[Reprinted from February 27, 2005. Authored by Ted Ladd Sr. about his son’s campaign for Wyoming’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004.]
I have recently survived a congressional electoral campaign during which I acted as a part-time aide to my son, whose name is also Ted Ladd. This was a wild, sometimes exhilarating and almost always exhausting ride. I have suggested to my son that he has earned the equivalent of a doctorate in civics. I am not sure what if any advanced degrees I deserve, but it was an extraordinary learning experiencing which I’ve decided should be recorded for posterity.
My recollection is that my son’s serious consideration of running for Congress in 2004 for the one Wyoming seat began in December 2003. I recall talking with him about a month later and urging him to go for it. Even if he failed, it would be a great learning experience. If he didn’t try, he would always wonder whether he should have made the attempt.
From the very beginning, we knew it would be a long shot. Even though the incumbent was reportedly ignoring her constituents and had missed an extraordinary number of votes in Washington, there were lots of obstacles to my son’s success: running against a five term incumbent is always difficult; she would have a substantial amount of money for campaigning; running as a Democrat in Wyoming is tough, particularly coming from “the wrong part of Wyoming”, namely very wealthy Teton County which is disliked in much of the rest of this relatively poor state. At the age of 35 and with limited state-wide public service, his name recognition hovered near zero. Last but not least, with the modest exception of my son’s management of a campaign for a candidate for Teton County Commissioner, this would be his first electoral experience. That’s a pretty powerful list of headwinds.
This is not to say his candidacy was totally whimsical. He has a great education with an undergraduate degree from Cornell, a Masters of Business Administration from Wharton and a Masters of International Economics from Johns Hopkins. He has had business success in the high tech business world. He has lived permanently in Wyoming for 3-4 years but has been in and out of the state regularly for 25 years, working with Wyoming Game and Fish on the grizzly bear team, being a ranch counselor, a dude ranch wrangler, and a Forest Service back country ranger. My son’s professional expertise is strategic planning for small business, a great background for a candidate.
Governor Dave Freudenthal appointed Ted to the Wyoming Business Council in 2003. The fact that Democratic “Gov Dave” won his election in 2002, albeit by a razor thin margin, and is increasingly popular shows that it is possible for a Democrat to win in Wyoming. Finally and most important, my son is (at least according to his proud father) smart, energetic, passionate about public service, and eloquent.
So that you won’t be in suspense, let me tell you the outcome upfront. He won the Democratic primary in August, although by a relatively small plurality. There were some periods during the general election in which we thought we might win, but President Bush’s appeal in Wyoming (69% of the vote) was just too great. We did manage to convince 22% of the voters who supported Mr. Bush to change party affiliation on the next line of the ballot and to vote for my son, but that was not nearly enough, so he lost: 55% for the incumbent, 42% for my son, and 3% for the libertarian candidate. He did, however, win Teton County, Vice President Cheney’s home district.
Notwithstanding Ted’s electoral defeat, it was a terrific learning experience for him, his wife, for me, for our entire family, and many others. There were relatively few ill effects. We expected if he lost that there would be a post-electoral let down, but as I will explain later, that let down lasted but a nanosecond. What follows is my tale on the campaign trail: observations, conclusions, and (in italics) some of the anecdotes along the way.
Starting in late June 2004, I spent roughly two months campaigning with or for my son all over Wyoming. Most of this time, I accompanied him, but I was allowed to make a couple of speeches on my own when he was elsewhere. During the campaign, I had extensive experience walking the streets, passing out brochures in residential areas and retail areas of some of the cities and towns in Wyoming. There were times when I had a teammate, namely my wife, my son’s wife, my son-in-law, or one of my son’s campaign staff. I volunteered to go by myself on a three-day expedition to ultraconservative southwest Wyoming. His sister, my daughter, was enormously emotionally supportive of her brother and may be the unsung hero of the effort, even though (with two small children) she was reluctant to go on the campaign trail. It was a family effort and a family experience. We had some terrifically interesting meetings and some days when nothing could go right.
My first general observation is that the people of Wyoming are very gracious and hospitable. With extremely few exceptions, people welcomed me at their doors or in their stores. I experienced almost no hostility. This was a surprise. I still don’t know whether this reflects the sparsely populated state of Wyoming and therefore the willingness of voters to be receptive to new faces or whether it was the unaccustomed opportunity to have a national candidate (or representative) appear in person. I may also have had the benefit of having the same name as my son, and there was on occasion some confusion (which probably worked to our advantage) over our identical names.
There were lots of people who were not interested in my son or in the election but extraordinarily few who were rude. My most difficult moment was on Summit Street in Evanston when I knocked on the door of a house and was greeted by a seemingly pleasant woman of roughly my age and her nice little black dog Winky – one remembers the details. She said, upon receiving the brochure, that she had only one question, namely how my son felt about abortion. When I said he believed that women had an unequivocal right to choose, she tore the brochure into tiny pieces in my face.
A second general observation is that Wyoming politics are intimate, a personal experience. Coming from Massachusetts, I have usually met our governors but have never shaken hands with our senators or congressmen. In the course of campaigning in Wyoming, I met the governor five times, had some interesting conversations with his very distinguished wife, met all the other candidates for statewide office, and in most cases had a chance to meet their families. Personalization softens the political experience.
This personal aspect to the campaign is even more extraordinary given the physical size of the state. Wyoming is 50thamong the states in population but 9th in size. A particular problem for my son, living in Teton County on the Idaho border, was the task of getting to the capital Cheyenne near the Nebraska border, a seven-hour drive, and driving is the only choice unless you have the money (which we didn’t) to charter your own plane.
While Wyoming in general is a beautiful state and driving through magnificent country is a pleasure, my son and I both came to believe that by far the most boring stretch of roadway lies between Shoshoni and Casper, roughly the middle of the state. This is a 100-mile stretch of generally straight two-lane highway through utterly uninteresting, featureless, unvarying territory. About every twenty miles there is a very small town (“population 23”). To make life interesting on our drives, I carried with me a book on the “Roadside Geology of Wyoming” but as best I can tell, in the 4.3 billion year history of our planet, nothing ever happened between Shoshoni and Casper.
A much less pleasant surprise during my travels was the degree to which voters appeared to be interested only in issues which touched their personal lives: they seemed to be saying: “I am concerned solely about my job security, my health care benefits, maybe my kid’s education”. I was surprised that in Wyoming, “the Cowboy State”, which prides itself on its independence, entrepreneurship, and distaste for government (especially Washington), there are a lot of folks who seem quite dependent on government (including Federal) largesse.
At a time when American soldiers are dying in Iraq and the success of our intervention in the Middle East seems very much in question, I received extraordinarily few questions or evident interest in foreign policy. I kept urging my son to talk about government deficits – you would think that the liabilities we are bequeathing to the next generation would be considered outrageous. My son kept telling me the fiscal issues “didn’t resonate” and that voters don’t draw a connection between their personal lives and the broader issues. I don’t know whether this phenomenon has changed over the decades but there is little evidence that the preponderance of today’s electorate is interested in national issues or community in the broadest sense.
To the degree I got questions about the broader issues, they were usually social issues like abortion or same sex marriage. I suspect that the proportion of gays and lesbians in Wyoming must be among the lowest of any state. You would think in a state with the highest teenage pregnancy rate, the highest divorce rate, the proportionately very large 16% of the population without health insurance, and the biggest gender pay gap of any state - that folks would be focusing on those very real issues. Perhaps it is my prejudice about the wedge issues of abortion and same sex marriage, but in my view they will probably never be resolved and only invite divisiveness in our society. Further, I had thought that they were macho issues, but the number of women who are inflamed against abortion or same sex marriage seemed about the same as the number of men.
There are other sacrosanct issues peculiar to Wyoming. No candidate can avoid taking a doctrinaire stand on guns, snowmobiles, and wolves. In case anyone is in doubt, the required pledge is in favor of unrestricted gun control and snowmobile use. Wolves are a bit more complicated: these animals are fine when they are in the national park but should they wander outside (perhaps they have poor eyesight and difficulty reading the signs on park boundaries), they should be deemed predators and killed with any tool close to hand.
A Democrat running for public office automatically is suspect on environmental and “social” issues. Before this campaign in Wyoming, I had never learned that Democrats in Massachusetts are perceived in the intermountain west as folks who are likely to break into your house in the middle of the night to steal your guns and your children! Another social issue I encountered (but only once) was a man in Laramie who said his sole litmus test for any candidate was support for “U.S. English”. It took me a while to figure out that he was unalterably opposed to teaching of English as a second language.
We also encountered a substantial amount of apathy, especially among the young. I recall a morning at Western Wyoming Community College in Rock Springs. It was a well-publicized event. You would have thought that a candidate for Congress would get a bit of a crowd. There were only 8-9 students who showed up.
Another surprising location for apathy was on the Wind River Indian Reservation. One is impressed first by the size of the Reservation (2.2 million acres, almost half the area of Massachusetts), yet it is incredibly sparsely populated. There are ten thousand Indians (a name they prefer to “Native Americans”): about 7,000 Arapahoes and 3,000 Shoshones. Unfortunately the Arapahoes and Shoshones don’t care much for each other, which compounds the problem of getting governmental support. Despite Herculean efforts by federal, state, and local government, the education system is poor, the housing stock is dilapidated, and crime is abundant. The desperation is palpable. The Indians should be natural Democrats, and could be a powerful electoral force. Unfortunately, not many of them vote.
On the other hand, senior centers were an exceptionally good campaign forum. There was almost always a relatively big crowd; they would show up promptly around 11:30 for the noon meal; they listened to the issues, followed the campaign, and more important they voted. One can understand from this experience why there is a tilt toward the elderly in governmental benefits. Many seniors are Democrats but we discovered even at senior centers there are “Republican Tables” and “Democrat Tables”.
We loved going to senior centers, except for the food. I avoided most of the lunches but I would characterize them as white bread covered with grey/brown gravy and a small dish of custard. I would usually go with my son – he would explain to the seniors that while he was 35 years old, he looked younger, and if they wanted grey hair, there was old dad with the same name. After we talked with the seniors, we would make an excuse that we had a luncheon meeting elsewhere.
Politics is a serious business but a campaign takes on elements of a carnival or circus, especially if the issue is name recognition. Ted did some outlandish things, plastering his campaign headquarters in Casper with signs, scheming to get yard signs at the busiest intersections, volunteering to go on radio talk shows only to be eviscerated by anonymous callers.
My favorite carnival moment was the annual Rock Springs parade. There were perhaps 140-150 different floats. I was driving my wife’s car, the windows and sides of which were so plastered with campaign signs that I had very limited visibility. We were positioned in the parade immediately in front of a dozen riders on horseback. It became apparent that all the parade bystanders were intrigued by the horses, and we were not getting any attention until my son hitched a rope to the roof rack and got on top of the car. This was deemed to be sufficiently quixotic so that his antics got lots of attention. I was quite nervous driving with my son on the roof, and I got a lot of advice from parade watchers to step on the gas and try to shake him off. Fortunately we all survived unscathed but the sequel was that the roof had a very large concave dent where he had been standing and had to be hammered back to a normal position.
Wyoming is a state at the margin. It is a huge energy producer, but mineral extraction is a boom/bust business (currently booming) and the economy needs to diversify. It is fascinating that in a state with national parks and where the environment is a huge tourist and economic attraction, there are not many avowed environmentalists and probably even fewer who are successful politically. The trade offs between energy and environment are not well understood.
Some businesses were sufficiently interested in (or possibly concerned about) my son’s candidacy that they sponsored some great tours including a descent into a trona mine west of Green River and driving through a gas drilling field near Pinedale. The highlight of the former was being in a truck moving rapidly through a bewildering labyrinth of tunnels about 1,500 feet under the surface of the planet when the driver turned off the lights in the vehicle to show the darkness. He made his point: I have never been in a darker place!
In the tour of the gas drilling field, the business executive who had driven from Denver just for this meeting gave us the soft sell on why the environmental impact was de minimus and it would be beneficial for the environment and the country’s energy supply to have year round vs. drilling only during the six warmer months. We were polite but skeptical listeners, thinking that the drillers had underestimated the extensive network of road covering an enormous swathe of land and the heavy truck traffic to service the rigs, the wildlife migration impact, and the problems of regrowth of the disturbed areas of previously pristine, high-mountain desert. The completed wells didn’t seem too visible but the drilling platforms were mammoth, especially when lighted at night. I am sure it is hard to put an economic cost on visual pollution but the rigs were a giant blot on the landscape.
The idyllic town of Pinedale lies between the magnificent Wind River Range to the east and a ridge of hills to the west of town that is now dotted with rigs. The area is booming because this gas field is one of the hottest drilling sites in the country. Amidst the prosperity there is huge social impact and dislocation with a part time population of crews (usually single men without families) and the resulting problems of alcohol and drugs. A subsequent meeting with voters at the Sublette County Library revealed how divisive the energy issue is: some of the Pinedale residents wanted to eliminate all energy production now; others were talking about somehow creating a four-year college in this very small community. Both points of view seemed to lack any reality.
A day in July – a few weeks before the Wyoming Primary Election - ended on a dispiriting note in Pinedale. My son volunteered for an interview with the publisher of one of the local newspapers. The publisher was a very feisty and arrogant young man, brimming with cynicism and disrespect for political candidates, and seemingly obsessed with the issue of same-sex marriage. While we kept our cool, following the interview my son and I were both angry. Months later in the midst of the general election I had a considerable surprise in picking up a copy of that same newspaper and seeing that the editor had endorsed my son. I can only guess at what sort of discussion developed between the editor and the publisher and still wonder about the former’s job longevity.
Aside from energy extraction, Wyoming is not doing well - it is sparsely populated, remote, under-educated (lowest proportion of college graduates of any of the states), and lacking in the natural advantages of more sophisticated urban communities that have a hope of participating, as the cliché runs, in “knowledge based industries”. The largest private employer in Wyoming is Wal-Mart. Many of the downtown sections of cities such as Rawlins had been hollowed out, with main street vacancies rates reaching 30%. Furthermore, it is difficult to lure large businesses to Wyoming – there simply is not the critical mass of workers even in the largest cities of Cheyenne and Casper to provide the labor for a large manufacturing facility. Kids are leaving the state at a rapid pace in search of better jobs elsewhere. Thus my son’s campaign focused on small business creation to create better jobs, keep kids in Wyoming, and recycle the profits in state.
We also heard alarming anecdotal reports on how many potential employees failed the drug tests that are increasingly required by employers. We were told the new Walgreen store in Rock Springs couldn’t stay open even for 12 hours (even though it had hoped to run 24 hours a day) despite local a unemployment rate of about 6% because it couldn’t find sufficient numbers of drug free employees.
My son and I had the good fortune to meet with several police chiefs – I was awestruck at the drug problems, especially crystal methamphetamine (meth). Evidently most hard drug epidemics start in the urban east and move west but this one has started in the rural west, in part because fertilizer – one of the key ingredients - is readily available in Wyoming. However, it is now cheaper to make meth in Mexico, and there are reportedly Mexican gangs who run the stuff up in trucks to the western U.S.
Evidently meth is extraordinarily addictive, and those hooked go through violent highs and lows. A meth habit costs $600 per week, so there is a lot of related crime. It is very damaging to one’s organs and it is a real life expectancy shortener: it permanently damages the verbal center of the brain after as few as two uses. The police chief in Rock Springs said arrests (mostly drug related) were up 280% in 2003 and another 40% in the first part of 2004. The police chief’s strategy in Casper is to make the city very inhospitable for meth dealers, probably forcing them elsewhere, but there does not seem to be a broad strategy for addressing the underlying problem. Once the addict is caught, the detoxification period is very long, 9 to 12 months. My guess is that the cost of attempting to treat a meth addict is about $40,000 per year. This is a real blight on society in Wyoming.
The economic and social consequences of slow growth and declining younger population are clearly negative. One of our great meetings was with the school superintendent in Evanston. The school enrollment in that town has dropped in the last ten years from 3,700 to 2,900 students. Thus there has been relatively little need for recruitment of younger teachers. My impression is that a very large proportion (70-75%) of the teachers will thus be retiring in the next ten years. The Evanston schools are increasing salaries for young teachers from $25,000 to $27,000 per year, but that compensation is not competitive in the marketplace, especially with Salt Lake City only 70 miles to the west paying substantially more, and there is a huge teacher replacement problem on the horizon.
Based on observation, my intuition is that there are a lot of people, at least in Wyoming, who are living at the margin. Jobs are insecure, there are often two working parents who are really stretched, diets are poor, and debt/drugs are too available. I was impressed and yet discouraged at a session of teachers in Green River. A particularly outspoken first grade teacher described kids who are dropped off for school at 8 a.m. because that is their only chance of getting breakfast. Supervision of after-school hours for children is a serious problem with both parents working. What is to be done? The first grade teacher said the only solution was parental education before they have children. If that doesn’t work, what do you do? “Spay them, neuter them”, was the response.
I trust it follows from this discussion that the life of a candidate is tough. The hours are long, perhaps 14-15 hours a day. One is always on stage. There is endless interviewing with TV, radio and print media, developing an organization, raising money, placing yards signs, asking for votes door to door, and last but not least developing campaign issues. My impression is that Ted was asked to construct a sophisticated point of view on perhaps 140-150 different issues, from small business development to social issues, gun control, trona taxes, and tort reform. With the demand to have an opinion on so many subjects, I am confident he got some of them very wrong – we just don’t know which ones.
Amidst this frenetic activity, I also experienced periods of boredom. I recall a campaign visit by myself for a day and a half in Evanston. By mid morning on the first day, I had passed out campaign brochures to all the downtown retail stores and completed what seemed like the most promising residential areas. I did the senior center at lunch. I then toured all the historic and scenic spots in town. By early afternoon (in the rain) I had walked more of the residential streets, finding absolutely no one was home. Even though I felt I was an integral part of a campaign that was important for Wyoming, there was nothing to do but go back and sulk in a dreary Best Western motel room. Any feelings of self-importance were quickly punctured.
The most satisfying stress reliever of the campaign came at the Casper State Fair. Four of us worked hard during the lunchtime passing out brochures, but when we went back during the late afternoon for another round, we found out that we were persona non grata. (It was illegal to pass out materials unless we had paid for a booth!). While making our humiliating departure, we stumbled across the bumper car rides and all four of us clambered aboard. As bumper cars go, these were not particularly fast or powerful but the four of us drove them with maximum aggression, colliding with each other and other innocent participants. It was therapeutic.
With these time pressures, an election campaign is like a marathon. At age 67, I don’t understand how folks over 40 have the stamina to do it. There are the inevitable stress points: am I doing the right thing personally, do the voters really care about the issues, is the electorate paying attention, and am I the appropriate person for the task? One doesn’t get much sleep, the exercise is minimal, and the diet is poor: “It’s 2:30 p.m., we have not had lunch, I am running out of energy, 10 minutes to the next meeting, let’s slip into Burger King.”
One develops a sense of how to use one’s time well under these stressful conditions. I was indefatigable on door to door campaigning and, to be maximally efficient, developed a set of standards on houses where I would not bother to ring the doorbell: leashed dogs in the front yard, chain link fences, vacant houses with trash in the yard – these folks probably won’t vote even if they are home. If pressed for time, I passed by the screen doors with the closed handles where there is only a limited chance to loop a rubber band attached to a campaign brochure on the handle.
I learned to “case” towns and make a quick judgment where to concentrate time and effort in reaching the maximum number of potential voters, so I would drive into Afton or Kemmerer or Thermopolis and develop a plan of attack for both residential areas and the central business district. Teams of us moved through Riverton, Rawlins, and Lander. I became a self-proclaimed expert in the selection of optimal sites for yard signs, and I was elated in places like Laramie where the soil is soft and I could slide the yard sign’s metal struts into the earth effortlessly, a skill that in my previously life I had mistakenly thought was unimportant.
Another acquired skill was the efficient distribution of campaign brochures in office buildings (there are a few 6-8 story buildings in Wyoming) by taking the elevator to the top floor and walking down the internal stairs, stopping at each floor to pop into the offices of lawyers, engineers, architects. I was surprisingly well received. The one misadventure was in accessing a highly secure floor of one of the banks – evidently the bank thought that unwanted or high risk visitors would always attempt to gain entry by the elevator, not by the stairs. While the bank workers were quite hospitable and happily accepted campaign literature, I was advised to leave quickly before I was discovered by higher authority.
As a campaigner, one gets into the flow and develops a compulsion to hand out brochures. Two of us found ourselves on Halloween passing out brochures in a blinding, biting snowstorm in Cheyenne. Another time when I crossed the Wyoming border heading into Utah, I felt a sense of relief that I was no longer amidst Wyoming voters and thus had no obligation to pass out campaign literature.
Inevitably there are dog problems. My son was bitten on the knuckles. One of the low moments for me was a dog that, due to my arrival and a wind blown open gate, inadvertently escaped from a house on busy Sheridan Street in Laramie. It turned out it was the house of a very prominent Republican family. I anguished about the potential headlines in the Laramie Boomerang if the dog died. (The dog survived. I captured it eating garbage behind the house).
There was also an animal high point. On the last day of the campaign, after all the rallies in Cheyenne and Casper, we were driving wearily back to Jackson. I was in a car with my daughter-in-law as we crossed over Togwotee Pass at about 9,600 feet in northwest Wyoming when a wolf crossed the road in front of us. The wolf, much larger than any coyote, was almost white. We were thrilled.
I have deliberately tried to downplay the partisan nature of this exercise. Inevitably in a prolonged contest of this variety, there is an inclination to demonize the opponent, to think she is serving the country or her district badly. From my point of view, my son tried to wage a positive campaign to address serious issues. The incumbent was loathe to debate and when she did, was condescendingly dismissive of my son (“he is a nice young man”).
Furthermore, since my son was born in Massachusetts, the incumbent contended he must automatically be of the same ilk as Kennedy and Kerry, e.g. in favor of higher taxes and same sex marriage. While my son can occasionally get feisty, he is generally an extraordinarily civil person and he had a hard time responding to those attacks – maybe he is too nice to be in politics. Late in the campaign there was a debate to be televised with the other two candidates in Casper. My son had prepared vigorously, trying to anticipate the topics, planning the arguments, and creating the retorting sound bites. When the debate actually took place, he had a hard time scoring the intended points, in part because of the risk of a younger man appearing to be aggressive in a debate with an older woman.
There were large numbers of people who rallied to my son’s assistance, dedicated their time and energy, and displayed uncommon devotion to what we thought was a great cause. There are too many for me to mention or even remember but very special people who still stand out for me (I’ll preserve their anonymity) are John from Sheridan, Darcy in Casper, and Lorraine in Laramie.
In terms of campaign tactics, my son did something I considered brilliant, namely defining a contract with voters under which he would donate 5% of his congressional compensation for each of three commitments if he: a) failed to visit annually all 23 counties in Wyoming, b) didn’t show up on the floor of the House of Representatives for 90% of the votes, and c) voted on balance to increase the Federal deficit. This “Contract with Wyoming” not only suggested accountability and some pain if he failed to live up to his promises but also highlighted what we perceived as the incumbent’s vulnerabilities of inattention to her constituents, poor attendance in Congress, and participation in the development of a huge federal deficit. While the contract with Wyoming got some favorable press and reaction, it did not seem to draw the votes we thought.
In the end, as the votes spilled in, we lost by a big enough margin so it was clear that my son could not have really changed the outcome. The margin was about 30,000 votes out of about 240,000 cast. Maybe he lost 3,000 votes from initially having taken the politically damaging side on a trona royalty issue, but that was a minor issue in the final vote. Furthermore, I don’t think money made the difference. While the incumbent out-spent us three to one, she seemed to allocate her money ineffectively. At the end of the day, the defeat can be attributed to President Bush’s success (it is inconceivable to me we could have persuaded as many as a third of the voters to change party affiliation), to the social issues (of which the stigma of Massachusetts is one), and to the fact that my son was a fresh and admittedly inexperienced candidate.
Between the primary and the general election, my son’s campaign cost $360,000, of which $317,000 was contributed from individuals (his opponent raised $930,000 but only $296,000 was from individuals). I don’t know whether he was accurate in this estimate but my son contended that it was two-thirds cheaper to contest a Congressional seat in Wyoming than the next least expensive House race. If true, that’s an interesting fact, but I am not quite sure what it says about Wyoming.
As previously indicated, the post electoral let down was exceedingly short: he was prepared to lose, he has lots of other things to do, and we all recognize that for at least the next two years, the Congress will be a very rancorous and unpleasant place – these people seem to hate each other with a vengeance.
The continuing question is will he, now that he has name recognition, run again? He was asked that question on election night, and almost every day since. The quick answer is he doesn’t have to make up his mind on that issue for a year so why commit now. Another question is whether the power of incumbency and the innate conservatism of Wyoming voters mean that he could ever win, even after he has established his credentials with a credible campaign. For those folks who are vigorously anti-abortion, there is no campaign argument that will change their minds. But the broader issue, for my son and other challengers is this: if this has been enough of a learning experience to do it once, is the reward enough to justify going through another campaign?
On balance, it was a great experience. My son and I had a great time together. We learned a lot about politics, the people and culture of Wyoming, and each other. We met some terrific people. It was a life changing experience for my son. In retrospect, he was right to go for it and I was right to commit a lot of my energy and time in campaigning for him.
However, having survived the campaign, I am thinking of changing careers and starting a new professional service: I’ll get an 800 number and announce that people who think they might want to run for Congress can call me and I will dissuade them. This will be an extremely valuable service and thus I plan to charge a hell of a high price.
-Ted Ladd 2/27/05