YOU’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

Dear Mrs. Dole:

Let me be the first one to extend the hand of welcome now that you have decided to change your voter registration to North Carolina. Folks around here say that it’s the first step to declaring your candidacy for the Senate seat that Jesse Helms will be vacating in 2002.

I can’t say as I blame you for wanting to get out of the house, what with Bob lounging around popping Viagras like they were Tic-Tacs and drooling over that Britney Spears Pepsi video. It creeps me out and I don’t even have to live with the dude.

I must confess, I got a little tear in my eye when I read that you put your 100-year old mother’s address in Salisbury down as your address on the voter registration form. Moving in with your dear old gray-headed Mama like that should really resonate with all us folks who are into strong North Carolina family values.

It’s been a while since you’ve been here, so you may want to bone up on current North Carolina events. For example, Dean Smith retired and Dale Earnhardt got killed. We were all real broken up about both of those.

Let’s see, what else? We moved the lighthouse out at Hatteras. UNC-Greensboro isn’t just a school for girls anymore. I-40 is finished and has really cut that travel time to the beach. We also have a lot more Yankees now. And Latinos, so you may want to brush up on your Spanish. Oh, and you can get bagels here now, but the pizza’s still better up North. At least that’s what all the folks who’ve moved here say.

I’m sure you know you have some pretty big shoes to fill. No one could match Jesse when it came to protecting us from the endless wave of homosexuals that threatens to engulf our fair land. Jesse made that a priority. In fact, Jesse thought about homosexuals more than just about anyone else I ever heard of. We’ll all be watching you closely to make sure that you don’t let us down on that front.

Some people have also been kind of concerned that your positions on things like gun control and abortion might not be conservative enough. But I’m not worried. I’ve seen you in interviews, tap-dancing like Fred Astaire to keep from giving a straight answer to questions. With any luck, no one will be able to figure out what your positions are on anything, so you should be safe.

Now, you may get some static from North Carolina politicians who actually LIVE in this state, like Richard Vinroot and Lauch Faircloth. They may be a little teed off about having the national Republican leadership talking about backing someone for Jesse’s seat who hasn’t been part of the rough and tumble of our State’s politics for a while. Don’t you fret your pretty little head about that. If Hilary Clinton can get elected to the Senate from New York, I don’t see why it should be any problem that you’ve spent the last few decades in Kansas and Washington, DC. In fact, pretty soon I’ll bet they’ll just ditch the whole idea of residency requirements for Senate seats altogether. We can have a system sort of like the NFL does, where a team can just pack up and move wherever they feel like they’ll get a warmer welcome. I mean, really. What good have residency requirements ever done us? You think Strom Thurmond even remembers where he’s from?

In conclusion, I hope you’ll remember the strategy that served you so well in the last Presidential campaign. You know, the one where you said over and over again that "you weren’t a politician"? Boy, that really struck home with me. In fact, it almost made me forget the whole time you spent living in DC and the fact that you’ve been Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Labor, and a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Remember, if the son of a President can run as a "political outsider", so can you.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.