Free Air for politicans

When Scott Brown was running for the balance of Ted Kennedy's senate term in Massachusetts in 2010. I was in Boston on business. I arrived on the red eye from LA early on Sunday morning, killed some time, checked into my hotel and caught a nap. I went out had a nice dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, ran into a few people I knew, had a nice time.

Monday morning the day before the election I had to drive out of the city for 35 or 40 minutes for a meeting. I turned on WEEI Sports radio. Scott Brown was on the Dennis and Callaghan Morning Show, for my entire drive, the morning show on a sports talk radio station was all politics. I mentioned it to the guy I was meeting with and he said, "He's on WEEI almost everyday and has been for months, if he's not live, he's on the phone."

The meeting wrapped up and I got in the car to head for my next meeting, WEEI was on, there was Scott Brown on the phone with the hosts, I had to drive for 45 minutes, he was on when I got in the car and he was still on when I parked for my next meeting.

The second meeting was longer and included a nice lunch at an old line steak house (I had Boston Scrod) by the time everything wrapped up it was after 3. I got in the car to head back to the city and WEEI was talking about the Pats. I hadn't been in the car for 10 minutes and guess who showed up live in the studio? Scott Brown.

WEEI at the time was the number one station in 25-54 year old male listeners in Boston.

Brown nipped Martha Coakley in that special election by less than a 100,000 votes. Brown's winning percentage of 3% came from white suburban males, 25-54 years old. Or the WEEI listener.

Coakley spent more money than Brown, but Brown had all that free radio time, for months. He got it not just on sports radio, he was on WRKO the conservative talk station in Boston virtually everyday as well.

The same scenario unfolded in Brown's reelection campaign against Elizabeth Warren, Brown raised more money, had all that free air time but lost by 6.7 percentage points.

My point? It has been calculated that Donald J. Trump has gotten close to a BILLION dollars in free TV and cable coverage since announcing his campaign last year, that's not counting his endless hours of chat time with conservative local and national radio talk hosts. Many of those radio hosts have larger audiences than the political cable shows.

Just sayin...

The Cakes is from New York

Here's something...From the Washington Post, “New York has plenty of values that Ted Cruz wasn’t counting on”:

With the New York primary just days away and the airwaves filled with presidential candidates talking about New York values, two guys were discussing the subject during a coffee break on Wall Street.

“Hey Steve,” one friend called to another. “What’s a New York value?”

“Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — and Ted Cruz is a complete a–hole,” said Steve Giannantonio, who works in finance.

“That’s a New York value.”…

“Where is Ted Cruz from anyway?” said Freddy Aponte, 35, a building super from the Bronx.

“I don’t know, Kansas?” said his co-worker Elijah Moses, 30, from Harlem. “Ohio?”

“Some place with 99 people,” said Jeury Jimenez, 19, a baker from Harlem…

Just down the street, two guys in nice-looking suits were standing outside, not far from where the World Trade Center had once been. They looked like Wall Street bankers, but it turned out that one of them was a lawyer who was a part-time actor, and the other was a writer, director and actor, and they were about to film a car commercial, proving the point that another New York value is not making assumptions about people.

“I think he meant to distinguish New York Jewish elite liberals from the rest of the country,” said David Denowitz, 59, the lawyer, referring to Cruz’s jab. “I took it very badly, because I’m a New York Jewish elite liberal. Well, upper-middle class and educated.”

“New York is really a shining example for the rest of the world — we’re Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, and we all ride the same subway, we all sit at the same lunch counter, and no bombs go off because no one feels the need,” he said, pointing out that the obvious exceptions were the work of outsiders…

War is Politics by Other Means (von Clausewitz)

 

I was born 6 weeks before the end of WWII. June of 1945. After VE Day and before the Japanese surrendered in August. There was dancing and kissing in the streets all over the world because war was over.

It wasn’t…

We had advisors and flyers and boots on the ground for the Nationalist Chinese against Mao, until the Mao beat them and the nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949.

After the surrender of Japan the US sent a Military advisory group to Korea in 1945. In 1950 the Korean War started. At the same time we had a Military advisory group in Vietnam to work with the French. The French lost in 1956 and Viet Nam was partitioned into North and South like Korea. At that point we upped the number of advisors and supported corrupt politicians in the south.

In the early 60’s we had the Cuban Missile Crisis, our first intervention into Lebanon, intervened in Egypt, troops in the Dominican Republic all before the Vietnam War escalated. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 after 58,000 Americans were killed and tens of thousands were wounded. Things calmed down for a few years and then in 1979 we began assisting the Afghans against the Soviet Union. We got involved in the Congo and Liberia and other African countries. In the 80’s we backed Saddam’s Iraq against the Iranians. Then sold the Iranians arms to have the “off the books money” to supply the Contras in Nicaragua. We had another disaster in Lebanon and 247 Marines were killed. We attacked Libya a few times. We invaded Grenada and backed Britain against Argentina in the Falklands War and poked around some more in South and Central America. (we’d been doing that since the end of WWII)

In the 90’s we invaded Panama, got involved in Somalia and the Balkans. And had the First Gulf War, shot down an Iranian airliner filled with families and businessmen.

At the turn of the century we invaded Afghanistan and then went to war in Iraq under false pretenses. We’re still there. And we are blowing the trumpets and beating the drums for more war.

I’m 69 years old and I’m hard pressed to come up with 5 years of my life when my country wasn’t at war, threatening war or assisting other countries in making war and I’ve almost forgotten about spending most of my life under the threat of nuclear annihilation. 

USA-USA-USA!

The Big Dog

I had the pleasure of hosting William Jefferson Clinton at a Democratic Event in 2003. My job was simple, introduce him to the several thousand attendees. Listen to him speak for 60 minutes and then ask him questions we gathered from the folks in attendance.

President Clinton spoke without notes for the hour on economics, the two wars we were involved in and how the Bush administration had ignored all the evidence his administration had provided about what a threat Bin Ladin was to the country. He wasn't partisan. (although I wished he would have been) He was, smart, warm, personable and each of the several thousand people in that room felt he was speaking directly to them.

I wanted to ask him about his midnight meeting at the White House with Newt Gingrich the result of which led to Gringrich's resignation as Speaker, I didn't. I wanted to ask him about the rise of the phony, ludicrous religious right and why politicians feel they have to kowtow to them, I didn't. I had a lot of questions for President Clinton but I could only ask the ones on the cards. I did ask those and he answered them in detail. He remembers names, dates and he knows his history. The best thing about his talk that night was he didn't mouth political talking points.

I spent 15 minutes with him in the dressing room prior to the event, we ran through the details and in those few short minutes he made me feel like a friend and colleague.

I have an old friend from Boston who had met President Clinton in Beijing a year earlier. She is a tall, All American blond and he had spotted her at a new shopping mall in the diplomatic district of the city. Clinton, being the guy he is made a beeline for her with a 100 Chinese journalists and camera crews trailing behind him. He wanted to know what she was doing there and why, she explained she was there on business with her husband, Clinton wanted to know what he did and how long he had been doing business in China. She told him the details. That night she and her husband and his Chinese partner were having dinner. President Clinton with his entourage came into the restaurant. Clinton came over to their table and introduced himself and invited them to join his party after dinner. They smoked cigars, drank French brandy and talked about doing business in China for several hours. Bill Clinton picked her husband's brain the entire time they were together. He later introduced her husband to some Chinese business folks and he did some nice deals with them.

As I walked off the stage and back to the dressing room with President Clinton I asked him if he remembered the good looking blond he met in the Chinese shopping mall. He stopped and said "I sure do, she's from Boston." I told him she was. He said "How did you know about that?" I looked the Big Dog in the eye and said, "Because I used to sleep with her." He grinned and put both his hands on my shoulders, laughed and said, "You are a lucky man!"

President William Jefferson Clinton is one hell of a guy.