I wanted his support, so I couldnt laughHe said...
- Posted at 10:48 PM on Thursday, May 6, 2010 by minping4849
I wanted his support, so I couldnt laughHe said hed once been young, thin, and fast, the starting guard on the Coal Hill High School basketball team, which he had led to the state championship over Little Rock Central High in the 1930s; hed gained all his weight in the years when he was the county bootlegger, and never lost itAfter a while, he said hed be for me, maybe just so he could go back to bed
Next, I drove out into the country to see Bill Fowler, who had a farm in BoxleyBill had served as the Arkansas representative in the Agricultural Soil and Conservation Service in the Johnson administrationAs we stood on a hillside with a spectacular view of the mountains, he said he would support me, but he didnt think Hammerschmidt would have enough of Nixons crap on him to stink by election dayHe then offered this assessment of the President: I hate to say this about a Republican, but Nixon could have been a wonderful PresidentHes brilliant and hes got a sackful of gutsBut hes just sorry, and he cant help itI thought about what he said all the way back to Fayetteville
During the early weeks of the campaign, louis vuitton purple bag besides the retail politics I tried to work through the mechanicsAs Ive mentioned, Uncle Raymond and Gabe Crawford co-signed a note for $10,000 to get me started, and I began to raise money, at first mostly in the Fayetteville area, then across the district and eventually throughout the stateSeveral of my friends from Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale and the McGovern and Duffey campaigns sent small checksMy largest contributor was my friend Anne Bartley, Governor Winthrop Rockefellers stepdaughter, who later ran the Arkansas office in Washington, DEventually thousands of people gave, often one-, five-, or ten-dollar bills as we passed the bucket at rallies
On February 25, I formally announced my candidacy with my family and a few friends at the Avanelle Motel, where Mother went for coffee most mornings before work
Uncle Raymond gave me a little house in a good location for the Hot Springs headquartersMother, my Park Avenue neighbor Rose Crane, and Bobby Hargraves, a young lawyer whose sister I had worked with in Washington, set up a first-class operationRose later moved to Little Rock and joined my administration gucci leather handbags when I became governor, but Mother kept building the organization and put it to work in future campaignsThe main headquarters was in Fayetteville, where my banker friend George Shelton agreed to be campaign chairman and FMartin, a young lawyer I played basketball with, signed on as treasurerI rented an old house on College Avenue, which was kept open mostly by college students, and often on weekends by my cousin Roys fifteen-year-old daughter, Marie Clinton, aloneWe painted big CLINTON FOR CONGRESS signs and put them on both sides of the houseTheyre still there, having been painted over many times as new enterprises moved inToday theres one word over the old signs: TATTOOEventually, my childhood friend Patty Howe opened a headquarters in Fort Smith, and others cropped up around the district as we got closer to the election
By the time I went to Little Rock to file on March 22, I had three opponents: State Senator Gene Rainwater, a crew-cut conservative Democrat from Greenwood, just south of Fort Smith; David Stewart, a handsome young lawyer from Danville in Yell County; and Jim Scanlon, the tall, gregarious rolex sea dweller mayor of Greenland, a few miles south of FayettevilleI was most worried about Stewart because he was attractive, articulate, and from the Clintons home county, which I had hoped would go for me
The first big political event of the campaign was on April 6: the River Valley Rally in Russellville, a college town in the east end of the districtIt was an obligatory event, and all the candidates for federal, state, and local office were there, including Senator Fulbright and Governor BumpersSenator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the featured speakerHe gave an old-time fire-and-brimstone speech and entertained the crowd by playing the fiddleThen the candidates speeches started, with the congressional candidates scheduled to speak lastBy the time everyone else had taken three to five minutes, it was past ten oclockI knew the crowd would be tired and bored by the time we got up, but I took a gamble and chose to speak lastI figured it was my only chance to make an impression
I had worked hard on the speech and had hammered it down to two minutesIt was a passionate call for a stronger Congress that would represent discount chanel quilted handbags ordinary people against the concentration of power in the Republican administration and its allied economic interestsThough I had written the speech out, I gave it from memory and poured my heart into itSomehow it struck a responsive chord with the audience, who, though tired after a long evening, found the energy to rise to their feet and cheerAs the crowd walked out, my volunteers gave them copies of the speechI was off to a good start
When the event was over, Governor Bumpers came up to meAfter complimenting me on the speech, he said he knew I had worked for Senator Fulbright and thought he shouldnt be trying to unseat himThen he stunned me by saying, In twelve years or so, you may be facing the same decision regarding running against meIf you think its the right thing to do, go on and run, and remember I told you to do itDale Bumpers was one smart cookieHe could have made a handsome living as a psychologist
The next seven weeks were a blur of rallies, sale barns, pie suppers, money-raising, and retail politicsI got a big financial and organizational boost when the AFL-CIO, at its meeting in Hot Springs, endorsed gucci bags discount
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