What the Hell Happened?

Toward the end of the century, moderate Republicans (like me) and a few moderate Democrats were becoming increasingly worried about the rise of “dark money” and other means for corporations and “think tanks” using their considerable financial resources to unfairly control the political narrative. We considered this a threat to the concept of personal liberty. Corporations and cooperative spending groups are not people, and they were finding ways to thwart the will of the people to increase their profits or membership.

Two companies that Daddy served on the board for, Entergy and BellSouth, were increasingly being seduced by these methods of lobbying. With Daddy dead, I asked his friends about it, and they said, “Times are changing.” Yeah, no shit. Times are changing. Changing to what?

Lobbying for Daddy, I was well aware that there were guys who outright said, “What are you gonna do for me?” Realizing that what they were asking me to do was illegal, I asked both Daddy and Bill Goodman about it. That’s how I started journaling my conversations and saving correspondence. I wasn’t going to jail over any of this shit.

For a while, I’d been impressed by John McCain. A genuine war hero, he faced the issues that plagued the boomer generation head-on, including the Vietnam War, where he had been a prisoner of war. Upon winning his freedom, McCain was greeted by President Nixon. Nixon promised to get us out of Vietnam by winning. To win, he broke several laws with Kissinger’s plan to bomb Cambodia.

Had he not been impeached over Watergate, there was a movement to impeach him over Cambodia. After resigning as president, Nixon said in the famous Frost Interview, “I’m saying if the president does it, then it’s not illegal.” Let that sink in.

John McCain, a ranking moderate Republican, and Russ Feingold, a ranking moderate Democrat, came together and wrote the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act (2002), and I felt like good men were taking on the problem head-on.

Coming out of the gym, sore, sweaty, and cranky, I always suffer a momentary fit of depression after lifting weights. It has something to do with blood sugar, I suppose. Sitting in my truck, smoking a cigarette (I know. I know) and waiting to feel normal again, I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio attacking McCain and specifically the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act.

Wait. What? McCain was a Republican. A ranking Republican. Limbaugh was supposed to champion Republicans. What’s going on? After Daddy died, I’d heard ther was a war on moderate Republicans from within the GOP, but I was seriously trying to break ties with Daddy’s heavy political influence and live a different way.

I suppose I should have known something was up when Gil Carmichael and Jack Reed, previously GOP frontrunners in Mississippi, suddenly found themselves persona non grata in my own goddamn party.

The end of the 20th century was a triumph for moderate politics, starting with GHW Bush, then Clinton, then W Bush. I felt like we were having unprecedented successes in the executive branch. The Soviets were dead, the Berlin Wall was down, the economy was pretty stable, and we even balanced the budget for a while.

Barack Obama came out of nowhere. Another moderate, I felt like he was too green to run for president. The Democratic Party felt otherwise. John McCain was the Republican front-runner, but there were concerns about unity in the party, so he picked a running-mate from the more conservative end of the GOP who turned out to be a disaster. People were having serious doubts about the first woman vice-presidential candidate. I had doubts too.

Forces within the Republican party, including the current president, who had previously been a Democrat, began saying things like Obama wasn’t born in America. He was a muslim, and his wife was a transsexual man. All things that were demonstrably untrue. Since everybody I knew in New York said Trump was a clown, I ignored it.

Twice during campaign speeches, Republican voters asked McCain about the threat posed by Obama’s fake citizenship and Muslim faith. Both times, McCain insisted these things weren’t true. I was pretty proud of my candidate not taking a cheap shot at his opponent, but forces within the GOP were angry. What the hell?

Obama shocked the world by using the Internet to raise grass-roots money from small-dollar donors in a way that changed how campaigns run forever. Out of the blue, this nobody that I thought was too green to do anything was suddenly the frontrunner, and then he won.

A moderate, despite what everybody said, Obama wasn’t that different from his predecessor. As ex-presidents, the very genuine friendship between the Obama family and the Bush family makes me proud to be an American, but it makes some people pull their hair out. What the hell?

Citizens United v. FEC (2010) was an unexpected victory for big money political interests. The US Supreme Court ruled that corporations and political think-tanks (like Citizens United) have the same free speech rights as individuals. What the hell? Clearly, they are not individuals. How they made an argument that the constitutional intent was for corporations to have the same rights as citizens is some pretty twisted forensics.

So now, it no longer matters if Democrats can use the internet to raise millions with small-dollar donations because corporations can write million-dollar checks overnight, and it’s all legal.

The party for small government is now for expanding government everywhere. The government now runs the NCAA; it determines who can get transgender surgery and what private property owners do with their bathrooms. Governments want control over which books are included in libraries and in college syllabi. They want to dig their fingers into private schools by moving public funds into private schools. Government isn’t shrinking, it’s growing at a fever pace, and with every new law, liberty is reduced, and the budget, my god, the budget. We’re looking at record deficits from the party I joined because they promised balanced budgets.

I am so done with parties. Aint no strings on me. So many people I know are more loyal to their party than to their state, and they wait for the party to tell them what to believe about every subject. That’s some bullshit. I think for myself, thank you. There are very few people who influence how I think, and they know who they are.

Everybody thought Daddy was this big Democrat, but he pushed Gil Carmichael over Cliff Finch (after Finch beat Winter), and among our last conversations before he died, he was pretty dedicated to Jack Reed being the first Republican governor in Mississippi.

Both parties started putting “what do I have to do to win” over “what’s best for the people,” and that’s where I get off the bus. I have to know somebody a pretty long damn time before I let them influence what I think. Parties are not allowed.

Hell, the agenda of the Democratic party seems to be “we don’t want whatever the Republicans want.” No thanks, guys. No thanks to the Republicans either. I’m for Mississippi.