B. U. G. S.

If you are at a science fiction and you don’t know names like Hessenberg and Dyson, you will be considered rather odd.

If you are at a political convention and you don’t know the difference between the 435 congressmen and the 3 delegates in the House of Representatives, you might be asked to catch up on your reading.

But if you are the average party and don’t know Dyson, Heissenberg or that there is such a thing as a delegate inthe House, peiople are not going to gather inthe corner and gawk at you.

So when it comes to people who in on making national political strategy for decades, there were very few of us. The others who did this needed to know me, and I needed to work with them, so we knew each other.

So today people get the impression that I “knew everybody.” In 1976 National Review did a front page article attacking those who were know through the years as leaders of the movement for the Republicans to abandon its pursuit of the black vote and go for what were referred to as “Wallace Democrats.”

Since the 1980 election they have been referred to as “Reagan Democrats” and every Republican will tell you he was always for going after them.

So when I picked up National Review in one week in 1976 I had one of those problems that someone at at a scifi convention who never heard of Heissenberg has.

There was a cartoon showing the Evil Conspirators who after the filthy old working class vote. Cartoons always assume you know who is being cartooned. Ihad been reading NR on and off since its founding in 1955, so I was pretty savvy on the things one was supposed to know.

I instantly recognized Pat Buchanan, Kevin Phillips, and NR’s own publisher Bill Rusher. But I didn’t recognize the other guy.

I went to the next office and asked them and they thought I was showing of.

The other guy was me.

You would think that made me Somebody.

It certainly wasn’t that way at the time. I remember one guy at a party in 1972 that I didn’t know who Nixon’s Deputy UnderSecretary of Defence for something was.

We both knew in 1972 that if you volunteered the name of the guy was Deputy Undersecretary of Denense was in 1972, people would wonder what time warp you had walked out of. But Being There, being somebody with a big title, was all the buzz when a nee administration came in.

Actually, when it comes to real general national strategy, almost nobody matters. If it hadn’t been Bush it would have been somebody else.

Pat Buchanan, Kevin Phillips, Bill Rusher and me were the Without Which Nothings of the Reagan Revolution.

But by the time the revolution we caused happened, we were elsewhere.

In fact, I gave away my tickets to BOTH Reagan inaugurations.

I get more joy out of saying that than I could ever have gotten out of going to them. For me it would have been like an office party.

While everybody else was jostling to Be There, I was putting together The New Right Papers. And the whole point of THAT was to make a point on immigation which has become critical since.

When I sat with Pat or anyone else in our tiny group, we almost never even mentioned what was the Big Rage at the moment. Remember that Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran , to mention names you will recognize, made his living writing columns about the Deep Philosophical Implications of whoever the latest nomineee for Deputy Assistant Secretary of Something were.

Let me give you one more example to give you a picture of how TINY the world of people who make national policy is.

When NR did its cover article with my cartoon, it led off with an attack on Wallace Democrats by attackinging George Wallace.

In the very first or second paragraph was a quote about how Wallace was not a REAL conservative. The quote was from another long-time discussant of national POLICY. In fact, this man’s quote was used in direct opposition to something I had said.

The man was John Ashbrook. He was my boss and his desk was thirty feet from my desk. He had hired me specifically tohelp hiim get those dirty old Wallace, now Reagan, Democrats.

But what John said about Wallace was what he meant. It was also what I had said, Wallace was not a conservtive, he was a populist.

But my point is how SMALL the world of people who infuence national policy at any level.

I knew them all.

Hell, I knew their CATS.

Pets, children and all, we couldn’t have made up a decent-sized cocktail party.