Pillsbury: You Never Know Who’s Listening

By Lee Pillsbury

So, I’m sitting at home snowbound on a Friday night sipping Tennessee Whiskey and feeling contemplative and sentimental, which whiskey and snow do to me. When I get like this I often resort to my oldest friend which is music. I start tripping down memory lane to those artists and songs that meant so much to me when I was much younger.

I’m sure you have those songs too, something that spoke to your soul. That song where you were sure the singer had been reading your mail, and was singing your life. For me it’s always been Bruce Springsteen.

As a punk kid, raised on the wrong side of town — the poor side of town — Springsteen’s songs of hope and redemption for working class folks, his absolute belief in the fact that a dream combined with hard work could lead to something better, could raise you up, could get you out, helped form my lifelong conservatism. Isn’t that the heart of what we believe as conservatives? That faith, combined with work, can raise one to something greater? That anyone can make it if they try?

I’m not going to get bogged down in an argument about Springsteen’s politics but, instead, I’m trying to explain how he influenced my politics, and my life.

My dad worked two or three jobs most of my life. No one in my family had been to college; hell, we never discussed college. That was for rich folks. But my dad was a reader and he gave me books. They showed different worlds, and Springsteen’s music gave me the idea that it was possible to get out, to have a different life. To live in those worlds.

I became a theatre nerd, first in high school and then professionally, working at the old Virginia Museum Theatre, Dogwood Dell, and at the Empire Theatre where I was master electrician at 19.

And then somehow, I was asked to work at the State Senate running sound and the old electronic voting machines. My little cubby hole of an office was right off the floor of the Senate, between the Chamber and the Senators’ lounge, and I got to listen and learn how the sausage was made.

I became fascinated by the horse trading and sausage making and developed a love for politics. I saw some giants at work: Hunter Andrews, Ed Willey, John Chichester, Doug Wilder. Men that understood that politics wasn’t a zero-sum game, that if the other guy “won” it didn’t mean you were losing.

Doug Wilder encouraged me to go to college. I worked on Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural. I have been an advance man for John McCain, managed races from Board of Supervisor to House of Delegates. I’m friends with Congressmen and Senators.

I’ve experienced personal failures and professional victories. But when I am feeling sentimental like this, I remember that I owe a lot of it to a singer who gave me the faith to believe that there was a different life, if I could just dream it.

I cannot begin to tell you how good my life is, and how different it is from the one I thought it would be. That the people I grew up with have. It’s a life I owe, in great part, to a singer who has a political view diametrically opposed to mine, but who shares a belief in the American dream, and who understands that the American dream leaves a lot of folks behind.

As conservatives we need to give people the opportunity to dream. To think big. Hell, just to envision a different life.

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Lee Pillsbury lives in Henrico with his wife and has been involved in politics most of his life.