Reprinted to Blog from email list of 7/16/05)
*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***
In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin said that one way he got things done was by giving credit to others for things he had come up with, even if he had done the work.
I exercised real power by dong the same thing. I would 1) come up with an idea, 2) find someone who could benefit by pushing it through.
In my case this was not as self-sacrificing as Franklin was because I did very little of the work. Richard Viguerie said in my anthology, The New Right Papers, that the New Right, which had so much to do with electing Reagan, began with a piece of legislation I got started.
But he had no idea that I got it started. The Internal Revenue Service had declared that any private school that wanted to keep its tax exempt status would have to meet racial quotas. Conservatives in general were afraid of being accused of racism, so they let it go ahead.
I contacted the long list of associations I had contact with from my activism and got some solid support. I then went to the Judiciary Committee, where my boss had staff, and talked to one of the newer staff members there who wanted to make a name for himself. I explained how it could be stopped and the benefits in it for him.
We beat it four to one on the House Floor, and after I handed it over to him, I did very little work on it. He and my boss got credit, I got it what I wanted.
I exercised power.
The problem with this method is that I often regretted what I started. Once it gets out of your hands it gets out of your control.
For example, I started what led to the Paperwork Reduction Act. I wrote an amendment to the bill establishing the Department of Education that every regulation had to declare how much extra paperwork it involved.
It didn’t pass, but Senator Hatch put three of the amendments I had come up with as excellent additions to the law, and this was one of them.
This became the Paperwork Reduction Act, but I have a feeling that in the end it just added to the paperwork.
Real power means real regrets.
The greatest power I exercise is the one I will still be exercising in my grave. It is the power I have through my radio program and whitakeronline and my blog. I work out EXACTLY what is wrong with what the other side is doing, and what should be done. The fact that present racial policy is simple, straight genocide is obvious now, but it took me years to get it across.
It is hard for anyone else to understand how I take credit for these things. Every idea I come up with can be found MENTIONED in something from many years ago. But you have to look for it.
It was mentioned and it was missed. I boil it down, I put it front and center, and I make it potentially useful in real political debate. Then I plant it, over and over. Then I make it become so obvious that everybody thinks they’ve always been saying it. That is exactly what I am working for.
If you do that work, someone is going to find it useful. I sit and watch these points become commonplace and very, very effective.
Just as Viguerie did not know that the idea he was talking about first came from me, the others things I do are not seen as coming from me. I make it good enough for people to run with it. I have exercised a staggering amount of power this way, and that is what I am after.
I was a bit surprised when William Rusher actually gave me credit in one of his books for the concept that Federal courts are the bulwark of each out-of-date establishment. It felt odd for someone to know that I had come up with it.
I appreciate his seeing it, but I get more satisfaction out of the power I exercise that no one but me knows that I have. By now I’m used to that and have learned to like the secrecy of it.
But getting credit is very different from exercising power.
And I like power.
Bob
Recent Comments