For Sold.. Your vote.

I wish this campaign could be about something else. I wish it could be about the difference I would make by using the office of senate to create jobs, spur development, make sure our kids have schoolbooks. Maybe even get that long promised highway from the bridge to nowhere across 72 at Barton to the new stadium in Tuscaloosa.

I wish.

One friend said yesterday, It is all out here now, The people know.

If they vote the (blank's) back in then they get what they deserve.

I am tempted to agree.

Tempted, but I cannot.

For three reasons. A slip of blue paper and two pink love stamps from the 80's

On Thursday, I drove down to my campaign mailbox in Haleyville, walked past the crumbling seventies Federal project construction and slid the key into that ornate style brass mailbox door the Post Office has been using for a hundred years or more.

Inside, the usual assortment of letters. - Covering everything from mule breeders to brew masters asking for my position on their particular issue. A few returned letters with bad addresses. Something else from Newt Gingrich and the National.

And a letter.

Light blue in color, adorned with two 25 cent "Love" stamps, each with a pink rose.

Jimmy;

the letter began,

The handwriting a shaky prose that I immediately recognized as a woman likely in her eighties.

Written on a five inch bit of blue, lightly faded around the edges.

"Thank you" She began, "For doing this for us... we all are so proud of you. I know your mother would be too."

My right hand began to tremble. I knew what was coming next, the tri-folded check was already in my left hand.

She went on to write that we need someone to change things in Alabama.
That the corruption and the lately news articles was embarrassing to her and all Alabama.

She said it had been that way for her whole life, and thanked me again.

The letter closed with the statement:

" You know I am on a fixed income and I can't do much. I wanted you to know that our prayers are with you. I want to send you a little something to help with your campaign."


Two dollars.


I know the woman. The story of the widows mite came to me and I lost it right there in the post office.

I said I wish the campaign could be about something else.

I wish I could agree that the people deserve what they get.

But it can't be about something else.
The campaign won't let me.
This letter won't let me.

I will not cash this check, I will have it framed, along with the letter.

I will put in on my office wall in Montgomery,

And when Milton and the other mob goons come in and try to buy my vote I'll just have to say

"Sorry guys, -It is already sold, to a little old lady in Phil Campbell"

She outbid you big time, with a currency you cannot understand.

Proud of what I have done for Phil Campbell?

When I mentioned to my boss at the college what I was planning to throw my hat into the ring, he said "Well I don't think the sitting senator has done a single thing for our school" .. I replied, "Yeah but when he hears I am running I promise you will get something before November."

My grassroots supporters came out early in my home town of Phil Campbell, I think a volunteer called on every house. The support was firm and fast.

Yesterday the Northwest Alabamian had a 180 point headline "$650,000 grant for the Phil Campbell Industrial Park"- “They’ve had a lot of people look at the property but they all required a sewer system,”

This has to be the most significant improvement in Phil Campbell since my uncle put in the water system in nineteen-ought-fifty-five.

This is good, very good, with unemployment raging at twice the national average in district six it is about time some incentives to get the people working again.

The shame of it has to be that it took a gentle shake of the Gentleman from Franklin County to get it done.