Written by Al Simpson, former U.S. Senator from Wyoming
I’ve sure taken a few good lumps in my political life and dished out a few too! And yet, I’ve never seen anything like this recent governor’s race. We have two men, Foster Friess and Sam Galeotos, who claim deep allegiance to Wyoming, running for an office called governor. Neither of them have ever “governed” anything – they’ve never been involved in a city council, a school board, a county commission. The job is to “govern” the state of Wyoming. To work with its citizens. To listen to them, to work with the various agencies of our own state government, and the federal government – after all, the feds own nearly 50 percent of our surface area and about 62 percent of our minerals underground. You don’t want to irritate your main landlord too much! We’ll leave it to “Hang ‘em High” Harriet Hageman to do that!
Courtesy photo of Al Simpson
Back to Sam and Foster. I would think the title “Governor” would sound pretty strange to both of them since they’ve spent much of their lives being called “Big Boss” or “Head Honcho.” But again, they have never “governed” anything. Oh sure, they have administered, negotiated, run board meetings, and I also get the deep feeling they are kind of used to having their own way. I know that they’re willing to spend anything to clasp that mysterious (to them!) title of “Governor.” Foster says he’ll spend “whatever it takes.” It is truly hard to believe that the two of them have spent an estimated $5 million dollars in this primary campaign, with still a couple of weeks to go! No telling how many “buys” they have to take them to the end. I have a question for both of them. In your travels before deciding to run for the state’s highest office – had you been to towns in Wyoming named Otto, Clark, Deaver, Smoot, Robertson, Barnum, Edgerton, Elmo, Carlile, Osage, Manville, Redbird, Hartville, Veteran, Albin, and more places like that? Have you been there campaigning? Real, authentic Wyoming folks live in those places and they would have loved to have seen you and asked you a lot of questions about your campaign – but there are few places for private planes to land, so I’m guessing Foster missed them. In fact, I understand Foster had never been to Casper before. Kind of sad. And I reckon for the first time in our Wyoming history we’ll find out whether money, ego and wealth can really “buy an election.” It’s never happened before, but who knows. We’ll find out soon. If it does, we’re in a heap of trouble!
Now let’s take a good look at another candidate. Ol’ “Hang ‘em High” Harriet! She’s really spraying the internet with nastiness and venom. When you see her in person she’s seems relatively calm – but in her mailings and online she’ll smile and run a shiv in your ribs. What all that really is is an act of desperation on her part. She knows where she is in the race. And each and every shred of ancient crap that she’s dredged up was well-known to the people of Wyoming long before they elected Mark Gordon for the first time as their state treasurer. People need to know and remember that. Now they do – because Mark has an explanation for each and every one of her desperate charges. In politics you can be called a fool, boob, idiot, bonehead, squirrel, nut-case and every other ascending expletive, but you must never allow your opponents to distort who you are! And all her ugly attacks are a distortion of who Mark Gordon is – it’s clumsy, it’s nasty, it’s harsh, and it’s old laundry. My granddad had a pretty good phrase: “You can’t sell your own product by knocking the other guy’s product.”
Lord knows what she might have done with me if she ever knew I was once a member of the ACLU – but when I was a brand spankin’ new lawyer I liked what they were doing with native Americans, and the Northern Arapahos and Eastern Shoshones because my great-grandfather was the “Boss Farmer” for Shoshone Chief Washakie. Then when the ACLU sat silent as the Nazis decided to march in Skokie, Illinois, a largely Polish community that had gut-wrenching memories of their war time countrymen who had been savaged and incinerated by the Nazis in the Holocaust ovens, I said, “That’s enough for me,” and I resigned. That’s just what Mark did when philosophies and ideals later changed in the organizations he first had embraced.
Don’t forget, the word of the day is “governor” as in “governing.” Who can do it? Who has done it? Who is good at it? The answer to those questions, only one guy – Mark Gordon. He’s done it all. You trusted him before, why would you stop now? Unless of course you believe all the garbage, BS, rumors, distortions, and plain damn lies that have been hurled, and will continue to be hurled, by envious opponents. Hang on tight! Remember, you have nothing to lose but your wonderful state of Wyoming.
Paid for by Friends of Mark Gordon
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