I rolled my eyes but tried to keep it from my son. Marilyn might say he was too much like me, but he wasn't an academic. It was a little more like Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold proudly talking about his son Rusty in Vegas Vacation - 'He's a C+ student!' It was time to put my foot down. I looked down at him and said, "What about you? Have you done your homework?"
He gave me a look and said, "I don't have any homework."
"You don't have any homework, or you don't have any homework here?"
"Dad!", he protested, with a very guilty look on his face.
I put my hands on my hips and gave him the stare down. "You ever try to pull a stunt like this again, you won't be able to sit for a week. You think I'm tough? I learned from people who would eat you alive! Until you hear otherwise, I will be checking your homework nightly. You want me to start calling your teachers and asking them if you have any homework?"
"Dad!" He had a panicked look in his eyes at the suggestion.
"Out! And don't try this one again!" I pointed towards the door and he scooted out at high speed.
Marilyn came in about a minute later. "What did you say to your son?"
I gave her a wry smile. "Just that he had to do his homework." She gave me a curious look. "He tried to pull a fast one on me by telling me he didn't have any homework, when he meant to say he didn't have any here. He really left it home."
Marilyn replied, "That little shit!", but she was smiling as she said it.
"So I chewed his ass and asked if he wanted me to make daily phone calls to his teachers."
She glanced back towards the door. "I'll chew him some more when we get back home."
"I like that idea. Why do I have the funny feeling my first born is not going to be making his name in the halls of academia?"
"Carl! That's an awful thing to say!" I gave her an are-you-kidding-me! look and she shrugged. "Well, did you know you were going to get a doctorate when you were eleven?"
"I think I knew when I was in the womb, and it still wouldn't have satisfied anyone!", I replied, laughing.
"You're as crazy as everyone else in your family."
"Sshhh! Don't let anybody know!" I laughed and advanced on her. "Besides, only poor people are crazy. Rich people are eccentric!"
Marilyn laughed and backed away from me. "I don't care how rich you are. You're still crazy!" She backed her way out the door.
Since it didn't look like I was going to trap Marilyn in the den, I went back to work.
Tuesday evening the meeting was set for seven at the house on 30th. I had told Marilyn I would be spending the night in Washington, and the catering company had left plenty of coffee and tea and some cookies and snacks. By twenty-after we all had our coffee and were gathered in the den. John looked around the room and said, "Well, Carl, you called the meeting. What's on your mind?"
I was already standing, but at this I went over to one of my easels that I had positioned at the end of the room. "All right, fair enough. A few weeks ago I was talking to Newt about continuing the pressure on the Democrats, about taking control of the House back, and even the Senate. I spent a chunk of the recess thinking about this, and came up with some ideas. I'll go into them in a moment, but I want to lay out the big picture first."
"First, we need to keep up the pressure related to the bank and post office scandals, but we need to do more than that. So far we've only been telling people why they shouldn't vote Democratic. We haven't been telling them why they should vote Republican! We've been negative, not positive. It's not enough to say the Democrats are the bad guys, we have to convince people that the Republicans are the good guys. Has anybody here ever worked in the private sector, a restaurant or a company selling something?"
The others looked around at each other. "I grew up working in my grandfather's bar. It's still in the family.", said John.
Frank Riggs offered, "I used to sell real estate."
"Okay. You guys know that you can't sell stuff negatively." To John I said, "Your grandfather wasn't going to sell any more beer by simply advertising that the bar down the street wasn't as nice as his. Same thing with you, Frank. Nobody is going to buy through you if the only thing you tell them is that the other brokers are crooks. No, you have to show them why they should buy from you, that you have better listings and know more." I turned back to John. "Or that your beer is tastier, or your waitresses are cuter. You have to push the positive." I got a few nods at this.
"We have to show that our Republican Party product is better for our buyer, the voters. So, here's my idea. While we keep pushing the problems with the Democratic Congress, we also come out with a bold plan, something that takes all the ideas we got into this business for, and combine them into something new."
I reached out and flipped the top page off of my easel pad, exposing what I had written beneath. "I propose a Contract With America!" There were some curious murmurs at this. "We can call it something else, but I think this will fly. Here's how it works."
I flipped another page over, where I had ten bullet points listed. "Now, we have ten items on our list." I flashed my hands out, all ten fingers spread. "We can argue about the specifics, but we keep it to ten items. For instance, balancing the budget, we all want that. Entitlement reform, especially welfare. The line item veto on the budget. Infrastructure investment. A Federal level gun law that requires 'may issue' states to become 'shall issue states'." I went over several other items. I had purposely left several lines blank, so the others could come up with their own ideas.
"Why ten items? We can come up with more than that?", asked somebody.
"Ten's a good number. It's easy for people to remember and think about and talk about. Moses did well with it, why can't we?" There were a lot of nods at that, along with a few grins. I always tended to think of Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part One, where Moses comes down off of Mount Sinai with three tablets, telling everybody he has 15 commandments, and then drops and breaks one of the tablets, cutting the number down to 10.
"One important feature - we stay away from Democrat hot buttons.", I warned. "I don't care what you might personally think, but you want to stay away from abortion. Stay away from school prayer. Stay away from gays and marriage. I don't care how wonderful a bill you write, we get into some of these social things, and the Democrats will beat us to death with them!"
"Abortion is wrong. It's murder.", said Rick Santorum.
I shrugged theatrically. "Rick, I understand what you are saying, I truly do, but that doesn't mean I agree with you. There are nine good conservatives in this room, and I can guarantee that I'm not the only guy here who doesn't agree with you. If we start trying to push these things, they will be the only things the Democrats will talk about and we will get killed on this. The average American doesn't like it, but that doesn't mean they want to ban it either. If we start pushing a hard right agenda, this will be still born." There were a few grumpy faces around the room, but a few relieved ones as well.
"So how does this work with the Contract bit?", asked Scott Klug.