DID I DO GOOD? | 2006-06-20
I just finished the show I announced below with James Edwards.
I could use a little input fomr you about how I did. If you didn't listen, you can get it on his website soon.
James would be nice to me if I did so badly I cost him his FCC license.
I think I sounded tired, which may have meant I sounded drunk, which I wasn't. But more than one person has said to me after other programs that I sounded tired or drunk.
One problem I have always had is that I ran with the top pros. The list is endless:
1) I practiced shooting when a kid with a guy who was phenomenal with a gun. He could flip a bottle in the air and shoot through the hole in the neck;
2) I learned languages around a man who routinely dictated in four languages and who could translate between two languags, both of which were foreign to him;
3) I was a nominal mercenary among the best in the business. They were combat mercs because they LOVED combat and they couldn't get it in a regular army. A regular army career involves very little fighting;
4) in the present case, being on the radio, I worked for the Voice of America and did some shows under Cokie Roberts on National Public Radio.
These people WORK on their voice presentation in EXACTLY the same way a concert pianist WORKS on his music. Their instrument is their voice. I was, as always, an amateur in a professional world.
The upside of all this is that I learned from the best in each area. The downside, as you can easily imagine, was that I felt like a neophyte in every area. No crack shot, no linguistic phenomenon, no professional combat merc, and no professional broadcaster can do more than try to reassure me.
So working out of your league is a great learning experience, but it doesn't do squat for your ego.
I am about half of everything. I am half a radio amateur. Naturally I was right there with the best of them.
I was among Nobel Prize winners in economics in grad school.
I have told you before that Capitol Hill is a giant breaucracy. One person who worked there will tell you about junkets and scandals. That means he gravitated to people who were into junkets and scandals. I was a fanatic, as you have probably guessed before now.
The people I knew on Capitol Hill, both left and right, were people I could reach from my office at 2 am. No sane person offered ANY of us a bribe after the first encounter. It happened to me twice, and both times I said something like,
"You know, we have rule here that you never write anything down that you don't want to see on the front of the Washington Post tomorrow. We can end up in front of a committee being crossexamined about hwat you just said, and they will ask us, over and over, 'You are a senior staffer. Didn't that sound like he was getting ready to offer you a bribe?'"
"I could end up in prison, and you could end up in prison, no matter what you MEANT to say. So let's get off the subject."
The only scandals we ever got caught in was when we would try to do something for the cause, like supporting the contras or other anti-Communists. Reagan was never accused of trying to get a dime for himself, but the "contra scandal," in which Ollie North was involved, was entirely a matter of funneling money to the anti-Communists.
So while others write about the good stuff, the underhand techniques and outright robbery, I dealt with people whose word was gold and who would fight for what they believed in tooth and tongue.
But we were NOT nice. We were playing for all the marbles, and the game was rough. But it was not dishonest.
A radio interview is known to be hardest, but it is all I can get besides the Fox interviews. You are sitting there alone in your home while you listen to ads and the interviewer gets back to you. I have done maybe fifty of them, so now I can tell when it gets back to me, but it's not easy.
This time I had to have both my phones, one in each ear, to understand what was being said.
It ends abruptly. Then you are sitting all alone, while the station goes on with its busy program. You just talked to a whole city plus the internet, and you are hoping you made your interviewer look good. You need a friend to tell you how you did, the good points and the bad points.
I may have a friend or two here, someone who listened to the program. If not, listen to it later.
Old Bob needs moral support, and after half a century in politics, I don't have a whole lot of morals of my own.