My Clerk Pressed "Skip" - a Grave Insult and a Most URGENT Warning!

Esteemed readers,

I must begin with a confession. I have been HUMILIATED. In my own office. By a person I pay.

Yesterday evening I was at my perch, enjoying a programme on my clerk’s picture-telephone, when a political advertisement appeared. My clerk says the programme arrives by “streaming”. BALDERDASH! The telephone was perfectly dry. I checked.

But the advertisement! A fine one. Ominous music. A candidate photographed in grey, looking like a man who steals from church collections. I recognized the craftsmanship at once. It was one of OURS.

And my clerk leaned over and pressed a small button marked “Skip”.

SKIPPED! A masterpiece, commissioned at ruinous expense, dismissed in my presence like a tradesman at the front door!! I did not close an eye all night. I have not touched my seed. I am told I shouted for some time.

I ask your forgiveness for my condition. But the matter cannot wait, friends, because that small button is pointed directly at the finest thing we have ever built.

One does not bribe a voter. One would have to MEET him.

As all serious people understand, the public is permitted to vote. This was a regrettable decision, made long ago, and we have been managing it ever since.

Now, the general population has lately begun to mutter that political advertisements are a way of BUYING their vote. The impertinence! Who told them?

Nobody pays a voter for his vote. It is against the law. It is also unthinkable: one would have to visit him. At his HOME. One would have to shake his hand and learn his name, and then do it all again at the house next door, for millions of houses. I have seen some of these houses. NO THANK YOU!

What we pay for is FAR more elegant. We pay for what the voter sees and hears in the weeks BEFORE he votes.

A political advertisement - I explain this for the younger heirs among my readers - is a film of half a minute or so, wedged between the things a person sat down to watch. Ours shows our man in a sunny field with a dog. Theirs shows him in grey, with the church-collection face. Same man! The only thing that changed is who paid for the advertisement.

And how it WORKS!! The trick is the same as the organ grinder’s: play the tune often enough, and the whole street is whistling it. Show a person the same face every evening and the same fright every night, and one morning he finds the opinion already in his head, like a tune he cannot remember learning. He hums it all the way to the voting booth. He is quite sure he composed it.

He did not compose it. WE did. And we sent him the bill in the form of a government that serves OUR interests, while he believes it is serving HIS.

We shall be HUMMED in every household in the land!! There is NO grander ambition!!

A devoted stranger with a very large wallet

Allow me to gloat. I have earned it.

The law says a candidate may accept only a modest sum from any one giver. A lesser family would have despaired. My family’s advisers had a wing in the remedy, and I have never been prouder of anything. A triumph of Featherbottom counsel.

The remedy is called the super PAC. The letters stand for “political action committee”, which is merely a club for collecting election money. The SUPER kind may collect any amount, from anyone, and spend all of it on films. The law asks one thing in return: the club and the candidate must not arrange the spending together.

So think of it as a devoted stranger. A stranger of enormous means, who follows the candidate from town to town, praising him on every screen and blackening his rival, and who has never once been introduced to him. They have not spoken! The stranger simply guesses what the candidate would like. He guesses “correctly” every time. It is the most touching friendship in public life.

Then there is the matter of WHOSE money it is. Some groups that spend on elections are not required to name their givers. The newspapers have taken to calling this “dark money”, a phrase I find rather hurtful and somewhat seditious. I call it mere good manners. One does not ask a gentleman where his money has been.

Such a group needs only a name, and I christen many of them myself. My finest is Grandmothers for a Sensible Tomorrow. Who could vote against grandmothers? One pictures knitting. One pictures pie.

There is not a single grandmother in it. It is three gentlemen and a locked letterbox, and if anyone ever asked to MEET the grandmothers, they -

Ah-ha-HEM.

No. You did not read that. The grandmothers are real. They are simply shy.

Do NOT attempt to contact these grandmothers!!

The button

I tell my Clients that our position is permanent. That elections have always been conducted this way and always shall be, like the tides.

Between us, oh dear readers: it is EXHAUSTING. And in my darkest hour, I fear it is getting WORSE.

In my grandfather’s day, a film was shown and the public sat through it all. The public had no choice, nor was there much else to do. It was a simpler time where owning the narrative could be had with one production and a tour.

Now there is the SKIP button. My clerk pressed it without even looking up!! He did not weigh our argument. He did not shake his fist. He simply wished to get back to a programme about a man mending a boat.

Do you understand what this means? We pay for the music. We pay for the grey photograph. We pay for the devoted stranger and the shy grandmothers. And the whole of it now depends on one clerk NOT moving one finger!

An arrangement that a clerk can switch off with his thumb is not much of an arrangement at all - it is a loose end, a complete travesty!!

… I have asked for that sentence to be burned. I am informed that a sentence inside the telephone cannot be burned. I have asked again, more loudly.

An OUTRAGEOUS Proposition!!

There is worse than the BUTTON. MUCH worse.

In California, on the November 2026 ballot, sits a thing called Proposition 4. A ballot proposition, for anyone raised abroad, is a proposed law that the public votes on directly, with no politician in between. I have always considered this a design flaw.

That state has banned the public financing of campaigns since 1988. Public financing means a campaign is paid for, in part, out of the public purse and not out of OURS. Proposition 4 would repeal that ban. State and local governments could then, if they chose, set up voluntary programmes for candidates: matching the small gifts of ordinary donors, or handing out vouchers, which are coupons a resident may pass to a candidate he fancies, or giving grants outright.

Read that again and tremble!! A candidate paid for by PLUMBERS! By schoolteachers, a little at a time! What use has such a person for the devoted stranger? Why would he answer my letters? Whom would he be AFRAID of?!

And the public may simply vote YES on it. With the very vote we went to such expense to purchase! I mean lease - LEASE! Purchasing votes is illegal, of course.

For years my Clients and I have watched the public clamor for one enormous reform bill in the capital. THOSE we know how to handle. Such a large reform is almost certain to die from complexity and sheer inertia. One simply lets it grow fat and famous, and waits - and watch as the excitement drains out of it before anything passes. Jolly good. The way it SHOULD be!

But the threat that I am seeing now is far more pernicious, far harder to control. I am seeing the arrival of a long string of small, narrow victories. One ballot measure. One primary challenge, which is when a member of a politician’s OWN party runs against him before the main election. Each one too small to be worth a film!

There is an outfit called RepresentUs that works in exactly this way: city by city and state by state, passing pieces of something named the American Anti-Corruption Act. I shall not describe its contents. I read the title and had to lie down on my favorite perch. They count more than 160 local and state wins since their founding.

One hundred and sixty!! I cannot buy every screen in every village. I cannot even FIND some of these villages!

And then Montana. The proposal there, Initiative 194, I have already wept over elsewhere in this series, and I will not weep twice. What I had NOT been told is who is organizing it: a nonprofit, which is a body that exists for a cause and not for profit, called the Transparent Election Initiative. It is led by one Jeff Mangan, that state’s former commissioner of political practices, the officer who minds the rules of politics there. A man who has read the rulebook from the INSIDE!!

And how does a proposal reach a ballot at all? Signatures. Mere signatures. I am haunted by the picture: the very neighbours we have paid so dearly to keep quarrelling, standing in one queue at one folding table, SHARING PENS!

They do not need to outspend us. They need only sign, and vote, and press that wretched button.

We bring a treasury. They bring a pen and one finger. AND THE FINGER IS WINNING!!

I FORBID IT!! I FORBID ALL OF IT!!!

…

I have had a glass of water. My clerk has been spoken to.

Nobody is going to sign anything. The public does not read ballots. The public does not know where Montana is. The public sits where we have placed it and watches our films to the very end, with gratitude. The arrangement is permanent. Proposition 4 is a passing fashion, like bicycles.

My clerk now informs me that a letter in the digital places may be “shared” by anyone at all. Poppycock. I have shared nothing. A Featherbottom does not share.

This letter was written for sensible people only. If you are not one, STOP READING! You are to forget it immediately. I shall be checking.

Those who wish to see what I tell my Clients, in a steadier hand, may apply for a Limited-Release Client Memorandum: https://www.lordfeatherbottom.com/confidential-memo

I remain, entirely calm and in no way shouting,