Nothing Personal, It Was Only Politics

Originally written May 15, 2006

There is a story I need to tell in order to put a close on the most improbable chapter of my life. It is the story that made all the difference in my life, to bring me from where I was to where I am so close to being now.

For years I was locked in a power struggle, fighting for what I thought was the right and proper direction for the College Republicans. A place for people to gather, share their thoughts and meet people that they had things in common with. The College Republicans would have been a powerful political organization if politics had been its focus. For my time in Kansas, it wasn't. To become a force to be reckoned with in anything you, you need to have the support of the people around you, and to have supporters, you have to make the people feel like they are a part of something special. The issues of political parties, they never mattered to me. There were times where I couldn't care less what faction of the party was blinded by passions for their cause. For whatever reason, this idea of a social network never clicked with the people in grasping on to power, and only a few of us fought against the system to change that organization. In the beginning, my intentions were pure, for the good of the many.

With politics on a collegiate level, if you stay around long enough, you're adversaries eventually graduate out of the system. And no one enjoyed an eight year run in college life like I did. But there were always enemies to be made, and with my charming personality, they were never that far off. After running myself out of friends and the organization after college, I was out of politics for my first year of law school. But on a rainy Saturday afternoon in April, in the footsteps of giants we fell, and our old roommate Matt Flynn called me up to put the revolution in motion. Matt had served as the Treasurer, Vice Chair and State Chairman in his time, and he was my only friend in politics on the day it all began. Justin, the chairman of the Kansas club at the time, had fired Matt from his Treasurer position, and Matt believed it was so he could take money from the club's bank account. Matt ran a candidate for the chairmanship against Justin, and as a backup plan, he asked me to run for another position, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We targeted the weakest person running for a position on purpose because we could exploit that advantage. If we took her by surprise, if she couldn’t deliver the speech a law student could command, we would have a seat at the table. I spent three days emailing both factions in the club saying the other side was out of their minds, building good sentiments with everyone. After the greatest speech I had ever given, reaching out to everyone in a room that no reason to trust my intentions, my opponent Jessica came to tears in front of everyone. I was elected Treasurer.

After the election, as I stood among these people that had turned against their friend and trusted me to get a job done, I felt like I was floating. For the first time in a year, I was someone again. It was as if I was watching what was going on in the room from somewhere else, as if I was disconnected from that reality. I knew something had happened, something important. On that day I met Jordan, then the state chairman who Matt had used to feud with the Kansas leadership. We immediately found common ground, and there I stood among them, ready to burn the village in order to save the village.

People will believe what you have to say, as long as you have the appearance that you know what you are talking about. The first step was to gain power within the Kansas University chapter. The bank account records showed that Justin did steal that money. I never had warm feelings for him to begin with, so it didn't break my heart when I gave him the option to resign or be turned over to the police. While I maintain to this day that I never leaked that story to the newspaper myself, events were set in motion where his conduct was front page news on campus, and he was eventually forced out of his job and out the school. In the coming days I wrote the club's constitution, putting in place the rules that would govern our organization for years to come. I was now seen as the sheriff.

And it wasn't enough. I had the university, I wanted the state. In order to be recognized outside of the chapter, I had to change sides, became KU’s advocate, and turned on the state organization. We needed a bad guy to rally our supporters against. We needed something to fight. The state chair Jordan called a meeting to amend the constitution. He wanted to change the voting procedures at the state level to favor the election of his chosen successor, the vice chair Matthew. I had worked with the state committee to overthrow the leadership at KU, they were my allies but never my friends. They never saw it coming. Without introduction or recognition, Sean, the chairman of another university chapter, played from of my lead, and through this unspoken trust we worked for toward that same goal of cancelling the state meeting on a lack of credentials. If the meeting was cancelled, the amendments would never pass, and I would have still have a chance. The state secretary got up and yelled at me as he left the room; I chased him down and threw him up against the wall for embarrassing me. I was in control. After the meeting, Jordan and Matthew exchanged emails about sending me misinformation, to test my loyalties. The state secretary, included in on the emails, for some reason still lost upon me, forwarded everything to me. I had scared him into working for me. We had our nuclear bomb, we had the ammunition. We were going to war against the state.

At the state elections, the opposition claimed the proxy votes of several schools we never heard of, and later on we found out it was nothing more than forged membership lists. These guys threw every trick at me, lying to protect their interests; exactly what I would have done. It was the perfect test of who I had become and what I always wanted to be. I lost the election because of this forgery by the count of 52 to 50, one non-existent chapter made all the difference in the world.

After the results had been read, and the state committee moved on, I sat there, head bowed and filled with thoughts of going home to study for finals. But before I knew what had happened, I was the one demanding to see the votes individually. There we stood in the back of the room, reading through the slips of paper. I had earned the trust and vote of every chapter in the state but the imaginary ones. The world was washed in red as I raced into the middle of the convention, surrounded on all sides by the delegates I asked to hear me out, and with the fury and anger of a man possessed I shouted out "We're not going down like this". The representative from the state party walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder...and the look I shot him told to everyone in the room the Fighting Irishman was about to take someone down. After an hour of yelling over votes, of fighting for my cause because this was who I was supposed to be, I forced the state to have to cast their votes again, this time without the fraudulent chapters weighing us down. The big bad Jay came out on top, and I was elected the State Chairman of Kansas.

And it wasn't enough. Two of the people that were elected with me, Justin and Sam, were impeached within the first few months and blackballed from the party. I didn't trust them, and they were only there to work against me. They were out for themselves just as I had been a year before, but they didn’t know how to play this game. I had carried the idea of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer for over a year, but I had no need for deadweight. And these cancers were excised.

And it wasn't enough. At the end of the convention, I told Jordan that although I respected all of tricks to get his man elected, I didn’t think he had the character or fitness for a career in the field of law. I’ve never seen a man shake in fear like that before. Jordan left Kansas to attend some unaccredited law school in Michigan, and the state party disowned him. Matthew played his last card to try to impeach Sean at their own chapter, but like the coward he always was, he backed off before going through with it, and was never seen in Kansas politics again.

And it wasn't enough. I had the state of Kansas, but I wanted to be famous. A candidate for the national chairman of the college republicans spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making our national organization look like amateur night. I was a college republican before there was an establishment. I had been a part of this institution when most of these kids were in grade school. And in these national elections, I had convinced half the country I was a reform supporter, only to turn over all their information entrusted in me, and send the decisive Kansas votes to the man that won the national election. Half the country loved me, half the country hated me. We got death threats in the mail. I loved every moment of it.

And it wasn't enough. My friends had to be the next generation of leaders in Kansas. Because of me, there are so many people shut out of politics because they simply were in the way. It wasn't personal, it was only politics. You believe you know what you're talking about, you believe you can do no wrong. You believe in your friends, your clique, the ones you worked seven years to find. You set them up to succeed, to make sure they can father than you ever could, to do better than you ever did.

In a year I went from outsider to infamous, a rebel out for my own cause. And that was enough for me to say...I'm done.

It’s time McLaughlin stepped away from politics.