[Peace-discuss] Fwd: You Tell Me: Whitman Sampler

Tue Sep 14 09:00:35 CDT 2010

Great idea.... plus this is too good not to share w/ Peace-discuss. Hope you don't mind! --Jenifer

--- On Tue, 9/14/10, Barbara kessel <barkes at gmail.com> wrote:
Hey maybe we can get this to Ariana Huffington as an illustration of her new philosophy. What do you think? Barbara

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: david prochaska

    Thanks to Bob! -- David

    ------------------------------------------------

    Whitman Sampler

    I had been wondering about my friend Jimmy Bob
      Hardin, so it was no surprise when his letter arrived this week.
      Through no fault of his own, Jimmy Bob has gotten involved in
      politics. He is a country western singer and composer, and
      political campaigns love to have his songs to connect their
      candidate with the common people. He started with the campaign for
      governor of Texas when he wen off to help Kinky Friedman, and fell
      in with Willie Nelson. After Willie recorded Jimmy Bob’s song "How
      Hard Can This Job Be?," Jimmy Bob was in great demand. He went
      from Huckabee to Romney to McCain. So far, he has a perfect score
      of helping candidates lose, so I was hoping he might have signed
      up for the Meg Whitman campaign. When I opened the letter, I
      wasn’t disappointed.

    ******************************

    Dear Bob,

    Sorry I haven’t written in awhile, but life has been
      amazing. You remember that my wife had a one-woman show of her
      paintings, those giant paintings of jungle birds in bright colors.
      Well, she sold a bunch of them to rich people, and then she
      started getting commissions from them. They wanted jungle scenes
      on their livingroom walls and their children’s rooms and on the
      swimming pool decks. One lady in Santa Barbara with a stable full
      of polo ponies even wanted the whole inside of her barn filled
      with tropical birds to calm the horses. Now, Mary Agnes doesn’t
      need the money, but she loves to paint birds. So we’ve been
      traveling around painting birds and just enjoying life. I think
      the unemployment problem would go away if the unemployed people
      would just spend more time hanging around with rich people. They
      would be better off having a drink at the country club rather than
      standing on the curb at Home Depot.

    So I was basically on vacation until a month ago when
      I got a call from the Whitman campaign. They wanted me to write a
      campaign song for them. I wasn’t too interested until they said
      they would double what Romney paid me. That got my attention.

    I never told you what Romney paid me. In fact, I
      should have shared some of it with you for your help, but I knew
      you didn’t need it with your teacher’s pension and all. The fact
      is that they offered me $8,500 for their campaign song, which was
      generous considering that Romney didn’t stay in the campaign long
      enough to use the song. But when I got the check, they had added a
      zero to it. Right away I went to the head guy to ask him to
      correct the mistake. He said it was going to create problems with
      their election expenditure reporting if they changed it after they
      had already submitted it. It would be too much trouble to make any
      changes. He said I should just cash it as he didn’t care, and it
      wasn’t their money anyway. So I cashed a check for $85,000.

    Now you know why it got my attention when the Whitman
      people offered me double what Romney had paid me. When I asked if
      they meant double the $85,000, they said yes. So I signed on.

    Let me tell you, I have never seen anything like it.
      Money was flying around like chicken feathers at a pluckin’
      contest. They spent nine million dollars for some consultants out
      of New York City. Nine million! It makes my head hurt just
      thinking about it with all those zeros bouncing around in there.
      So the $170,000 they were paying me didn’t seem so outrageous. But
      I work for my money, so I buckled down and wrote the campaign
      song. Everybody got together in a room and I sang it to them.

    "Whitman Sampler

    "Life is like a box of chocolates

    Is what Forrest’s mama said,

    So reach right in and help yourself

    And you’ll be glad you did.

    "It’s a Whitman Sampler of Freedom.

    It’s chocolate 

    And chock-a-block with Liberty.

    "No taxes is that square one there.

    That cluster saves your gun.

    The round one lets us pray in school.

    There’s Liberty in every one.

    "It’s a Whitman Sampler of Freedom.

    It’s chocolate 

    And chock-a-block with Liberty.

    "No need to choose

    Just take ‘em all.

    It’s the patriotic thing to do,

    And vote for Meg this fall.

    "It’s a Whitman Sampler of Freedom.

    It’s chocolate 

    And chock-a-block with Liberty.

    "She’s one of us

    She’s just plain Meg

    She’s as down-to-earth as mumblety-peg.

    "It’s a Whitman Sampler of Freedom.

    It’s chocolate 

    And chock-a-block with Liberty."

    Well, everybody loved it, but I did have to explain
      mumblety-peg to some of the city folks. Then this New York
      consultant, who is mean as a rattlesnake with a toothache, said it
      wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit in with their campaign theme. He told
      me to write another one that attacked Jerry Brown.

    That’s why I need your help again, old buddy. I just
      can’t do mean, and besides I don’t know anything about Jerry
      Brown. He was before I got interested in politics, but I know you
      are very old and were probably around when he was governor.
      Anything you can give me will help.

    Thanks.

    Yours in Bobness,

    Jimmy Bob

    ************************

    Dear Jimmy Bob,

    I am always delighted to hear from you, and I am
      pleased that Mary Agnes is such a big hit with the rich people. It
      is nice to learn that paintings of jungle birds calm horses down.
      I suspect that many I have bet on spent their mornings staring at
      toucans. That explains why they were asleep on the track.

    You’ve got a free start with your Whitman assignment
      in the fact that Brown rhymes with clown. You can probably get a
      refrain out of that fact alone. Then he is a Catholic. The
      Republicans used that criticism successfully for over a century,
      right up until JFK. It probably still works with a lot of people
      who won’t admit it publicly. He is also Irish. That will probably
      appeal to the same group.

    There is also the fact that he dated Linda Ronstadt.
      She was German and Mexican, so you might be able to work in some
      hatred for those groups. Her grandfather got rich from inventing
      the flexible rubber ice-cube tray. I’m not sure how you can work
      that in, but you can ask that snake from New York how he would use
      it.

    Brown organized migrant farm workers after he
      graduated from law school, so you could depict him as an enemy of
      the farmers. And he was against the Vietnam War, so you could
      accuse him of siding with Jane Fonda. That resonates with every
      redneck in the state.

    As governor, Brown had this strange idea that the
      state should save money in a bank account during flush times so
      there would be a reserve to bail out the state in bad times. Crazy
      idea. He had tons of money coming in when he took office in 1975
      thanks to the huge tax increases imposed on Californians by the
      previous governor, Ronald Reagan. That’s right, Ronald Reagan had
      increased the state-wide sales tax by 50%! The sales tax is a
      regressive tax that is paid disproportionately by poor people, so
      when Howard Jarvis and his coalition of businessmen went after the
      Brown surplus, they saw to it that it was returned to its rightful
      owners, the property owners, via property tax reduction. The sales
      tax increase stayed in place. So you could accuse Brown of being
      anti-business. He took their taxes and kept them.

    He also thought that by driving gas-guzzlers,
      motorists were making us dependent on foreign oil producers and
      were seriously damaging the environment. While time may have
      proven him right on those facts, his solution to trade in the
      governor’s limo for a compact Plymouth and stop construction on
      all new freeways was wacky. You could paint him as being against
      the construction companies.

    He also had a wacky idea that the state should have a
      communications satellite so all emergency services throughout the
      state could communicate with each other. This idea gained him the
      sobriquet "Governor Moonbeam" from Mike Royko, a Chicago
      columnist. Lots of words will rhyme with moonbeam, so this should
      be of help.

    Brown also believed that people were buying homes
      bigger than they needed with mortgages they could not afford. He
      was convinced that when they could no longer make their mortgage
      payments, the system would crash. He moved out of the governor’s
      mansion and lived in a one-bedroom apartment to set an example.
      Clearly he was an enemy of developers and bankers with these crazy
      ideas.

    I wish I could give you more, but my heart just isn’t
      in it. In fact, I plan to vote for Brown. I offered to sell my
      vote to Whitman for $500, but she hasn’t sent any money. By the
      bye, the way she is spending money over there, I think you ought
      to ask for a raise.

    Give my best to Mary Agnes.

    Your very old buddy,

    Bob

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