When Miller was making his transition from Clinton Administration official to “journalist” in the early 90’s, he was a frequent commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition. I was a public relations worker at a private firm that was, thanks to welfare “reform,” suddenly in demand as a contractor in teaching welfare recipients how to look for jobs and teaching public agencies how to comply with the new law.

I hated the work but needed the job. The pay was terrible and, although the company was suddenly extremely busy, very few rewards were trickling down to most workers. My job was to contact reporters and “educate” them to produce positive press coverage. I soon discovered how naive my beliefs had been about journalistic integrity. Once, a press release I wrote was simply reproduced verbatim in a newspaper. In a way, my job was going well but I was sickened by how few critical questions were asked and how hurried and trusting the reporters seemed to be.

My secret hope was that a reporter would ask me how much I made or how the company itself was modeling its purported belief that welfare recipients who enter the workforce will soon be rising up the ladder and achieving higher wages in their jobs, but none did. My responses would have gotten to the real story behind the one that I was pushing. The company, while constantly claiming that work would lead to living wages, was structured so that a few executives earned huge salaries while most workers made barely enough to pay their bills and certainly not enough to secure their silence.

I needed this job as I had two young girls, but I wanted to tell a reporter the real story: that the company, which supposedly helped welfare recipients earn living wages, treated most of its own workers- including the ones charged with calling the reporters- as low-paid spare parts.

My dream was that a reporter would ask me to talk off the record. As much as I needed the job, I wanted to tell the truth, to ‘blow the whistle.’ In short, while my job was to put the company’s model into the headlines, my dream was that a reporter’s questions would put the truth there and expose the company’s hypocrisy. But the reporters I talked to, which included the NY Times and the SF Chronicle, never asked me these questions. Professional success, which was rewarded with undelivered upon promises of higher wages in the future, was accompanied by personal disappointment. I felt successful as a hack but like a failure as a person.

With this in mind, I called Matt Miller one day, hoping that the intelligence I’d witnessed in the NPR commentaries might prompt the tough questions I longed for. Looking back, I was looking for a Greenwald, I guess. I faxed him the company brochures, the previous articles, and followed up with a phone call. A female answered, I heard Matt in the background and was told he wasn’t interested.

I gave up and left shortly after this, the company President’s subtle threats to fire me if I didn’t start being more loyal finally pushing me to apply to law school. Later, the company was purchased by Lockheed Martin, almost all lost their jobs and a select few got rich. A few years later, watching Bowling for Columbine I heard the story of a second-grader taking a gun to school, left unsupervised as his mother was attending a mandatory job training class in Michigan. She was attending one of the company’s programs at the time.

I have often wished Miller would have taken my call, assuming I would have sought anonymity, told him to call me at home and given him the real story. Now, based on this op ed, I wonder, would he have even cared? Would he have considered me a whistleblower or a disloyal worker?

My post government career, which began with me speaking on NPR as a former Clinton administration official, is entering a new phase with my new book and the op-ed to promote the book will proclaim that, unlike me, former administration officials have to wait five years to discuss their experience. This will ensure that I don't have as much competition as a pundit and that any future competitors, although they have to follow new rules, have to follow my example of holding their tongues when given the opportunity to speak out against the establishment. Things will be much tidier in the village this way.