Photograph by Sarah Carmody
Blake Ashby is sitting at a table in the back of The Delmar Lounge, picking over a hummus plate, sipping a soda and talking about his life up to this point. Based on the usual measures, that life is going pretty well.
Ashby was an almost-millionaire during the dot-com boom and bust, continues to be the part-owner of several businesses—including The Delmar—and is one of the founders and owners of GameRail, a new faster-than-the-Internet network for computer gamers who want to go head-to-head with opponents from across the country. He’s 42, about 6-foot-7, single, healthy, moneyed and comes across as a guy who does pretty much what he wants to do, when he wants to do it.
That, put simply, is the best explanation for his decision to run for president of the United States. Hey, he wants to—so why not?
When you get past his political analysis, his website, his plans, his gripes, his one-liners and his strategy, that’s what it boils down to: He wants to run for president, and he has the latitude, inclination and money to do so. No, he doesn’t have Ross Perot money, Steve Forbes money or even John Edwards money. Yet when he says—without blinking—that he plans to drop about $30,000 on getting his name on the ballot in up to 10 states in the 2008 election, you get the feeling that he can write that check without worrying about his bank balance.
He’s been president of several companies, usually as a self-described “start-up guy,” writing the business plan and finding investors. He usually carries the title of president before his involvement fades and he becomes a part-owner. Right now, Ashby is “day jobbing”—a phrase he uses—at GameRail with the official moniker of vice president of business operations
and strategy.
The lanky, bespectacled Ashby comes across as calm and serene as long as the conversation steers clear of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, the administration’s deficit spending or the war in Iraq, which Ashby describes as “stunningly stupid.” When Bush is on the front burner, the cadence of his voice picks up; he sounds like just another disgruntled Democrat, but he’s more conflicted than that. He’s a rebel Republican.
In 2004 he ran for president as a Republican and was on the primary ballots in Missouri and New Hampshire. He finished 12th in New Hampshire with 264 votes, ahead of actor Tom Laughlin, who starred in the movie Billy Jack. In Missouri, he placed third with 981 votes. This time he’s running as an Independent and skipping the primary season altogether.
“I know I’m not going to win, but I’m going to run because I don’t want to look back 15 years from now and say, ‘I should have said something,’” Ashby explains. Winning is not the point. His contribution to the discussion is.
“What I hope to accomplish is to highlight the degree to which the Republican Party has abandoned its roots, the damage it’s doing to the country, and then say enough harsh things about the issues that they get picked up on by the mainstream candidates,” Ashby says.
His campaign, such as it is, promises to be digital, focusing on Internet advertising and linkage, but he also plans to speak at college campuses. (He made an appearance at a Saint Louis University business class in September and, as of press time, had plans to speak to a media class at Webster University in October.) He says he’s going to make edgy comments about issues and get attention through politically incorrect political statements and through humor—or at least attempts at humor. He’s already mentioned his hope that some of his one-liners make their way onto Comedy Central’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
When he announced his candidacy on July 12 at the Tivoli Theater, he had a friend, Drew Bell, dress up as Abe Lincoln and read “The Top Ten Ways You Can Tell a Republican Smokes Crack,” a list that Ashby wrote. “Number Six: You are a crack-smoking Republican if you think Ted Kennedy is to blame for all the problems in the last six years.”
At the Tivoli that Saturday afternoon, the bit mostly fell flat before the 50 or so people in attendance. A video of the “performance” can be found on YouTube; through September, about 500 visitors to the site had viewed it. Only three people bothered to leave comments, one wondering if the clip featured canned laughter. It doesn’t. If they had added canned laughter, they probably would have added more.
Ashby has made his mark and his living as an entrepreneur in the information and technology world, but he’s no stranger to politics.
In 1990, he worked for Republican congressional candidate Mac Holekamp, who ultimately lost to incumbent congressman Dick Gephardt in the 3rd Congressional district. During that time, Ashby teamed with Holekamp to write a book title d The Battle for America, which Ashby says traced the evolution of liberalism through utopianism, an interest he had pursued from his undergraduate courses at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He never graduated, though he says he had almost enough credit hours, just not in all the required courses.
When Jim Talent was a congressman, Ashby worked for the Kirkwood native as a researcher for the Missouri House Republican caucus. He was assigned to do a research report on the St. Louis public school desegregation case. Ashby says he concluded that busing was the right tool at the time to remove the vestiges of segregation, but that once that point had passed, the state money that had been spent on busing should have been spent on efforts to improve schools and increase teachers’ salaries in city public schools.
“Talent’s campaign manager suggested that maybe it wouldn’t be good for the campaign if the report were released,” Ashby says. “Ultimately I was working for them, so it wasn’t my decision. So they circulated the report internally. It would have cost
him votes.”
Tired of politics’ defeats and dilemmas, Ashby opted to focus on his entrepreneurial side in the early ’90s. After taking a business class at Washington University, he put a classified ad in the Post-Dispatch, offering to write business plans for $200. He started small, with clients like a dry cleaner and a pizza joint, before eventually working with the principals to write the business plan for Diamond.Net, an “Internet backbone provider” that later turned into SAVVIS Communications. Then there was the data-centric phone company Primary Network Communications, and later The Delmar in the Loop and Mangia Italiano, a bar and restaurant on South Grand near Tower Grove Park.
“My preference is to get a little stake in the company,” Ashby says. “I almost never work just for cash. Back in the day I certainly did, but not over the last 10 or 12 years.”
He still solicits clients through ashbytechnicalwriting.com, where he cites the four steps of capitalism as “Take. Ask. Apologize. Take more.” He’s not kidding.
“If you can remember those four steps, you can pretty much do whatever you want,” he says matter-of-factly. “I realized from a very early age that most people don’t ask for what they want out of life, so they don’t get it. I am just arrogant enough, I’m not afraid to ask. And most people only ask once and don’t ask again. I don’t mind asking over and over again. I am just a thick-skinned, cold-hearted [expletive]. I’m used to getting what I want.”
Ashby fashions himself after Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate who was a fiscal conservative and bordered on a Libertarian bent when it came to social issues. As for the other candidates in the ’08 election, he sees a group of populist cowards reluctant to balance the budget and too malleable to stick to their guns.
Take Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney—oft derided for changing his stance on abortion and gay rights—for instance: “Romney would be a very credible guy if he just spoke the truth. He’s a smart guy, he understands management, but I’m tired of liars getting elected. I’d rather have someone like Hillary [Clinton] who doesn’t say anything at all.”
Ashby doesn’t see how Rudy Giuliani will get the Republican nomination, given his stance on abortion and gay rights. McCain only pretends to be an “outsider”; Ashby believes he’s part of the establishment. At least Fred Thompson has hinted at taking a “look at the revenue side.”
“I want someone to stand up and say that George W. Bush has not done a good job on national security, and I want a Republican to say that even though it might cost us more money, we need to raise taxes to pay for the government we’re using,” Ashby says.
Bill Clinton was “a far better Republican than George Bush was,” Ashby says, but he thinks Hillary would be a “boring president.” That said, she’s probably been “at this so long, she’s so battle-scarred and battle-hardened, nothing is going to faze her. There’s no more dirt on her to bring out of the closet. They’ve brought it all out, over and over again, unless they find Vince Foster’s secret love notes.”
Ashby says Obama is a “great talker,” comparable to John F. Kennedy, but he’s “worried he’s not seasoned enough. If he got into a fight with the Republicans, he might be underarmed.”
The trouble for Ashby is not his opponents, who are all flawed in their own way. It’s Ashby: What does he bring to the party? His campaign slogan says it all: “Blake Ashby—At least he tells the truth.”
The trouble is, the truth isn’t always enough. A supporter of presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once told him that all “right-thinking” people would vote for him. Stevenson supposedly responded, “Yes, but we need a majority to win.”
Ashby bills himself as “quirky” and talks about siphoning off some disgruntled voters from the major parties being his best chance to make a showing.
“If Hillary keeps on being Hillary and she’s the default candidate and nobody really likes her, there will be a lot of dissatisfied people on the Democrat side. And I know on the Republican side, the Ron Paul people are going to be disappointed,” Ashby says. “So the strategy is to drive name recognition and get people to listen to me on the issues.”
At best, he hopes to get some votes from people who can’t stand the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton and those who wish they could vote for Ron Paul—and he’s hoping to get those votes in the 10 states, maybe, where he’s on the ballot.
In other words, the plan is to kick up a fuss over the next several months, let the big boys duke it out and hope that voters start looking for a third choice when they decide they don’t like the two choices they have.
“I guarantee you that you will hear things from me that will not come out of Hillary’s mouth or Mitt Romney’s mouth,” he says. “Then on February 6, the day after Super Tuesday, there’s going to be a lot of dissatisfied people.”
Some of those harsh statements suggest Ashby has more whimsy than wit, more shoot-from-the-hip impulse than accurate assessment. He speaks of being in favor of abortion because it will reduce the need for social services for babies who might have otherwise grown up to be a burden to society. He also talks about “welfare mothers” who aren’t good parents and how it ought to be easier to terminate their parental rights and place their children in orphanages. (Never mind that state governments have been moving away from institutionalized foster care for children for decades and toward preserving families or offering private home-based foster care. “Orphanages” are not only obsolete, but the term also has an Oliver Twist ring to it.)
On his technical-writing website, beneath his list of start-ups that went somewhere (SAVVIS, Primary Network Communications, The Delmar, Mangia), Ashby lists “Unsuccessful Projects.” Among them is “Posterworld” from way back in 1993, which printed posters from digitally manipulated photographs. Ashby says the technology wasn’t quite ready yet and that the endeavor had some “bad luck.” Then he states simply that with Posterworld, he “made a couple of decisions that didn’t turn out right.”
In the business world, Ashby’s streak of candor is refreshing. In the political world, it might just be interpreted as the mark of a man with nothing to lose.
