs, Hellman’s Mayo, and Letterman’s other advertisers dramatically increases the pressure for the executives at those companies to cut their losses and dump their Letterman ad buys. 

It will take a month to really hurt David Letterman — a month of sustained letter writing and calling to every one of his advertisers letting them know that their decision to stand with Letterman means they support the notion that statutory rape of a 14 year-old girl is “funny”, and that later calling this same 14 year-old girl “one of Eliot Spitzer’s prostitutes” is also funny.  

Liberals count on elephants never changing their spots. 

Maybe Republicans, like their mascot, can’t actually do such a thing. 

But, it’s hilarious for me to coach my new Republican friends like Jessie on things like the law school admissions process because they hang on my every word as if I’m speaking in tongues, amazed at the actual strategy that goes with consistently getting what you want from the system. “Gosh,” Jessie admitted, “here I would have just taken no as a no, and not appealed, or I would have talked about what I actually did instead of WHO I AM, which is the narrative those people really do want to hear.” 

And if you don’t believe that’s the case, you didn’t pay any attention to whom these liberals voted for in 2008 and whom they want on the Supreme Court in 2009:  it is about the narrative people, and persistence, persistence, persistence. 

Yes, it is an absolute pain in the neck to sit at a computer and write letters to corporate America every day.  It must also be a giant pain in the neck to be Al Sharpton, and have to wake up every day screaming and yelling, crying and wailing, about something. 

But, look how successful Al Sharpton is.  And I got into every law school I applied to a few years ago.  Unlike my Republican friends, I didn’t have the money to actually go, but I got in to really great schools, because I knew how the system worked and instead of living in the dream world of “that’s not how it should be” I played the hand these schools deal. 

So, I’m interested to see how long Republicans can keep the pressure up on The Olive Garden, Mars Candy, and Kelloggs in particular.  Losing those three big accounts will make CBS apoplectic.  I think it’s a valuable lesson to both CBS and Letterman personally to see how many advertisers drop him if we keep this pressure up for 30 days.  To my knowledge, Republicans have never stayed focused on anything that long, losing interest in protesting after a day or two, and then probably going off to play golf. 

Meanwhile, on the blue side of the aisle, we continue to be busy, busy, little letter-writing bees…with the busiest and buzziest being Sharpton, a man we personally find as repugnant as Letterman (but for different reasons), but a man no one here could ever claim was not effective. 

The advertisers will all buckle in the end…but it will take a few weeks for them to stop listening to CBS’s line that “this will all blow over, just watch”. 

If you take this opportunity to use Democrats’ favorite tricks against them and you don’t let this blow over, Republicans could very well be surprised to learn a whole new set of tools to get what they want from the MSM and liberal elite.  Jessie sure was surprised to have a glimpse of how things are done on my side of the aisle — you can be pleasantly surprised like that too.

But first you have to work hard to get there.

And say what you want about Sharpton, and he probably deserves most if not all of it, but the man sure does work HARD at whatever he’s up to that day. 


Sebastian Gray

Chicago, IL

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)