{"id":1051,"date":"2012-11-08T15:27:54","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T21:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2012-11-09T08:21:12","modified_gmt":"2012-11-09T14:21:12","slug":"no-more-emails-from-the-president-beyonce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/no-more-emails-from-the-president-beyonce\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Emails From President, Beyonce"},"content":{"rendered":"

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>

I feel a bit lonely now that the election is over. My email inbox doesn\u2019t fill up nearly as often as it did, especially in the closing days of the campaign. Entire hours can pass without a new email. Since I spend a lot of time in front of a computer writing and editing, checking email is a regular habit \u2014 sometimes too regularly.<\/p>\n

The first email from someone with quite-the-famous name appeared in my inbox in June. Why in the world is Barack Obama emailing me, I wondered? Others soon followed, from Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, campaign operatives, and other famous personages working for the president\u2019s re-election.<\/p>\n

Not once did I reply to any of these entreaties for money, to volunteer to knock on doors, or to put up a yard sign. The last time I gave money to a political candidate was in 1984. In a moment of foolishness, I mailed Oscar Mauzy $20 when he was running for Texas Supreme Court, because I took a shine to him, when he stopped by the San Augustine Rambler office to seek our country weekly\u2019s endorsement. You would have thought I had sent the man $1,000. The entreaties for more contributions kept on coming in the mail after that. This was well before emails made pleading for money easy to do at a rapid clip. As a result \u2014 early in my journalism career \u2014 I concluded right then that being active in politics and covering politicians did not mix. Since that time I vote and that\u2019s the extent of my political activity.<\/p>\n

Still, the emails kept coming through the summer and into the fall. Michelle invited me to wish her husband a happy 50th<\/sup> birthday. I skipped doing so, though my bride gave me a copy of David Marannis\u2019 biography of Obama for my birthday, which comes a few weeks after his. This is a fascinating read of a president born of two cultures \u2014 Kenya and Kansas \u2014 and raised largely by his grandparents in Hawaii. I had hoped to finish it by Election Day but didn\u2019t quite make it. I collect presidential biographies and have a bookshelf devoted to them.<\/p>\n

By mid-September I was deleting the emails without even reading them. Then one arrived from Beyonc\u00e8, the beautiful R&B singer with the subject line, \u201cI don\u2019t usually email you.\u201d That is definitely true. I had to read that one. She and her husband Jay-Z were going to host a dinner with the presidential couple in New York in late September. If I donated $25, I would be eligible to win a chance to attend. Beyonc\u00e8 would cover the airfare and hotel. Or maybe Jay-Z would.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t bite, remembering Oscar Mauzy. Odds were great I would not win the trip, though it would have been very cool to dine with the Obamas. I would jump at the chance to eat dinner with any <\/em>president, even Franklin Pierce or Calvin Coolidge. But once a candidate\u2019s campaign gets its hooks in you, the pressure only increases. Soon I would be getting emails and robo-calls from Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne. My checkbook stayed in my pocket.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the campaign, Joe Biden became testy with subject lines such as \u201cLook, This is Serious,\u201d and \u201cThis Will be Blunt.\u201d I expected no less out of the fellow from Scranton. When it was clear Obama had won re-election, just after 11 p.m., I received a final email from him saying thanks.<\/p>\n

It was nothing, really. I voted, but that\u2019s all. Honestly.<\/p>\n

|\u2014\u2014\u2014|<\/p>\n

This was the 10th<\/sup> presidential election in which I have voted. I am batting .500. The first \u2014 and only presidential candidate \u2014 for whom I volunteered died a few weeks ago. George McGovern was 90 when he died. He is remembered for losing badly to Richard Nixon in 1972. Nixon, of course, resigned in disgrace two years later in the wake of the Watergate cover-up. I have several biographies of him as well.<\/p>\n

My small and insignificant role was as McGovern\u2019s campaign chairman for Gregg County. A local labor leader drafted me along with some other high school students to man a small office in the old KFRO building, which was next to the downtown post office on Methvin Street in downtown Longview. We called ourselves Democrats for McGovern, in reaction to a considerably larger group in the county called Democrats for Nixon. The fact that McGovern\u2019s local campaign effort was run \u2014 if you could call it that \u2014 by a long-haired high-school senior who wasn\u2019t old enough to vote (I was 17) should have been a warning sign. But we had fun hanging out in the office after school and on weekends.<\/p>\n

McGovern was a decent man, a decorated World War II bomber pilot with a doctorate in history, who remained a steady voice for progressivism ideals for four decades after that loss. I admired his integrity and his intellect, if not his ability to run a presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Print this entryI feel a bit lonely now that the election is over. My email inbox doesn\u2019t fill up nearly as often as it did, especially in the closing days […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[45,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-45","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1055,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/1055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}