Ladies and gentlemen, my constituents, citizens of my lovely home town of Fleenerville, voters, and Platinum V.I.P. Brunch Club Super-Tee level donors; my beloved wife Plovis, and my two wonderful sons Coho and Spelt, who flew in to support me tonight right after their Offal Studies final at Klumner State Butcher’s College; Mayor Burtis and his beautiful wife, Envoice; and most of all, all of you in the Cuttinger County Democratic Party who displayed such amazing faith and support to me over the course of this campaign for the 17th district — it’s wonderful to see you all here tonight, and I wish it was for a better reason.
But I’m afraid that the time has come for me to concede this congressional race, and admit that my opponent has won the office fairly in what has all too often been a contentious contest. No one is more disappointed than I am, but Naice Pretley has come up with the votes she needed to be declared the winner. She has fought a bold and determined campaign, and nothing I can do, not even the most sophisticated Moldovan voting-machine Trojan horse viruses or the tragic house fire that unexpectedly swept her house on the 19th and then again on the 23rd, is going to change that.
It hasn’t always been the cleanest campaign Cuttinger County has ever seen. People are passionate about their politics here, and more than once, cool heads on both sides failed to prevail. There was the time Ms. Pretley accused me of having been repeatedly audited by the I.R.S. and revealed that I had once been convicted of tax avoidance on nine separate occasions; and there was the time that she claimed that I was lying about my age, while I claimed that she was lying about her PCP addiction. She made outrageous claims about my street team having rigged her car with explosives, while I made some perhaps too pointed accusations about how such a frail old woman could have survived a car bomb.
But in the end, elections aren’t supposed to be about personalities, or scandalous rumors, or baseless speculation about how many additional families I am alleged to have tucked away in neighboring counties. They’re supposed to be about the issues. And while I will always insist that we had a better platform to offer than the Republicans, I am prepared to admit that the voters have spoken, and that I am willing to work with my opponents as a private citizen who may or may not qualify for minority-owned municipal contract status. I don’t agree with Ms. Pretley’s homeowner tax relief proposal, and she doesn’t agree with position that federal funds should be diverted to my bar tab at Henry Q. Grabbatitty’s Old-Tyme Root Beer Emporium and Exotic Dance Revue. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t work together to get those kids from flying drones over my hot tub. It’s this kind of bipartisan compromise that I got into politics for in the first place.
As you know, health care was my signature issue during this campaign, and I promise you now, regardless of the results of this or any other election, I will never stop fighting for the well-being of the good people of Cuttinger County, and that weird little bit of Huggs County that sticks out like a cartoon dick because old Buddy Jarglom couldn’t even do gerrymandering right. Ms. Pretley may have a different agenda, but ensuring the health of my fellow citizens is my number one priority. I have been accused of caring about health issues just because I happen to own the largest HMO in north and western Oklahoma, but I can assure you, this is just why I happen to care so much, not because I stand to make an enormous amount of money under the proposed H.B. 1411, which you can support right now by calling or texting the number on the big screen directly behind me. Anyone saying otherwise is not welcome to the best of medical care from Greenlow Health Systems LLC, a licensed vendor in this state, incorporated in St. Kitt’s and Nevis from the months of September through April. All policies are nonrefundable.
Do I have any regrets? Of course I do. My first regret is not fighting harder for you, the good voters of this district, who placed so much faith in me. My second regret is not doing more research on the potency of car bombs, and my third regret is not knowing never to trust a man who refused to be paid in anything but Naruto-themed bitcoins. If I had this campaign to do over again, obviously, I would have made different choices, such as doing more voter outreach, increasing my social media presence, and doing a little more to avoid that public indecency conviction that kept me out of the race for seven critical months.
But I don’t choose to blame myself. It is often said that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan; in this case, I would also add that failure is a bastard, and very possibly an asshole to boot. Instead, I blame you, the voter, for not turning up in sufficient numbers at the polls; I blame the Democratic Party for telling me I couldn’t run an attack ad with a body double of my opponent being drilled by a mule; and I blame my opponent for conveniently having had a handicapped son 23 years ago who just happened to learn how to be a huge blabbermouth the day I sold the ramps at the hospital to a Greek shipping company for use as ballast.
Regardless, though, I am enormously proud of you, as I assume you are enormously proud of me. I will go on fighting for you as a private citizen as much, or possibly even more, than I did as a candidate for office. I can promise you that none of your donations did anything as crass as buy you access to me, as I sincerely hope to never see any of you ever again. Good night, God bless you, and get the hell out of my x-ray room.