Nobody But Me

Here's the trick to doing your job

I have a staff, okay?

I have a staff

A whole staff

A team of people
Who work for me

Some of them are good
Some of them are decent
Some are completely incompetent

The incompetent ones
Have been with me
For years

Forrrr yearrrrrrssss, okay?

If you put cameras on us
It would be such a shitshow

I mean, it would be
An epic
Shitshow

People would wonder
Why I don't just fire them all

Because I can afford good people

Hell, I can afford the best in the state
I could get out-of-state
I could harvest GWU kids right out of school
And turn them into political machines

But I don't

Because I know the trick to doing my job

And the trick is--

Don't ever let anybody do your job as well as you do

That's the trick

There are people who work for me
Who know most of what I know
Who can do most of what I do
But the keyword there is 'most'

And when the shit hits the fan
I'm the only one that can clean it up

And I like it that way

Oh, I'll bitch and moan
And fire somebody from time to time
But at the end of the day
I like things the way they are

I like that nobody but me
Can fix things when they're broken

The only caveat to that
Is that when you set up a system
Where you're the only person who can fix things
Then you inevitably have to be there
Every time something breaks

Would you like to know how things fall apart?

Things fall apart when the person in charge
Has prevented anybody else from learning how they do what they do
And then a bunch of idiots votes them out of office

Okay, we're talking politics here
Well, of course we're talking politics
You're talking to a campaign manager

But everything flows back to politics
That's what you have to remember
That everything is political

Why do you think every time a political offices changes hands
Goes from one political party to the other
The first thing the new guy says is--

'Look at the mess the old guy left me with!'

And I always want to say--

'Well, what did you expect?'

Did you expect them to clean their cubbyhole
Right before you threw them out of it?

No

You want a clean cubbyhole
You want things to go smoothly
You want the shit to stay buried underneath the bed
You keep the party that's in in

Otherwise when they leave
You're fucked

That's politics

That's the job

You make sure nobody can do the job but you

But as I said
That means you have to be there
You have to be there all the time

And...

I wasn't

It's as simple as that--I wasn't

I'm working for the best chance Providence had
Of getting a Republican mayor
And a woman too

A FUCKING WOMAN

And I'm not there when she answers one question
And we're out

We lose the election

Someone asks her about whether or not she'd pick her kid up from soccer practice
If there was a blizzard going on

Rhode Islanders are obsessed with blizzards

Ninety percent of Rhode Islanders don't believe in global warming
Because we have secret sadomasochistic fantasies
Of dying in the snow

That's a statistic for you

Anyway, they ask her, and she says something about the mayor
And how he should pick his kids up
And his kid is dead
So you can't talk about his kid

Now, I never went over that with my candidate
It was never something that came up
Because we weren't supposed to be running a campaign
Where we talked about the other person
But she went and talked out of turn
And that meant we lost the election
And that meant I was out of a job

And are you ready for the shocking revelation here?

I deserve that

I fucking deserve that

Because at that moment
I was getting dinner

I got hungry

I gave in to a human need
And hunger of all things

I was bulimic from twelve to twenty-two
And what kills my political career is hunger?

It's almost like God wants me to fall off the wagon

I'm eating
And my candidate
Is surrounded by people who work for me

Sur-fucking-rounded

By people who don't know enough
To stop her from answering a question
About the mayor and kids
Even though all of them know
That the mayor has a dead kid
And that means you don't put the words 'mayor' and 'kid'
In a sentence together
Ever

Ever, ever, ever

And I was across eating a B.L.T.
While my career went down the fucking toilet

Can you believe that?

And I deserve it
Because that's the system I set up
Because I like that system
Because it's political
It's inherently political
And I am in, and have chosen to be in, politics

If I don't do it
It doesn't get done

If I don't handle it
It doesn't get handled

And if I'm not there to take the hit
The hit hits someone else
Who can't take it

And a political candidate
A Republican woman candidate
In this state
Cannot take any hits

Cannot go down and come back up again
That's just fact

That's just a plain and simple fact

I may be a woman
But I'm not running for anything
So believe me
I can take a hit

Nobody but me could have saved her
And I didn't

I wasn't there

And so there goes my job

And I deserve that, you know

You build the house
The house falls down on you

You deserve it

Everybody knows that

Everybody