VooDougal 2006

I told McDougal to take it easy, kick back, enjoy his annual Thanksgiving trip to Tijuana, get lost in a haze of underage hookers, tequila and mescaline... Not to worry about the new direction the campaign would be taking. I told him I have it all under control. But when he heard what I had planned for the week, well he just had to get involved.

It's election time in Haiti.

Anyone who wants to win an election, any election, anywhere, would do well to look at Haiti. A person can learn everything he ever wanted to know about corruption, graft, election rigging and the fine are of the violent coup by studying Haitian politics. I feel this is the kind of knowledge that our campaign staff is severely lacking. Sure, we know the high tech end of things. That modern stuff. Diebold voting machines and the like. Attack ads. Hanging chad. But what of the classic stuff? The real grass-roots of election fraud. Kids today don't know how to stuff a ballot box. They don't know how to rig an election so bad that a legion of United Nations Inspectors canvassing the country in white helicopters still can't figure out what the hell you did. They don't know how to crush a determined, and heavily armed, resistance who knows the election was crooked.

I fully expect all of these to be required skills in 2008.

So we spent the past few weeks packing up the whole operation into McDougal's C-130 transport plane and just today we arrived in country. I'm glad McDougal decided to make the trip, even though our arrival in Haiti was delayed by several days as a result. An hour out of Miami he decided that, even though he missed Thanksgiving, he really did want to get some of that mescaline. He ended up going on a three day bender. Actually, in the interest of full disclosure, WE ended up going on a three day bender. I remember nothing, the work of the tequila more than the mescaline, I'm sure... But according to the pictures on my digital camera (I deleted all of them this morning for legal reasons, so don't even ask) McDougal managed to convince several of the interns to take second billing in the donkey show. Each of them made about four hundred pesos each in tips, which they seemed very proud of. When they sobered up enough to understand the exchange rate they were understandably upset.