As the father of a grown woman I love and admire, I am bothered by the misogyny of the current president of America.
The insults, hatred and disturbing comments by Donald Trump towards women should disgust all of us.
The latest ad developed by The Lincoln Project, developed and managed by Republicans, several of whom I know and respect during my time as an operative for the national GOP and who are also fed up with Trump, lays out the differences between Trump and Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for president.
Who is the Lincoln Project. Ask 60 Minutes, the CBS news video magazine:
I’ve apologized many times for my work for Republicans in the 1980s. I took a sabbatical from my chosen career as a newspaperman to work for GOP Congressman Paul Findley in 1981 for what I said would be a couple of years working inside Congress to learn how things were done in Washington.
That two years turned into an 11-year journey that included serving as an operative for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee (NRCC), the Republican National Committee (RNC), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).
The NRCC asked me to take on what they felt would be a challenging role as chief of staff for the first term of right-wing freshman Congressman. It turned into two years of hell. The NRSC sent me into Senate campaigns to help candidates I would have never voted for and the RNC had me writing the “message of the day” for Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign.
The “payoff” was becoming the divisional vice president for political programs for the National Association of Realtors, a position that directed what was then the nation’s largest political action committee and also ran an independent expenditures program that supported candidates (Republican and Democrats) for Congress.
The money was good. So was the single-malt scotch that I drank to ease the growing disdain of what I had become.
After five years, I walked away from politics and into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous to deal with out-of-control alcoholism. I worked for a while as the senior communications consultant of a business crisis communications firm before getting back to the one career I loved — news journalism and I have been sober for 26 years, four months, and 12 days as this is written.
Is there a self-help program for former Republican political operatives?
Yes. It’s called the Lincoln Project: