SAP ALERT: It is Father's Day. As a father I am claiming my right to let the world outside stay outside for a day.

You know, by now that I am a dad. The Lad, whose real name is Reed, is 31.

Regular readers also know that, in spite of my firm instructions that he whisper two words before he went to sleep every night during his career at the University of Texas at Austin, "investment banking," he went into politics.

While he was in college I flew down to Austin so we could be together the night Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's streak. We had been to dozens of Orioles' games and I thought it was fitting we be together for that event. We went to dinner, then went back to my hotel where we ordered every desert on the room service menu and watched Cal's 2,131st consecutive game on TV.

According to the Washington Post reporting of that game:

The biggest outpouring of emotion came when the game became official at 9:20 p.m. And the crowd wouldn't stop cheering for 22 minutes 15 seconds.Two of the people cheering for those 20+ minutes were a father and son in a hotel room 1,500 miles away.

Reed started out in politics as an intern in the finance shop of Governor George W. Bush's re-election campaign in Austin. A couple of stops along the way with two other statewide office holders and he wanted to get into the Bush-for-President orbit.

As a father, I was worried about the fact that he had only worked in extremely large, extremely well-funded campaigns. As a father, I determined that he needed a stop in a real campaign.

As a son, I believe he thought his father was nuts.

He did a stint in York, Pennsylvania as the campaign manager and sole employee for the campaign of a guy running for a local office. It was the kind of campaign where you can't pick up the printing until you've been to the post office to see how much money came in today then raced to the bank and make the deposit so if the printer follows you out the door, the check you gave him will be good. Continued...