Grief counselors going from office to office. Tears being shed. “It was like it was about death.” “I don’t want to discuss it. It’s a hard time.”
Are these quotes about a terrorist attack? Natural disaster? Famine? Last night’s Redskins game?
No. They’re quotes from a Politico story talking about the Democratic staffers thrown out of work by the Republican wave two weeks ago. As many as 1800 Democratic hill staffers are losing their jobs as a result of the election, and they’re clearly not taking it well. The article makes it seem like these staffers were completely blindsided about the election – had no idea that they could possibly be on the chopping block. People crying, grief counselors trying to help with the “emotional side of the losses.” It is truly unbelievable. There’s no crying in baseball, and you can only cry in politics for good things, like becoming Speaker of the House. Ask Ed Muskie.
The best advice I received in life was from my Dad when I was in little league and didn’t get to play shortstop. I started getting upset, and he told me stop whining, rub some dirt in it, and walk it off. That’s good advice for dealing with any kind of setback in life, including watching your side get beat into the ground (I’m still talking about the election, not last night’s Redskins game).
I can empathize with these staffers, even if I refuse to sympathize with them. This is exactly the situation I found myself in after election day 2008. I knew that on the morning of January 20, 2009, I would be out of a job for the first time in my adult life. And the job market was bad – no one was hiring, law firms were cutting staff, and Republican labor lobbyists weren’t exactly in demand in an environment where Democrats controlled everything. It took me nine months to find a job after that election and even then it took me starting my own lobbying shop to do so. Were there grief counselors when Republicans lost in 2008? No. We were blindsided? No. We saw it coming. I knew when I took the job that it was temporary and that I would likely be out of work in a year. It was tough, especially knowing I was getting married that summer and money was going to be tight. But I never whined about it, never complained, and certainly never needed a grief counselor.
Where are the grief counselors for the 14.8 million Americans out of work right now through no fault of their own? They’re the ones who deserve the attention and the sympathy. Not the staff of members of Congress who were thrown out by their constituents for spending more time on health care and financial reform than on fixing the economy to create the jobs to get those workers back to work. There’s a bit of poetic justice in the idea of these staffers and members of Congress being out of a job because they didn’t do enough for people out of a job.
And if you want to talk about staffers being out of work, where were the sympathetic articles about Bush staffers after the 2008 elections? Nowhere. I recall seeing a few articles in the Washington Post months after the election noting that a substantial portion of the administration politicals, like me, were still out of work. That’s it. No one was worried about us, what we’d do or where we’d go. And that’s how it should be.
Anyone who works in politics should recognize that there are hills and troughs. Good times and bad, times when your party will be in charge and times when it won’t be. Democrats had a good thing going for four years, and they still control the Senate and White House – a White House that, as far as I can tell, still hasn’t completely staffed up on the appointee side. There’s no reason why most of these folks will be out of work for as long as I and my Bush Administration colleagues were. So for the staffers who say things like “What bothers me now is there is a lot of insensitivity to the plight of these people who are losing their jobs. Pundits are talking about how exciting this turnover is … but there are real people whose lives are being affected … [t]hey really need to show some compassion,” my response is simple – stop whining. You aren’t the first group of staffers to end up out of work because of a bad election and you certainly won’t be the last.
My advice to these hill staffers looking for a job – do what we did. The world isn’t ending. Suck it up, get out there and find a job.
Chances are things will turn out all right in the end. I can speak from experience.
