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.
Declan McCullagh