----- Original Message ----- From: kim2048@aol.com To: sascha@ex.com Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 7:42 AM Subject: Fw: Soft Money...
Sascha --- you gotta see this.
----- Original Message ----- From: xanna237@aol.com To: kim2048@hotmail.com Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 7:41 AM Subject: Soft Money...
Kim,
Hi There!
Sorry for taking so long to email you back. I've been really busy---not just with schoolwork, either. And, no, I don't have a boyfriend. It's practically Election Day! And since this is my first time voting, participating and everything has been really important to me.
Remember when John McCain visited my campus back in the spring, and I thought that his talk about campaign finance reform was pretty cool? Well, I've changed my mind. Reform would be nice, but right now the most important thing is the election. And this election is so close, it could really be decided by which campaign is able to run the most television advertisements.
Which brings me to what I've been doing for the past few months. Which is, basically collecting soft money for the campaign and our candidates --- I call them Our Boys. And if anybody found out what I'm doing, there would be hell to pay. So I am totally trusting you to keep this to yourself, OK?
Here's how it started: My father was a delegate at the convention this summer. I came along. It was amazing --- a whole week of partying and flirting. The food was fantastic. But I also listened to the speeches, and I really got energized, you know what I mean? I really got into the messages. I agreed with so much of what the candidate and his VP and everybody else had to say---I was totally tripping on the atmosphere. I asked M&D if I could give $1000 of my savings account to the campaign, and they must have been tripping too, because they said yes.
Silly me, I thought that once you give a thousand dollars, that's it. But when I turned in the check, the boy who took it asked if I wanted to match my contribution with another thousand dollars to the party. That's the "soft money" that McCain was talking about. When I told him that I didn't think I could afford any more, he said "ok," but that I might want to go out fund raising, to see if I could get anybody else to contribute.
This is then when I had my---oh, let's call it a revelation. We were at this after-hours party the night before the last night of the convention, and lots of people---M&D included---were trashed off their asses. Personally, I was soberer than sober. So this slick-ass middle-aged man in a suit comes up to me and asks me what I'm doing there, who I'm with, blah blah blah. We start talking, and he's all impressed with my intelligence and education and tan and my Prada minidress. So I tell him that I just contributed $1000 and he's all super-impressed with me.
So the guy gets really close to me and murmurs something to the effect of: "How would you like to contribute another $1000?" He said that he had to contribute $5000 to get into the party, and that they were expecting him to contribute another $5000 the next day. He said that if I let him kiss me, he would increase his donation to $6000.
Wow.
I got all warm and uncomfortable all of a sudden. I'm sure I was blushing. I didn't know what to do. And he said, "what's the harm? This campaign is very important to you. It's important to me. They need my money. I want to kiss you. A thousand dollars for our team."
"You would give them an extra thousand dollars, just for a kiss?" I said.
"Well, I was hoping that you would also come back to my hotel room with me," he said, with a sly smile on his face.
Right. "My folks are around," I whispered back. "They'll wonder where I am."
"Fine. A stolen kiss in an empty corner it is," he said. He looked pretty disappointed. "$100 work for you?"
I was imagining trying to kiss him. To tell the truth, he didn't look that bad. But I felt like he was changing the bargain. "I thought you said a thousand dollars."
"Yeah, I guess I did. How about $250?"
I nodded and smiled, and we left the big party and went into this little conference room with the lights out, and he flipped me over like a movie star and gave me this long, slurpy, oops-I' m-accidentally-rubbing-your-tits-aren't-I? kiss. Then he took out his checkbook, wrote out a $250 check to the National Committee, and gave it to me.
Wow, I thought. That was pretty easy. I felt like I had given blood or something---drained but exhilarated.
So the next day, while everyone was all at their little parties before the Boys were supposed to make their speeches, this other older guy comes up to me.
"Hello," he says, with this little dancing school bow. "You must be Xanna."
"Yeah." I say a little suspiciously, because today I'm not all tarted up in Prada or anything.
He smiles this weird smile. "You are, I assume, the young virgin ready to serve her country?"
I'm thinking, who the hell are you, asking me if I'm a virgin or not, and then I get it. "Oh, did Jim tell you about me?"
"He did. My pockets aren't as deep as Jim's, I'm afraid. But I'm wondering how much money I could give the Party if you would put your hands in them?"
Oh my God, I think. Like my brain can't quite process what this all means, but I say, "$500."
He looks at me again. "What if you would. as you young people put it.blow me?"
I say, "Spit or swallow?"
He says: "Price is no object."
I say, doing the math, "One-thousand spit. Two thousand swallow."
"Spit."
So I do. We go looking around the convention center for a quiet place, but we can't find anything. I'm getting ready to give up --- perhaps I really don't want to do this --- when he finds one of those handicap bathrooms, you know, the kind with a single toilet and a door that locks? We go inside, he locks the door, and he can barely get his pants down, he's so hard. I mean, he almost loses it the moment I touch him. Let me tell you, this guy was no different from the undergrads in my dorm. And the guy feels so bad about it, hitting my dress, just like Bill and Monica -- that he ends up writing a $1500 check to the National Committee. (He offered to give me $100 for the dry-cleaning, but I told him that I wouldn't take the money.)
At this point I was totally grossed out but filled with, what, this kind of patriotic fervor. I can't tell you how loud I cheered that night when Our Boys finally got onto the podium and accepted the nomination.
The second I get back to school I signed up for the Election Events committee, which handles the campus organization, the get-out-the-vote, and such. But it was all so removed. So I went down to the state party headquarters at the capital. They wanted me to stuff envelopes and make phone calls --- until I told them that I had raised $2000 in soft money in two nights by attending parties and flirting with VIPs. That did the trick. I got added as a special guest to all of the mailing lists, parties, and special events until the election. It was sort of a tacit agreement --- I could go to all of the cool events, as long as I could keep the donations coming in.
Now Kim, don't get me wrong --- the state party never explicitly endorsed the idea of trading blowjobs or a quickie for campaign contributions. They just know that I'm very good at what I do. I get to go to all of the exciting parties. I get to taste all of the amazing food, drink all of the expensive drinks (nobody cards me), and get to meet all of those important people. And they get their contributions. There's a reason that our state is up 200% over the record that we set in '96.
Some of the guys try to pay me personally, but I don't let them. That would make me a whore, you know? And one guy kept calling me, trying to see if we could get together again. I told him that we couldn't do that, or else people might get suspicious. Besides, this is about being part of the political process, isn't it? It's my responsibility to get as money from as many people as possible, rather than concentrating on a few big spenders.
The sex? I admit I get into it sometimes. A lot of these guys, they're really good in bed. You wouldn't believe it. I try not to fake orgasms, and what's really cool is a not insignificant amount of time I don't even have to. I mean, most of these guys act like it's their responsibility to get me off. I wish that more of the guys in my dorm felt that way!
I'm really strict about my guidelines. We meet. We fuck or whatever. They write out the checks. I leave. At first I was pretty naïve and I was willing to go along and pretend that I was their daughter's roommate or their son's girlfriend, but I finally decided that I just couldn't do that --- not that it doesn't stop them from asking. I also won't get tied up, or tie them up. And if it's too gross to even mention it here, I won't do it either. One guy wanted me to have sex with him in front of his wife --- no way, I told him. Remember that line about "plausible deniability?" Right. And I got offered $10K to do something that I'd never even heard of before. I thought Our Boys wouldn't approve, so I said no.
Some guys want to fuck me and have, like, political discourse at the same time. They're not paying for sex, they're paying for politics, right? And they have to prove it or something? And then I was sitting on top of this man who wanted me to answer a lot of political questions for him, and every time I gave him my opinion he got more and more excited, until finally I said something about strategic tax breaks and he.well I won't say it here. It's not nice.
Oh yeah. That reminds me. They always have to use a condom. A lot of them are so old they don't know about safer sex. And then some of them really want to fool around in my dorm room because it reminds them of their own politically active college days. Like, meet a girl, talk heavy politics with her, then take her home and nail her? It's sort of sweet of them, actually. But there would be too many witnesses.
And no, I've never fallen for any of my contributors. There was this one guy --- a CEO from California who was in town for some reason --- who asked me to marry him. I said, No deal---no matter how the election turns out.
I had to go through midterms like this. But luckily the fundraisers and whatnot are winding down, and honestly, I'm very tired. Tired of putting on my best clothes all the time. Tired of having them ask me if "Xanna" is my real or my "professional" name. I'm not a professional! I haven't made a cent off this! But Our Boys have pulled in nearly $100,000 since this summer. So every time I see a full-page newspaper ad for my causes or a really spiffy TV ad, I know that I've done my bit.