My Second Week Working on the Hill

Well, I finished up my second week at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). It was pretty awesome at some points and pretty boring at others. I’ll focus on the awesome. I also would like to speak to my course and some of the upcoming events that I am looking forward to this week.

Beginning on Tuesday of last week all the interns at the Republican National Committee (RNC), of which I am included, had lunch in the Reagan Room of the RNC. The RNC Communications Director came in and we all got to question him for over an hour. It was very interesting as he is the man behind the scenes of every media appearance the RNC makes and the framing of the RNC’s message whenever they issue a statement to the media.

This upcoming Tuesday, all RNC interns and there are only around 15 of us, get to take a tour of the Daily Caller and then chat with its founder, Tucker Carlson. I realize few if any know who these people are that I have and will be referring to, besides the other political junkies out there, so I’ll try and get a picture to spur your memory, think bowtie.

Mainly this past week I have been stuffing envelopes and making a lot of phone calls back to Oklahoma, the NRCC has an event in Tulsa on the 29th of this month. If anyone wants to attend please let me know, it would really make me look good if I could sell a few tickets. I actually did get one person to RSVP with me over the phone. She paid $1,000 for a general reception ticket to the event. When I told my superiors and gave them her credit card info, they acted like I had done something amazing. I felt like this is what the goal of all these calls had been all along and wondered what the big deal was. If I was in charge I would have been disappointed in my interns only getting one RSVP out of 8 pages of phone calls.

On Thursday of this past week the Director of the Finance Department, who is also from Oklahoma, took me to the Oklahoma State Society Congressional Reception that was held in the Capitol building. All of Oklahoma’s Congressmen, along with Governor Mary Fallin where present at the event and I got to meet them all. I also ran into the President of the Bank of Stillwater who was my father's best man in his wedding and graduated from OSU with him, talk about a small world.

Friday I was able to attend a NRCC PAC meeting where the Director of the Political Department gave an overview of all the seats they were targeting in the up-coming 2012 Congressional election. There were around 20 people there and I assume they were big money donors because he kept talking about them being excited to write checks to the NRCC. The meeting began with a speech from Rob Barker, who recently won the special election in New York 9 and Ahmeday, who won the special election in Nevada. The NRCC feels pretty confident in adding seats to the current Republican Majority in the House in 2012.

Well RSU, I’m getting ready for the Dallas game and have to start on my Political Leadership homework which is due tomorrow. Oh, my wife is visiting this week, so if anyone has any ideas of something romantic I can do for her while she is here please let me know. I have no clue when it comes to things like that. Tomorrow we go to a panel discussion featuring former Senator Trent Lott, and then our guest at the CSPAN class is going to be Jimmy Carters campaign manager. A little birdie told me after last week’s class to have a question ready for President Carter himself, so we’ll see.