She glanced back towards the door. “I’ll chew him some more when we get back home.”
“I like that idea. Why do I have the funny feeling my first born is not going to be making his name in the halls of academia?”
“Carl! That’s an awful thing to say!” I gave her an are-you-kidding-me! look and she shrugged. “Well, did you know you were going to get a doctorate when you were eleven?”
“I think I knew when I was in the womb, and it still wouldn’t have satisfied anyone!” I replied, laughing.
“You’re as crazy as everyone else in your family.”
“Sshhh! Don’t let anybody know!” I laughed and advanced on her. “Besides, only poor people are crazy. Rich people are eccentric!”
Marilyn laughed and backed away from me. “I don’t care how rich you are. You’re still crazy!” She backed her way out the door.
Since it didn’t look like I was going to trap Marilyn in the den, I went back to work.
Tuesday evening the meeting was set for seven at the house on 30th. I had told Marilyn I would be spending the night in Washington, and the catering company had left plenty of coffee and tea and some cookies and snacks. By twenty-after we all had our coffee and were gathered in the den. John looked around the room and said, “Well, Carl, you called the meeting. What’s on your mind?”
I was already standing, but at this I went over to one of my easels that I had positioned at the end of the room. “All right, fair enough. A few weeks ago I was talking to Newt about continuing the pressure on the Democrats, about taking control of the House back, and even the Senate. I spent a chunk of the recess thinking about this, and came up with some ideas. I’ll go into them in a moment, but I want to lay out the big picture first.”
“First, we need to keep up the pressure related to the bank and post office scandals, but we need to do more than that. So far we’ve only been telling people why they shouldn’t vote Democratic. We haven’t been telling them why they should vote Republican! We’ve been negative, not positive. It’s not enough to say the Democrats are the bad guys, we have to convince people that the Republicans are the good guys. Has anybody here ever worked in the private sector, a restaurant or a company selling something?”
The others looked around at each other. “I grew up working in my grandfather’s bar. It’s still in the family,” said John.
Frank Riggs offered, “I used to sell real estate.”
“Okay. You guys know that you can’t sell stuff negatively.” To John I said, “Your grandfather wasn’t going to sell any more beer by simply advertising that the bar down the street wasn’t as nice as his. Same thing with you, Frank. Nobody is going to buy through you if the only thing you tell them is that the other brokers are crooks. No, you have to show them why they should buy from you, that you have better listings and know more.” I turned back to John. “Or that your beer is tastier, or your waitresses are cuter. You have to push the positive.” I got a few nods at this.
“We have to show that our Republican Party product is better for our buyer, the voters. So, here’s my idea. While we keep pushing the problems with the Democratic Congress, we also come out with a bold plan, something that takes all the ideas we got into this business for, and combine them into something new.”
I reached out and flipped the top page off of my easel pad, exposing what I had written beneath. “I propose a Contract With America!” There were some curious murmurs at this. “We can call it something else, but I think this will fly. Here’s how it works.”
I flipped another page over, where I had ten bullet points listed. “Now, we have ten items on our list.” I flashed my hands out, all ten fingers spread. “We can argue about the specifics, but we keep it to ten items. For instance, balancing the budget, we all want that. Entitlement reform, especially welfare. The line item veto on the budget. Infrastructure investment. A Federal level gun law that requires ‘may issue’ states to become ‘shall issue states’.” I went over several other items. I had purposely left several lines blank, so the others could come up with their own ideas.
“Why ten items? We can come up with more than that?” asked somebody.
“Ten’s a good number. It’s easy for people to remember and think about and talk about. Moses did well with it, why can’t we?” There were a lot of nods at that, along with a few grins. I always tended to think of Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part One, where Moses comes down off of Mount Sinai with three tablets, telling everybody he has 15 commandments, and then drops and breaks one of the tablets, cutting the number down to 10.
“One important feature — we stay away from Democrat hot buttons,” I warned. “I don’t care what you might personally think, but you want to stay away from abortion. Stay away from school prayer. Stay away from gays and marriage. I don’t care how wonderful a bill you write, we get into some of these social things, and the Democrats will beat us to death with them!”
“Abortion is wrong. It’s murder,” said Rick Santorum.
I shrugged theatrically. “Rick, I understand what you are saying, I truly do, but that doesn’t mean I agree with you. There are nine good conservatives in this room, and I can guarantee that I’m not the only guy here who doesn’t agree with you. If we start trying to push these things, they will be the only things the Democrats will talk about and we will get killed on this. The average American doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t mean they want to ban it either. If we start pushing a hard right agenda, this will be still born.” There were a few grumpy faces around the room, but a few relieved ones as well.
“So how does this work with the Contract bit?” asked Scott Klug.
“It’s how we sell it to the customer, the voters. We tell them that it’s a package deal. There is stuff in here that everybody but the most die-hard liberal is going to want. We tell them that within the first 100 days after electing us, we will submit a package of ten bills, one for each item, and we promise that if elected we will ram them through. Lots of hoopla! We do a mass signing of the contract on the steps of the Capitol. We invite all the Republican candidates to Washington to sign with us. We do the talk shows and the news shows and the whole nine yards. If each of us takes one or two of these items as their own, we can bomb them left and right.”
“It’ll never work. Clinton will veto every last thing we put through,” retorted Santorum.
It was Nussle that answered that one. “So? This is going to be very high profile. You think he is going to bag ten consecutive bills? If we take back the Senate, we could actually do this in the first 100 days.”
“Remember, this is partly theater. Every day after we take control, we submit one of these bills like clockwork, just in time to make the evening news. We’re not actually going to get everything we want, but we can play this up big with the voters. Don’t forget, there are a lot of Democrats in conservative districts that are going to like pieces of this. It won’t be a straight party line vote on this stuff. I would bet that on some items we’ll be able to pick up enough votes to be able to override a veto,” I added.
There was a positive undertone to the meeting, but every eye was turned to Newt Gingrich, who could kill it with a single word. Instead, he was looking at my easels, one hand along the side of his face and a finger tapping his chin, with a sly smile. “Carl, you told me you had an idea, but this is an entire campaign! It is audacious! How do you see it working?”
Well, he wasn’t shooting it down! “This year, 1993, we are doing prep work on this. We finalize the ten points, start getting details down. A year from now, we start increasing in speed. Six months later, after the primaries, we get the new candidates involved. We go full court press on this. We get a few Senators to start writing their own versions of the bills,” I told them. I pointed at Newt. “You’re the general on this.”