The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear (6 page)

You could argue it round or flat. If Hilda Smith won, it would prove that he still had influence, that his own vice president, a representative of what passed for the mainstream, not-crazy wing of the party, had beaten back the forces of darkness. His legacy would be redeemed as people put the unfortunate troubles—that's what he had taken to calling the Crash, “these unfortunate troubles”—behind them. Unfortunate troubles. Talk about denial. As if the greatest economic screw-up since the Great Depression was just a minor headache. Funny how when the economy is humming along, every politician rushes to take credit, and when it's in the toilet, it's no one's fault but those damn international forces beyond anyone's control. And when it was beyond the toilet and into the sewer, it was hard to find a politician of the party in power who would even admit that elected officials could do anything about the economy.

But on the other hand, if Armstrong George was the nominee and lost, it might just redeem the president by making him look more reasonable: a good man who did his best in bad times. There was always the danger that Hilda Smith would win and prove to be a much better president and make him look hapless. Then there was the chance that Armstrong George might actually win the whole thing, and nobody knew what the hell that would mean. Put it all together, and it made for a president who was paralyzed by indecision and open to being moved by the emotions of any given moment. It scared the hell out of me. He might be a broken president, but he was still the president, and inside our party there remained a certain segment who felt he had been given a raw deal and had done the honorable thing by not running for reelection. That wasn't a huge contingent, but when you were fighting over a handful of delegates, everything and anything mattered.

“The president,” Lisa said, “intends to release a statement in the first news cycle.”

“He won't help us,” I said.

“No?” Lisa countered. “You know what the president plans to say?”

“I can make a good guess that he won't be using it as an opportunity to remind Americans of the wisdom of his vice president's position on that bundle of goodies called the Protect the Homeland package.” That was a collection of bills that supporters of Armstrong George were trying to ram through Congress. None were as completely crazy as his New Bill of Rights but it was pretty nutty stuff.

“Hilda's opposition to these draconian measures is one of the reasons she stands the best chance to win the general,” Quentin Smith said. He was right, too, and we had the testing to prove it. There was a sizable piece of the Republican Party that supported just about any “get tough on crime and terrorism” proposals—at least in theory—but when it came to winning big battleground states like Ohio, it was a negative for the key independent voters Republicans needed to win.

We had research that showed independents and soft Democrats thought Hilda Smith was a “different kind of Republican.” This was a good thing; the problem was that we had to win the damn nomination, and the last thing we needed was a new wave of fear rumbling through the convention.

“You know what the president should do?” Quentin Smith said. “He should resign and let Hilda become president and deal with this mess. That would guarantee she keeps the White House.”

“Brilliant,” Lisa said instantly. “Brilliant.”

I looked out the window, where the first hint of dawn was showing. The Secret Service had covered the windows with a thick bulletproof translucent cover but it still allowed light to leak in. This was a room I'd fought hard to be in—the suite of a vice president on the verge of capturing a nomination—but there were times when I felt an overwhelming desire for another life. There were surely millions of perfectly happy people out there who didn't have to deal with trying to explain to seemingly reasonable people that their plan for a presidential resignation that was basically a coup d'état was stark raving mad. I tried not to sigh.

“Moments like this are like bombs themselves,” I said. “Tremendous energy is released. Our job is to figure out how to use that energy to get the vice president over the top. There's going to be hysteria. Armstrong George will be screaming for bodies to be hung from lampposts. We can't out-scream him. Hilda has to be steady and calm.”

“I'm still here.” Hilda Smith sighed. “You don't have to refer to me in the third person. I'm not dead yet.”

I had to smile. I'd come to like this woman, somebody I didn't know at all when I walked into her hotel room in Manchester and explained to her that her only hope of saving her campaign was hiring me to take it over. I'd learned over the years that to really sell a client, you had to believe that whatever you said at that exact moment was absolutely true. There could be no doubts. Candidates were constantly subjected to the kind of abuse and humiliation that left even the tough ones feeling raw and vulnerable. They needed to believe that you could make the pain worthwhile. And I'd been able to sell Hilda Smith because I knew, absolutely knew without a doubt, that if she didn't make a drastic change she was destined to go down in flames. It was the easiest sale I'd ever made. She was desperate. I was hopeful. We were a perfect match.

Since then we'd been married to each other. An arranged marriage, very old-fashioned, between two people who didn't know each other. “You meet, have sex, get married, have children, fall in love”: that's how a stunning Czech woman had described the typical Czech marriage. She was one of Václav Havel's “aides,” whom I'd met when we were working to elect the best of a bad bunch in Serbia. It wasn't a bad description of what a relationship was like with a candidate. You entered each other's lives for a certain period and you became, invariably, the most important person in each other's universe. Often they came quickly to hate their dependence on you, resenting you when you were right, never letting you forget when you were wrong. You demanded to know everything about them, from the financial to the sexual. You needed to know if they'd ever had an abortion or knocked a girl up, been arrested or caught speeding, bounced a check, if their children had drug problems or their spouses slept around. All the awful, little, petty secrets we try to hide, the small humiliations and tragedies, every tiny bit of dirty laundry, all had to be revealed to this stranger.

But, of course, most candidates lied. They lied, if only by omission. They'd forgotten about that speeding ticket, that one-night stand, the time the checking account ran dry. There was always something out there that they hadn't told you. Sometimes you never found out what it was; other times it blew up on you like that bomb outside Pat O'Brien's. The late-night phone call and the words, those dreaded words: “There's something I should have told you.” God, I hated that phrase.

“The president picked Hilda,” Lisa insisted. “He should realize that she's his best hope to carry on his legacy.” She couldn't accept that everyone didn't see Hilda Smith the way she did, that the whole world wasn't in love with her. That was one of her greatest weaknesses as a campaign manager: her inability to understand why some people didn't like, or even hated, the woman she worshipped.

“Jesus, Lisa, I'm not saying the guy doesn't have good taste.”

Nobody laughed. Not even a smile, really. It was time to go.

“We'll draft a statement,” I said, standing.

“This can help us,” Hilda said with a sudden fierceness.

“I'm listening,” I said, sitting back down.

“How many times have we said that Armstrong George represents something terribly ugly and cruel in this country? And a horrible tragedy like this bombing could really make people step back and ask themselves what is happening to us.”

“Absolutely,” Lisa agreed instantly. “The same way that there was a backlash against the overkill after 9/11. All the taking away of civil liberties.”

I started to remind them that George W. Bush was reelected and any backlash happened more than a decade after 9/11, when everyone was feeling safer. And it was the current absence of feeling safe that was driving Armstrong George toward the White House. But I knew it was this side of Hilda Smith, call it a fervent reasonableness, that had drawn Lisa to her years ago. One night after we had won New Hampshire and done better than expected on Super Tuesday, Lisa and I had ended up in a bar alone, drinking too much. She'd told me that Hilda had looked like a star that day she first saw her speak, her blond hair dusted with snow, standing there in her husband's trench coat, borrowed when the sunny morning had suddenly turned into a snow squall. “Government can't do everything,” she had said, “but we must do a better job of educating our citizenry, or the new century is sure to dawn on the declining days of our great country.” Pretty heady stuff for a state rep race.

“That's our play,” I agreed. “But something like this just makes a lot of people want the toughest sheriff west of the Pecos to come in and kick ass,” I said, and when Lisa and Quentin Smith both glared at me, I didn't stop. “People are scared to death out there. Their terrified, racist eyes see all these little yellow and brown people taking what jobs are left, and we shouldn't kid ourselves that there is something reassuring about—”

“A thug like Armstrong George,” the vice president finished.

“On a dark night, having some jackbooted thug on your side can make you feel pretty good.” I tried to smile. “Remember, the innocent have nothing to fear.”

“Let's go to bed,” Quentin Smith said, standing. He reached for his wife, holding out his hand.

When I was at the door, I glanced back and saw the three of them watching me, waiting for me to leave, like I was the hired help who had overstayed. It was a fact of life. They loved you for saving them and hated you for needing to be saved.

One more reason I had to get out of this business. And all I needed was a handful of delegates—then Hilda would win, and I would be a moderately Famous Person with my own political show franchise. Then I could just talk about all the people who did what I used to do. Bliss.

As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I could feel something different. I was halfway to the elevator when it struck me: in the twenty minutes I had been inside with the vice president, extra Secret Service agents had been posted. Instead of the usual detail of two agents in front of the suite door and another by the elevator (entrance to the floor was controlled by passkey), there were now eight.

They were all faces I recognized. The agents liked me because I never gave them a hard time and always respected their needs. When Kim Grunfeld, our dragon lady of a media consultant, had tried to boss them around during the filming of a commercial, I had made sure I came down on their side and told Kim to either quit acting like she was a real film director or take a walk. As I was getting on the elevator, I saw that two of the guards had swiveled their Uzi submachine guns from their normal rear-sling position, where the machine guns rode in the small of their back, to the front, just under the flaps of their coats.

My daily senior staff meeting was scheduled to convene in the war room at six thirty, which was in just a couple of hours. Moving a campaign to a convention was never easy. Our regular headquarters were in Montpelier, Vermont, the smallest capital city in the country. This was partly because it was cheap but mostly to stress Hilda's definition as a non-D.C. candidate. Our offices were just down the street—one of the two main streets in town—from the statehouse where Hilda started her political career. No reporters, other than the locals who had known the vice president forever, just “dropped by” because they were in the neighborhood, and donors hated to trek to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Quaint coffee shops, a couple of great independent bookstores, and no reporters or donors. In the history of world civilization, no good had ever come from having donors hanging around a campaign headquarters. But at the convention, suddenly the entire political world surrounded us, reporters and donors everywhere. Throw in Bourbon Street, and it was easy to see a campaign totally losing focus, like a football team at a bowl game with players skipping curfew. To fight distractions, Eddie and I had decided to keep the same schedule in New Orleans that we did back in Montpelier. People bitched and complained, but that only proved us right.

I got on the elevator to ride down one floor to my room, but when the elevator stopped I didn't get off, and let the doors close, riding down to the lobby. A few delegates were milling around with drinks, looking dazed but still arguing. Everybody was arguing in New Orleans. And drinking. In the small lobby of the Windsor Court, I counted more than a dozen uniformed NOPD cops, what looked to be three or four NOPD detectives in plain clothes, and a full contingent of Secret Service. A huddle of technicians in Secret Service jumpsuits were installing metal detectors and new bomb-sniffing scanners at the main entrance to the hotel. Almost a thousand delegates and press were going to wake up inside a “secure area.” I wondered if this was happening at every delegate hotel in town or just here at the Windsor Court because of the vice president. Whatever: none of it was good for us. Hilda Smith was the candidate of hope versus fear, and it sure looked like fear was winning.

Luck is no small part of both life and politics, and I had done enough campaigns to know we were lucky to even be in this race. Nine times out of ten, after an economic meltdown the party out of power should be able to waltz into the White House. But the Gods of Politics had smiled on us one spring morning when the diary of the wife of the presumptive Democratic nominee, Pennsylvania governor Doug Banka, exploded into print. It was crazy.

Banka was in his second term as governor, an Iraq War vet from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had been reelected with huge margins. He'd been elected with the help of his wife's money, which came from the Silicon Valley world. She was a Stanford-educated engineer who had moved from Apple to Google to a venture capital start-up and made a fortune along the way. Banka had met her when he was working with a private-public aid group, Vets Recovery, and was on a fundraising trip to San Francisco. They dated transcontinentally for a year and then married in Erie. Banka ran for Congress and then made a big jump to governor after two terms. Pennsylvania loves to reelect governors, and he ran up the score, racking up numbers in the conservative part of the state like no Democrat in modern history.