B. U. G. S.

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.