The Perot phenomenon demonstrated this rule.

It is hard for us today to look at history and understand why no one saw the French and Russian Revolutions coming. I compared the March on Rome to Perot.

Every revolution is preceded by a wide, gaping hole in the political landscape which anybody should have seen but nobody does. Every time there are several elephants stamping around in the living room.

Today, as I also pointed out, you can see the hole because everybody who gets paid for talking agrees it isn’t there.

What is frustrating to me is that everybody sees this in retrospect, but they have the same attitude that existed before every major turning-point in history. So while others whine about our being excluded from the dialogue, the fact that we are so desperately excluded is the same as if the establishment said: “These people are the future.”

For years I have been pointing out that the traitors whites are not going to have anywhere to GO. Now Obama just knocked off Hillary and Bill has nowhere to go.

Instead of seeing where I am going, people whine about a black president and insist on being astonished. Please read back over what I have been predicting. Are we going to keep yelling to each other about our helpless tatted and how bad they are until somebody else comes along and fills the political hole?

The reason that white men tolerated mommy professor telling them that they were the oppressors of the whole world, including their own women, was world wars I and II. All that senseless slaughter, took the heart out of them. Those who should have lead, gave over to those who had no business leading. The disgusting part, was that many just pretended.

You ask if we will win. That’s in the realm of faith, but I think that white men are absolutely bound to take over again and white women will stop being foolish and get behind them. I’m sure there will be a ton of tears between now and then as the cost of throwing away, what’s most valuable, becomes more and more apparant. I think that a lesson will have been learned that will not be easily or quickly forgotten.

— Shari

This is the first presidential election since 1960 in which neither an incumbent president or vice president is running. The last time the Democrats elected a president from outside the Old Confederacy was also 1960. And that is the one election in which all political experts agree Democrats could not have won is they had not Lyndon Johnson of Texas to concentrate on the South.

In 1988 even National Review agreed that Dukakis was hopelessly ahead of Bush, Sr. in the polls. Through all the noise, I predicted Bush would win. I had already seen the Democrats slide in election after election between their high at the convention and defeat in November, always with another Northern liberal.

Please don’t tell ME, of all people, that nothing is inevitable in politics. But it is critical both in politics and the stock market to pay attention to the basics in the midst of all the noise and Latest News.

I am just reminding you of some political history.

Thinking about Helms got me to thinking about my Capitol Hill days.

One day, when the staff team was getting ready to do something, one of the team said, “We’ll have Bob do that. Bob can get ANYTHING out of the secretaries.”

I had been on the Hill for years, and I honestly didn’t know I had that reputation.

I treated the “secretaries” as colleagues. The very fact the guy referred to the lady in question as a “secretary” explained the reason he could not understand why I seemed to have this Great Strategy I was not aware of.

Congressmen and Senators almost all had a male Big Wampus called the Administrative Assistant, the guy who ran the office staff and was so often In With the Boss. Each congressman and senator normally had a woman who held the Key to the Kingdom, the one the AA CALLED when HE wanted to See the Boss.

She was NOT a secretary. To the male staff, 1) the female receptionist who had just gotten out of college, the female case workers, a title which took some time and experience, not to mention not getting fired in the meantime, to obtain, and the office manager who sat with a typewriter and decided who saw the Boss, were all “secretaries.”

This combined rudeness and ignorance with stupidity, and that was a sore point with me. I had had quite enough of this combination in decades of dealing with moderate Republicans.

What always got me about Republican moderates was not only that they kept selling us out, which one expects in hardball politics, but that they were STUPID about it. It’s like the saying about Nixon, what bothered a pro was not that he was tricky — he got the PRESIDENCY that way — but that he got CAUGHT at it.

Moderate Republicans kept saying they sold out because it was PRACTICAL, but it WASN’T even PRACTICAL! As long as moderates ruled the Party, it was a minority. EVERY TIME they got hard-core they WON! Then they went back to Jerry Ford’s mantra “The votes are in the middle of the road.”

I kept pointing out that not only did Republicans win when they went hardcore, but a list of congressmen IN CONGRESS would show that the congressional voting records showed that people who GOT elected and STAYED elected were on the right or the left, NOT IN THE CENTER.

They would then repeat the Jerry Ford maxim: “The votes are in the middle of the road.”

I got paid to be very practical about politics. I also had very strong principles. When people violated principle to do something stupid it was a double whammy to me.

Now back to my Machiavellian genius with “the secretaries.” It would never have occurred to me to call the office manager a secretary. It was one 1) a screaming declaration of ignorance, 2) bad manners – it takes YEARS to go from receptionist through case worker to Office Manager and very few make it. And 3) it was STUPID.

My principles are courtesy and respect, but it never occurred to me this was Bob’s Genius at Work. You are talking about the woman into whose hand the Boss has handed the Keys to His Kingdom. If you don’t deal with her as such, you might as well go and throw some coffee into the face of the Big Boss himself.

Please understand I am making two simultaneous points here. First, I am a gentleman and a TEAM WORKER on principle. I was as courteous with the receptionist as with the office manager.

This was not a reaction to feminism. I would have done this is in my teens.

It never occurred to me that any sane man on the Hill didn’t have the same “strategy.”

Until the guy said I had “strategy with the ‘secretaries,’’’ I was genuinely unaware of it. I thought any sane man on Capitol Hill would do what I did.

Yes, the office managers liked me better. Does this surprise anybody?

Again, what really ticked me off about this, though I didn’t make much comment on it at the time, was that this lack of principle – the principle of courtesy among others – was STUPID, and my reaction to it was the same double whammy I had about Moderate Republicanism. Combining stupidity with lack of principle was already a thorn in my side, so my reaction was the same.

What I should have thought of, according to Goodthink, was how offended these women were by this male staff insensitivity. Instead I thought about my OWN sore point, “Oh, my God! Not only are they rude and ignorant, it is STUPID to be rude and ignorant in this case!”

I had had enough of that. That, not Politically Correct sensitivity, was what froze MY gizzard.

If you wish, I’ll tell you later what I DID about it. Right now I am just hammering on how far people go out of their way to be STUPID, which was one of MY pet peeves.

BoardAd was kind enough to offer me condolences on the death of Jesse Helms. It is another case where BoardAd shows a remarkable understanding of me personally.

I knew Strom much better personally, of course, but I worked with Helms’ office. When we stopped racial quotas imposed on private schools with the Ashbrook-Dornan Amendments, which I initiated alone and we stopped with a 4-1 majority on the House Floor, Helms took over on the Senate side. Many times I would find that Helms had reprinted speeches I had written for AshBROOK and proposals I had initiated for AshBROOK.

In the late 1970s East was elected as Helms’ junior Senator from North Carolina. East was openly and proudly a Helms man. Right after the election, the lead man for moving East onto Capitol Hill, an old friend of mine, called and said “Senator East wants you to know that you are the first person on the Hill we contacted.”

Helms and East had talked about me at length. I had never been in Helms’ office, much less seen the man, but we had had a long and close relationship as fellow warriors.

People usually want to know how many times I SAW Reagan or had cocktails with the big guys. They are always disappointed when I give a vague answer. I almost never spoke with anyone on the Senate side personally, much less the Senator himself.

ANY Senator.

There is an old military saying, “Never send a man where a bullet can go.”

My rule is MORE important, because it deals with more than a skirmish in a battle that, if Congress had done its work right, would never had happened. That my rule of senior staff that is as rigid as the soldier’s rule cited above:

“Never go to a busy, literate man’s office when you can send him a memo.”

I didn’t call the bosses in until I had done ALL the groundwork and no more could be done without them.

Then I thought things out and wrote an excellent, SHORT memo. That’s why they hired a professional writer. If the man in the front office needed more, he would call me. They seldom needed to see me, and I considered it a bit of a defeat when they did.

I felt very close to Helms, although we almost never saw each other. As you can see from the example of Senator East above, he worked very closely with me. I just lost a friend and hero.

Thanks, BoardAd.