Sure, I was getting business from my regular customers, the long-time incumbents, the real hacks. A lot of them had primary opponents, but I’d noticed a disquieting trend. The people trying to take them out tended to be older, over sixty, sometimes closer to seventy. Historically, the kind of people who usually ran for the legislature against incumbent reps were younger. They were small businessmen, third-rate lawyers, town hacks, mamas’ boys living at home, empty-nest housewives. But those were the people pulling up stakes in Massachusetts and fleeing. When you get your future hacks calling it quits and heading south to Florida or Tennessee, one of those no-income-tax states, you know you’ve got a long-term problem, and the problem is you just can’t make a living here anymore, period, unless you work for the government. These political hacks I work for, they’ve really wrecked the state. Which is a long way of saying I needed more jobs, and beggars can’t be choosers. Still, I had a bad feeling about this guy I was meeting.
