THE ULTIMATE REJECTION!

THE ULTIMATE REJECTION!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 8, 2012

When I came to Honeywell Avionics, Inc. (Clearwater, Florida) in 1980 as an inside no longer an outside consultant, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, my boss, had won election to the Pinellas County (Florida) School Board during the previous November.

Dr. Pesuth would go on to be reelected and to become its chairman with his name embossed permanently on steel plates on the entry way to new schools across the county. 

Having seen one of these plagues at a nearby school, I mentioned it to him one morning.  He smiled, “It was the second time I ran,” then shaking his head with the memory of that defeat, confessed, “Running for an elected office and losing is the ultimate rejection.”

Looking at him curiously, he continued, “You don’t see all those who voted for you.  You see only those who voted against you.”

As I got to know my boss, a disciplinarian to the nth degree and the hardest working professional I had ever known, I could imagine the effort he had put into that defeat.

That thought came to me as I saw that Mitt Romney was going to lose his quest for the White House, knowing he had left it all out there on the field holding nothing back.  President Obama did the same, but he had won.  There is a decided difference here.   

I had a reference point.  In the 1964 presidential campaign between Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, I was President of the Young Republicans of Marion County (Indianapolis, Indiana). 

Part of my responsibility was organizing rallies, dinners and assemblies out in Lawrence Township when elected officials or other dignitaries visited this part of the county.  This included Senator Goldwater’s son who was campaigning for his father.

On occasion, I found myself sitting in the homes of Republican boosters across the room or the table from Indiana’s Republican Governor, or a Congressmen or Republican Senator.  Campaigns are built on energy and optimism as well as hype.  For some reason in that campaign I felt the hype but not the energy or optimism.  There was a reason.

President Johnson’s campaign had successfully painted Senator Goldwater as a shooting from the hip warmonger.  Television commercials accentuated this image showing him as president authorizing the detonation of an atomic bomb in Vietnam with a rising mushroom cloud in the background to drive the effect home.

The irony here is that an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in Northern Vietnam gave the president justification in August 1964 to bomb North Vietnam, and escalate the war on the Vietcong.  History would later prove the incident bogus.  Tens of thousands of troops followed growing to hundreds of thousands in a war that could not be won no matter how much man or firepower was added.  Vietnam in the end would prove the president’s albatross.   

Johnson, however, won in 1964 in a landslide.  Romney didn’t suffer a Goldwater type loss, but my sense is that his narrow defeat has given him little comfort.  Since the election, Monday morning quarterbacks are now busy picking up the pieces to describe why he lost.  Soon there will be a cadre of folks on both sides of the political spectrum launching campaigns for the presidency four years hence.  It never ends.

My sense is that despite this most fatiguing campaign cycle Romney and Ryan will find new challenges and worlds to conquer.  It is not as if they have never been here before.  I suspect some readers can relate to what follows.

The spring of 1964 a contingent of Republicans came to my house and asked me to run for congress in my congressional district.  I sat there looking at them incredulously across my living room, as if they were mad.

“No, absolutely not!”  I said, then went on to say that I didn’t want my family exposed to innuendos bordering on slander, and then have the same attacks directed at my opponents in my name. 

Memory of that experience has found me applauding all candidates with the nerve, passion and patriotism, whatever their ideological persuasion, to run for public office.  Were it not for them, and their sacrifice, we would not have the democratic republic that we enjoy.  Think of that the next time you disparage people who have submitted themselves to this often inhuman sometimes humiliating grind, but what can also be an awesome exhilarating experience.

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