Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Lucky me. I’m just three degrees of Allen West.
As you’ve heard, defeated, deranged and debased Florida Congressman Allen West got two votes for Speaker of the House yesterday. He immediately demanded a recount. Last I heard he was refusing to admit defeat until John Boehner could prove he was born in America.
Double lucky me, our local Republicans have a Lincoln / Reagan Day Dinner fundraiser every year. They feature speakers who, in the last couple of years, aren’t even speaking to Lincoln or Reagan. This year their February 1st fundraiser features Allen West as the speaker. Rumor has it that they are trying to scrub him since he lost but it’s not like they haven’t had losers speak before. Hell, I think they even had Glen Beck last year.
And triple lucky me, it was Louie Gohmert whose vote raised West over that one-damn-vote threshold and gave him the two-fingered fame.
I don’t know how I get this lucky.
Thanks to everybody and their Aunt Bess for telling me about Louie’s vote. I giggled when each email came in. I’ve raised you people right!
I heard but was not there to see it personally that they had Karl Rove as their speaker last year.
1Louie, Louie, you make me sigh!
2His vote proves you’ve been WAY too nice to ole Louie. It’s a vast understatement to say he is the walking definition of bat crap crazy.
3Personally, I could have wished that Allen got 30 more votes, because then Nancy would be speaker. Just as long as there is no way in hell that man actually gets a position of influence ever again.
4Louie’s buddy is Paul Braun, House Rep. from my adopted neck of the woods. If only…. they both would follow in Alan West’s footsteps & not let the door smack their little fannies on the way out!
5I identified Louie to my husband as “Juanita Jean’s favorite chew toy.”
6Well, for starters…. BEFORE West was soundly defeated this past election, but AFTER he had made all those bat guana crazy statements about 80-ish Democratic House Members being communists…. WHY would the glorious Texas Republican Party ask this deranged goofball to speak at their biggest soiree in an off-election year? Oh… I remember now. Their State Party Leadership and Lincoln/Reagan Day Dinner Steering Committee are every bit as crazy as Allen West, and Screwie Louie probably very magnanamously offered to help out by asking West.
Having served on several Jefferson/Jackson Day Committees in Denver, and thoroughly understanding the painful process that the committee goes thru to obtain a speaker, then pull off a successful event, I can say without reservation that it is a clusterf*** process.
The meeting starts, typically after 5pm some day at Headquarters, with bad box wine and a mediocre coldcut tray, with people throwing names onto a wish list. A realistic list develops, and then the committee divides up the list of who each person will contact….you start calling your Congresspersons’ offices to see if anyone has leverage to make your wishes come true. You don’t get thru on the first call or two, but you leave detailed messages. You twiddle your thumbs waiting for some Congressperson, or some staff person to return your call. This is where relationships developed during campaigns come in very handy. This process happens with everyone on “that sub-committee” making phone calls on behalf of securing a speaker, since that is pretty much the first thing you need to have in place in order to print invitations, tickets, programs, advertising… who’s coming to speak. You committee decides to divide and conquer. Asking the actual Congressperson to be a back up speaker, in the event that you can’t find anyone else to speak, takes finesse and diplomacy, but you have to cover your bases. Again, personal relationships make all the difference.
You don’t get squat accomplished at your real job for weeks. You play musical message for days and days.
The speaker choice determines to a large degree how many tickets you sell, and where you target those sales. And of course, you sell a whole lot more tickets to the VIP Reception and preferred dinner seating with “said speaker”, if that “said speaker” is a good draw.
Inevitably the committee jumps at the first person they can get to commit.
Poor ole Simpleton Louie returned the phone call to some egotistical, yet lowly committeeperson, who probably gave him $200 for his campaign at some point, or is in his wife’s prayer circle, or something, and what you see is what you get.
Looney Tunes. Couldn’t happen to nicer folks. Excuse us while we wipe that egg off our faces.
By the time you get a speaker committed, everyone is ready to breathe a sigh of relief…. you’re just glad to have that out of the way. Bigger fights actually happen in committee over menu choices, caterers, and who sits where. Oh, who gives the Benediction is a biggie, too. It is amazing how many people can get their knickers in a collective knot at once sometimes. You only serve on this committee a couple of times; you get smarter the next time someone calls to ask you to serve.
You are a worker bee, you know all about hitting the bottom line, or you wouldn’t be on the Committee in the first place. You are usually exhausted at the event, and getting a sweet note thanking you for all the time you spent, resulting in all the business you lost while wrapping yourself around the tree with the other committee members for 3 months, fighting over whether or not Kosher meals, or vegetarian meals, or just rubber chicken would be provided, and meeting deadlines for the ad sales for the program, dealing with RSVP’s and head counts for the caterer or event venue, that you swear you have served on your last JJ Dinner Committee.
The next year, it is a whole new group of committed volunteers procured by seasoned, yet over-committed staff, who go thru the exact same learning curve. A year or two down the pike, they come to the same conclusion you did. It’s a miracle any of those dinners ever happen.
My experience was in Colorado… a tiny little state compared to the geography and population of Texas, and we pretty much concentrated on heavily Democratic Denver Metro area for ticket sales. Some of the out-lying cities now do their own JJ Dinners too, and they have an even harder time coming up with a speaker unless it is in Aspen, Breckenridge, or Telluride, and they can put together a cushy ski weekend for them, too.
Developers of ski resorts and the associated frou-frou tend to be Republicans, availability of housing can be scarce in high season… unless you have a donor/contact who owns a house or condo, and who will agree to host. It happens… but that is just another “thing to get handled”, along with transportation, etc, ad nauseum. Now there are all sorts of changes to the kinds of inkind gifts elected officials can receive, which I am certain further complicates things.
I had excellent contacts within Ski Colorado!, and was always amazed at what Bob and John could do for us sometimes… but we totally lost control of the speaker after the event… which was JUST FINE with us. They had a huge budget for that kind of entertainment… the Democratic Party didn’t.
Just finding someone to come speak without an honorarium, and by only having to pick up travel expenses, was quite a trick. That whole speaker issue is fraught with snakes and landmines, and about the time you think you have everything under control, you get a blizzard that throws the airlines into a quagmire of delayed and cancelled flights, then they close down I-70 and the Eisenhower Tunnel, which cuts off access to the resorts via car. It’s just a party in a box, with a big ole bow on top.
That’s how they got Allen West.
7Oh, Rhea, that’s a winner!
8Take solace JJ. We have our own loonies up here in the Badger State.
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