I Got Yer "Busy" Right Here!


I HAD PLANNED TO wish you a happy new year, but I am just too busy.
 
And that worries me - not that I am too busy but that I say I am too busy.

Everybody these days says they're too busy. Have you noticed? If someone doesn't reply to an e-mail or participate in a school meeting, their excuse is invariably "Sorry, I am just so busy."

The problem is, as an excuse, it has gotten old. It is the adult version of "the dog ate my homework."

To beg off doing something like, say, returning a phone call, because you're too busy is like not brushing your teeth because your gums hurt.

(I have no idea, by the way, if that sentence makes sense. You think you're busy? I am too busy to check my similes for logic.)

You know what "too busy" is? It's the new inconsideration. That's all.

Let me tell you a story about busy.

Years ago, the phone rang in my house. I picked up the receiver. It was Lee Atwater.

Who was Lee Atwater? A really busy guy, that's who.

Atwater, who died in 1991, was the most famous - and, some argue, the most effective - political strategist who ever lived. Except for maybe Machiavelli, to whom Atwater was often compared. He didn't shrink from the comparison; he embraced it.

Back in 1988, he was the Svengali behind the first George Bush's presidential victory. If it had been a sporting event, that campaign would have yielded its own ESPN highlights special - or, to detractors, lowlights. The campaign ran two political ads that are considered classics, if you will, of the spinmeister's dark art of negative advertising. One tied the policies of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis to a man who became nearly as famous as Dukakis: Willie Horton, a prison inmate who killed a person while out on furlough. The other showed a cartoonishly helmeted Dukakis in a tank, going around in circles.