Primary Colors (12 page)

"Happy Davis is a gossip columnist."

"So? Look, Henri, we're flyin' blind. We don't know shit about this guy. We need to hire someone. Oppo our own self. This is fuckin' crazy for us to be sittin' around, scratchin' our balls, so much at stake." He had a point. But no one had the guts to approach Stanton on it-least of all, Richard. He would call me at the office, page me on the road. The eightieth time or so, I returned his page from a high school gymnasium in Nashua. Stanton was just finishing up a town meeting-awesome as always on the Q&A, moving up the aisle aglow, conferring meaningful handshakes on the multitudes-and I said to Richard, "Goddammit, tell him yourself," and handed the phone to the governor.

"You're nuts, Richard," Stanton said, laughing. "The Cowboys are gonna beat the spread." He handed the phone back to me.

"Thanks for joining us," I said to Richard, "for this week's edition of campaign profiles in courage."

"We're gonna get fucked, Henry, and it's going to be our own damn fault."

I was worried too: It was all too good too soon. We roared into the first debate, a month to the day before the February 17 primary. It wa
s h
eld in a converted knitting mill, the new home of a local TV station, in a large room with the feel of a SoHo loft, smelling of plaster and polyethylene. There was to be a live audience, equally divided between civilians and half the known political world--it was the first great tribal event of the season for the scorps, the first chance for the heavy hitters to see us in action.

It was a strange scene. No individual greenrooms before the show: the four candidates were thrown together with their wives and seconds, a coffee urn and chocolate chip cookies in a bare room with newly painted white walls. Stanton overwhelmed the room, or so it seemed. He created his own dysfunctional family--Charlie Martin was his raffish, goofy younger brother; Bart Nilson was dad. But Lawrence Harris wasn't playing: he sat off to the side, checking his notes and carrying a copy of Scientific American with "The Promise of Desalinization" on the cover. He drove Stanton crazy, standing off like that--the governor kept glancing over at him and, I could swear, ever more egregiously chatting up and charming the others. He was eared into Nilson bigtime; he loved the old coot, loved listening to his stories. "Henry, c'mere," he said. "Senator Nilson was just telling me about the time Hubert Humphrey tried to get Eisenhower to move on civil rights, back in the fifties. Senator, this is Henry Burton--you know, the Reverend Harvey Burton's grandson." He could be an absolutely shameless asshole when it suited him.

"Really?" Nilson asked--shocked, suddenly ashen. "I marched with your grandfather. I was there when he was . . ."

Shot. But Bart Nilson was too proper to go on. His eyes filmed over--Stanton's too, I was certain, without looking. "We've got to keep that spirit alive, don't we?" Nihon said, touching my arm. "We got pretty close there for a while, Henry. Pretty close to makin' it happen." "Yes sir," I said.

"We'll make it work again, Senator," Stanton said, fixing him very close. "One of us is gonna do it," he said, with a certainty that almost caused Bart Nilson--who knew it wasn't going to be him--to recoil. "You see how the folks are, right? You can feel them--hungry for something, worried. I don't think the Republicans understand that yet." "Republicans never understand that," Charlie Martin said, laughing. "The only thing they want to do is scare the shit out of 'em. But
,
hey, Jack, I love hearin' you talk that sixties shit. The idealism! The Movement! The sex. I'll bet you got laid four hundred times while I was getting my butt shot off." Stanton quickly glanced over at plain, dowdy Elizabeth Nilson, standing just to their left, alone at the coffee urn. Charlie caught the look, shrugged, mouthed: "Sor-ry." (Susan and Martha Harris, who'd never be mistaken for anything other than the women's studies professor she was, were engaged in deep, animated conversation across the mom--Susan, it seemed, was having better success penetrating the Harris Curtain than the governor, but, then, she came from their class.)

"Hey, Jack, I have this great idea--let's mess with Harris's mind," Martin said. "When they ask us about taxes, and he trots out his Natural Forces fee, or whatever he's calling it, let's say it's not enough. I'll say, Double it! Then you can say, 'No, higher.' Bart can say, 'Maybe we should tax unnatural forces, too.' "

"Gee, Charlie," Stanton said. "That would just be stone hilarious, wouldn't it? I'm sure the Republicans would love it to death." "I guess," Martin agreed wistfully. "And some of our folks are so fucked up righteous, they'd probably think we weren't kidding. But it would be nice to strafe Larry a little. He didn't used to be so saintly when we were freshmen together. I didn't know when you have a heart attack they stick a cork up your ass." Then: "Hey, Jack, speaking of righteous, what did you have to promise Harriet Evergreen? She wanted me to agree that every piece of paper my administration used would be recycled."

Harriet Everton was the leading enviro-lunatic in New Hampshire. She had been giving Stanton grief about the huge pig-processing operations down home, and the clear-cutting he'd allowed in the piney woods. So he'd taken the pledge on recycling to shut her up, and was beginning to redden a bit now (and Charlie Martin saw it).

"She was all over me about a vote I made on acid rain eighteen years ago," Bart Nilson said.

"So you caved, Jack?" Charlie Martin pressed. Happily, though, someone said, "Gentlemen," and it was time to roll.

The debate started out a breeze. Stanton seemed very cool, presidential--and, to everyone's amazement, out of the line of fire. It wasn't hard. The others were murdering themselves. Charlie Martin tried t
o e
xplain his very elaborate health-care scheme and got so bollixed up that he threw up his hands and said, "Well, this thing makes a lot more sense on paper than it does when anyone talks about it. But you know, we do this, and our national energy level will just, just . . . explode!" Then Nilson and Harris got on each other. Nilson went into his usual stump number about how we ought to spend a lot more money helping folks off welfare: "Give 'em a ladder, not a safety net." And Harris, incredibly, went after him. "How can we serve our grandchildren if we're spending all this money providing pickaxes to people who need to be computer-literate?"

"You think the folks'll be willing to pay your dollar-a-gallon gasoline tax and get nothin' back except owin' ourselves less money on the national debt?" Nilson said, truly angry. Harris's bloodless aloofness promised a Democratic Party very different from the blue-collar, lunch-pail outfit Bart Nilson had signed on with.

"It's not a gasoline tax," Harris said, with enough condescension to start Charlie Martin giggling. "It's a Virgin Sources Usage fee. And a lower deficit will mean--"

"A better life for your bond-holding fat cats," Nilson shot back. The wise thing for Stanton to do would have been to stay down, let them kill each other. But he jumped in ("No! No!" Daisy Green whispered, squeezing my hand hard), acting on a deeper need than political expediency, the need to be a peacemaker--and to ingratiate himself with Lawrence Harris. "Not just the bondholders, Governor Nilson," he said. "Working families will have lower mortgage rates, small businesses will be able to borrow money on better terms and compete in the world. A modest but steady reduction in the deficit will be good for all of us."

Okay. Not bad. But shut up. But no: "Of course, Governor Nihon does have a point. We do need to provide jobs for those who need--" "Hey, Jack," It was Charlie Martin. "What, if anything, are you against?"

There was laughter in the hall. Not a lot. But laughter.

"I am against doing nothing while people are suffering." Stanton was furious. "I am against the style of government that says, Waitthings'll get better. Just wait. I am against that kind of patience. I am impatient when it comes to the people you and I--all of us--have see
n u
p here, the folks who worked hard all their lives, did what they were supposed to do and suddenly the bottom drops out. You've seen their eyes, you've heard their stories, Senator Martin. Are you saying we should do nothing to help?"

"Well, of course not," Martin began and then stumbled through a convoluted acquiescence. He was toast.

We dashed to the spin room, another loftlike contrivance one floor down, with rows of long tables and a press podium. Me, Sporken and Laurene Robinson triangulated and began working the room. (Lucille Kauffman had had her way; Laurene, a tall and smooth young black woman, was now press secretary--and not bad, I had to admit.) We were very cool. It was a good night. It was fine. A good, substantive debate on all sides. We were satisfied. Even Sporken knew enough not to launch a "Great! Great!" barrage. Losers spin; winners grin. "But didn't Senator Martin have a point?" asked Felicia Aulder, a real pain in the butt from the New York Daily Neon She hated us for some reason. She loved Charlie Martin--or, rather, she loved Charlie's pollster Bentley Benson, who fed her all sorts of chow for her "D
. C
. Wash" column and was quietly, we knew, plying her with "woman trouble" rumors. "What is Governor Stanton against?" "I think the governor explained that," I said.

"They were laughing at hint," she pressed.

I looked away, and caught Laurene's eye. Something was wrong. She needed help. The question was, how to get over to her side of the room without bringing along my swarm of scorps--especially Felicia. "Listen," I said, "gotta go--" and I headed toward the door--with Jerry Rosen tagging along after me, a puppy in love, his arm around my shoulders, whispering in my ear, "Awesome, awesome. You're gonna wrap up the nomination by Valentine's Day."

I went out the door. Waited one, two, three, four, five. Then back in, over to Laurene's side. Everything scented fine at first. Then a tall, gaunt, pockmarked fellow approached me, "Mr. Burton, maybe you can help me?"

I looked at Laurene and saw that this was the problem.

"I can try," I said. The other scorps were still pummeling Laurene--tactics, advertising plans, fund-raising, bullshit. They didn't know this guy. He wasn't one of the regulars.

"Was Governor Stanton ever arrested during the Vietnam war?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I can ask him and get back to you."

"All right," he said, too calmly. He knew what he was doing, and he had something. He handed me a card: Marcus Silver, Los Angeles Times. "You're covering the campaign?" I asked, hating to have to show any sort of interest or concern, but needing to know.

"Not really," he said. "Special projects."

As I feared.

"Okay, I'll get back to you."

But he got to Stanton first. It was about fifteen minutes later. I'd gone down to meet the governor in the holding room. He was there with Susan and Uncle Charlie-and in a foul mood. "Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go."

"What about Laurene and Sporken?"

"What about them? Let's go."

And we were moving, down in the stuffed, sweaty elevator out into the sharp, clear, very cold night, sweat and chill and confusion, television lights and shouts of "Governor . . . Governor . . ."

We moved toward the van, past the lights and into a bitter cold and darkness. The ground was slick. We were near the van, and there was Marcus Silver. "Governor," he said, very calmly, and, again, his calm penetrated the frenzy like a knife. Stanton stopped.

"Governor," I said, trying to push him along.