How Acting Like A Total Jackass Helps Flip The Tide Of Politics
Victory is mine.
At least that is how I choose to frame it. When you get a column someday, then can you crow. This is my moment and I’m taking it.
Sure Democrat Josh Gottheimer now represents New Jersey’s Fifth Congressional District, my district, after what was a highly contentious and some say patently ugly battle over the past months. But that is merely a sidelight around here. What really happened is I got involved. For the first time. And I kicked ass.
I’m not entirely sure what the hell Gottmeier’s got going, but I know he is not his opponent and our current Congressman Scott Garrett. This was an opposition front from the get-go. Topple the horrid and deal with the terrible. Old time politics. Gory. Brutal. Music for the masses and sweet demolishment for the wicked.
Fuck Donald Trump. I’m a bigger asshole and I can prove it. My victory is even more unlikely.
2016! Assholes are in!
Let me just point out that my throwing this thing into turmoil helped to flip a district that has not elected a Democrat in 85 years. That’s right, long before my parents were on the planet. Eight decades plus. Nearly a century. Not one Democrat.
Then I got pissed.
And I wish to be clear; I was not necessarily politically pissed. It matters little that Garrett was a Republican. He is scum. And he had to be sent packing.
At first I was merely inconvenienced, then mildly annoying, then increasingly angered. It was around flat-out pissed that I got involved in the race.
If you think about it, the entire history of civilization is summed up in the above sentence.
American Revolution is Inconvenience—Annoyance—Pissed.
It all began for me with simply researching what the hell my representative was about. I suggest you do so, as soon as you are done reading this. I don’t care what you stand for, but when everything the person representing you in congress stands for makes you want to violently retch, it is time to get warmed up.
As soon as Scott Garrett’s record revealed itself to be a tsunami of bigotry, spite and overall dumbness, taking this thing into the realm of the asinine suddenly appeared worthy of my angst-in-motion.
Okay, let’s recap; A few weeks ago I became embroiled…okay, I embroiled directly…in a very public tete-a-tete with Garrett, whom I openly challenged to a fist fight in print. I felt, and rightfully so, that everyone needs a beating once in a while in their life. I took them. Many times. They are good for the soul. They teach you that ideologies and debate are all well and good, but a direct hit to the temple can wake a man, give him needed perspective. Garret was way overdue for this, and I took up my patriotic duty to administer it, with extreme prejudice.
This was not my initial plan. I was having the time of my life covering what was the most absurd of presidential campaigns run by two giant assholes and generally making glib of all-things as usual here. Then I started getting inundated with robo-calls from the Garrett campaign. One or two a week became five or six and then it was every evening, right around eight or so. Sometimes, as I shared with my readers, it interrupted key dancing time with my eight-year-old daughter. We dig punk and we dig it loud and the incessant phone ringing and then some automated falderal being read in a sub-mental drone could not be obliged.
To be frank, I was already at a boiling point with Garrett’s bi-annual digital town halls that would call my home and then for close to 20 minutes, if I dared answered or my machine picked up, would not allow me to remove it from my line. My phone connection was literally hijacked by this nonsense.
And so I began badgering Garrett’s campaign to cut the shit. They did not comply. I could have reported the whole operation to the FCC or some such, but I despise “proper channels”. I like to get ugly. Not to mention, I have this nifty forum and it seemed right to use it in the most vicious way.
As you might have read in the now infamous series of Garrett bashing (“Scott Garrett Needs An Ass Kicking” and “Scott Garret’s Intimidation Machine Versus Me”), which resulted in the aforementioned challenge to brawl, I could not have been more blatantly satirical. Yet, I thought it my journalistic duty to gather a comment from him. Several professionally placed calls to his campaign came up empty. The campaign then decided this would be a good time to accuse me of harassment (ironically what started all this was their harassment of my home phone) and got local police involved.
All of this back-and-forth, of course, was published here and on the fancy Internet and that is when things got interesting.
It started with calls from the Gottheimer Campaign. They had been spending way too much time trying to answer for me, and the seriousness of first my challenge and then the cops being brought into the fray. They asked if it was okay to send newspapers and online blogs my way and even requested I address a rally for their candidate, for which I answered the same way I have for nearly 20 years of this; “I don’t do rallies.”
It wasn’t until Politico contacted me that I realized this had gone national and it was directly affecting the race. Some off-the-record comments, which I can now reveal, since Gottheimer is the congressman-elect, from his people were telling me the negative feedback from voters to the petty and feckless over-reaction from Garrett was putting a strain on his campaign. They were actually answering questions on whether they understood the concept of satire and whether Garrett was afraid of a 54-year-old writer who is a little over five foot and 125 pounds soaking wet with a bag of nickels in his pocket. Even the cops who were calling me laughed at the whole thing.
And then I found out there were tapes of my calls to the Garrett Campaign, not only archived, but sent to the authorities. I was able to obtain them through a journalist whose name shall not be revealed, because I wouldn’t want mine revealed, not so much to protect sources.
I cherish those tapes now—every syllable dripping with sarcasm and rage. They will be my legacy here.
For all the crap I have stirred up over the past 19 years of this cannot compare to acting like a complete idiot and having it result in a victory.
Now I know how Donald Trump feels.
Fuck him. I’m a bigger asshole.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud—The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
