My time in Washington was the high point of direct mail as a new phenomenon. It also shows why so many people who came into professional political action at that time are so news oriented.

When you get a direct mail appeal and toss it away the first thing you wonder is how they AFFORD these things? Few get opened and even fewer bring in money.

Those who send these out are looking for a House List, a group of people who are interested in their particular cause and are willing to give money to support it. So you are on a huge number of lists which show your interest in a subject.

I have at least half a dozen mass mailings from McGovern asking for money for SPLC. That is because I show an interest in race.

Once you get a House List, you may rent it out for the use of others. A pro-life group will let a libertarian group try out its list because they are also anti-liberal.

House Lists for direct mail vary in size from a few hundred to a million in the case of groups like the NRA.
Direct mail was a breakthrough for anti-liberals because liberals had little use for this and did not develop it. The left is funded by limousine liberals, government contracts, and taking over large private endowments. Their money comes in huge chunks.

Direct mail is the ultimate bourgeois tactic.

So how do you get a House List? You try House Lists on causes overlapping with your own. No matter how big the House list is, you rent three to five thousand random addresses on it to test it. Since you need at least a one percent return, the size of the sample that is statistically significant has no relation to the total list.

If a list tests out and you get the minimum return from it you need to almost cover the costs of mailing, you rent the whole list. If you get a good return, you mail it again. The point is that you are looking for people who respond to YOUR message, and that becomes YOUR House List.

You mail your House List several times a year, telling them what you are doing and asking for more money to do it with. Liberals do not make such regular reports to their field hands. Direct mail became famous when it was discovered to be the only major asset anti-liberals had.

In my time, a House List address was worth about fifty bucks, discounting the amount you would get by mailing for donations over and over. You would rent it for two or three cents a name, for people to test it for their own purposes and to mail it if their test paid off.

And this House List becomes an asset. Almost every activist you heard of back then had one or two organizations that were his basic source of income. That’s how we kept people in Washington while liberals got them jobs at Ford Foundations they had taken over.

None of this is a revelation. As Paul Weyrich pointed out in my New Rights Papers in 1982, if reporters ask about how the groups are financed, he just said “It’s in your press kits, guys.”

In order to do a new mailing, which is your bread and butter, you have to come up with something that is going on in the news. The reason it is in the news is because it excites people and it is being talked about.

Contrast this with the Mantra. Here is what will change the real future but you are well aware of how hard it is for anybody obsessed with the latest news to be concerned about the real war.

The reason people who are really deeply concerned don’t make it to the top in a movement is exactly the same reason that Futurology has nothing to do with the future. Those who get in the limelight are interested in what is interesting here and now for fundraisers, just as futurologists are interested in the limitless potential of wind power because that is what the Politically Correct grant-givers want to talk about.

A lot of this political stuff is really just common-sense mechanics.

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