The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear (7 page)

While we were fighting Armstrong George hand to hand from New Hampshire all the way to New Orleans, Doug Banka was cruising to easy victories in the Dem primary. He became the first to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, and after that it was pretty much all over. Once he had the nomination sewed up, Banka started attacking Armstrong George. I hated that he wasn't attacking us. Every time Banka hit George, the guy went up with Republicans who figured if the other side was hitting our guy, he had to be pretty good. Had Banka put together a sustained attack on television and digital, he would have eventually damaged George with Republicans. At a certain point, negative information adds up, even if it's coming from the anti-Christ. But Banka didn't lay the heavy wood on him, just took shots at George's plan to build a wall the full length of the border and banged him day after day on the New Bill of Rights. Armstrong George's people loved him for all those things; it was like accusing a supermodel of being thin. That was the point.

Every poll had Banka up five to eight points over both Hilda Smith and Armstrong George. Until the Gawker Bomb hit. It came on April 19, at five a.m. EST, which gave it sort of a classy Pearl Harbor “hell at dawn” touch. I was just trying to wake up and drag myself out of bed in another hotel in Ohio, where we were slogging through the last primary, when my phone lit up like one of those flashers they give you at Fuddruckers to let you know when your crappy food is ready. Within five minutes, I had over a hundred calls, my voice mail full and throwing up. “What the hell?” I was fumbling with the cheap coffeemaker when Eddie Basha burst through my door.

“You hear?” he asked.

I was standing there in gym shorts, after my usual four hours of sleep, feeling like death before coffee. Eddie was dressed in a nicely pressed shirt and tie, looking like he had won the lottery. “How the hell did you open the door?” I asked.

He held up a key. “Advance has passkeys to all the rooms,” he said. “Didn't you know that?”

“Christ.” I had a rush of panic, thinking of when Ginny and I had been having mad campaign sex in other hotels. “The advance guys always have keys to every room?” I asked. Why didn't I know that?

“Her diary,” Eddie said. “Focus. Gawker got her diary.”

The coffee sputtered that it was ready. I was really not good at this early-morning chaos without coffee.

“Eddie,” I said, feeling better after the first few sips of the coffee. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He picked up the remote and turned on the television. “Watch,” he said.

And we did. Sitting next to my top guy and drinking the bad coffee, I heard the breathless story that Gawker had obtained the diary of Amanda Collins, the wife of Doug Banka, and it contained “explosive details of their intimate lives.”

“Good, so good,” Eddie said gleefully, and for once the reality of the story lived up to the billing. For the next two weeks, Gawker strung out the juicy details of threesomes with Amanda's college roommate, “sexcations” in Thailand, “lost weekends” in Vegas. Banka refused to comment on any of the details. About a week into the drip-drip of details as Gawker teased it out, Maureen Dowd wrote in
The New York Times
that the diary read like some
Cosmo
fantasy and she doubted that any of it had really happened. That kicked off an Internet treasure hunt for articles and stories that resembled the scenes that the first lady of Pennsylvania had described. Rumor had it that she was so offended by Dowd's accusation that she wanted to hold a press conference and reassure America that, in fact, this stuff really had taken place.

We won Ohio but no one seemed to notice, the whole political world transfixed by the meltdown of Mr. and Mrs. Banka. Editorials and what passed for “Democratic Wise Voices”—these were rare in both parties—urged Banka to withdraw and throw his delegates to the second-place finisher, Senator Richards of Rhode Island. The problem was that Richards was such a boring “White Man of Wealth and Privilege” that no one had been particularly excited about him when he ran; the idea of turning over the nomination to the guy seemed to generate an amount of enthusiasm slightly lower than you might feel at having to kiss your aunt. The concept of honorable resignation in America had never been especially popular, and since Bill Clinton had proved that hanging on was the key to success, many seemed secretly to admire Banka's stubborn refusal to cave.

Usually the party in power has their convention last, but this time the Republicans had chosen to go first and early, sort of a Hail Mary pass in hopes of setting a narrative that could force the Democrats on the defensive at their own convention. “Setting a narrative” is the kind of phrase political consultants and journalists love to toss around when they really mean “rat-fuck.” The hope was that the Republicans would spend the convention attacking the Democratic nominee and making him respond when it came time for his convention. But politics has a way of working out—or not working out—like none of us pros predict. The good news was that the Dem nominee had plenty to do just dealing with his own self-inflicted attacks. The bad news was that we were in worse shape. If Hilda didn't win the nomination, odds were that Doug Banka could live-stream having sex with monkeys and still win four hundred electoral votes against Armstrong George.

So we were in New Orleans with a chance, and sometimes a chance was all you could ask for in politics. Outside the Windsor Court, the predawn moment should have felt freshly minted and tinged with promise. But the air tasted stale and nasty, like a locker room with too many bodies and lousy toilets. By the time I reached the gates of the hotel's circular courtyard, I was dripping with sweat. I walked down Canal toward the Superdome. I told myself I didn't have a destination, that I was just out to clear my head, but of course that was a lie. Canal Street was a history of the booms and busts that had racked New Orleans. At one end, by the Windsor Court, there was that huge mausoleum of a failed casino perched on the Mississippi River like an abandoned temple of a forgotten religion. A dozen or more times, gambling had been slated to save New Orleans, but a combination of greed, graft, and inertia had always killed it before it could take hold. Locals took a sick pride in the failure of gambling in New Orleans, like the city was too proud of its heritage as a sex, drinking, and music Mecca to allow itself to be transformed into just another imitation of Las Vegas. So what if it cost the city billions in lost dollars? It had been over a hundred years since New Orleans was rich, and that was just fine by everybody. We were New Orleans. We didn't need anything as crass as money.

The few times the city had flirted with affluence, it had quickly rejected the notion, like a teenager turning down fancy French food for a hot dog. Oh, to be sure, there had been the brief petrochemical booms and the flood of post–Hurricane Katrina money, but this was greeted as a cause as much for dismay as for joy, a reaction that cut across social lines. Uptown society was terrified of the impact of any new money on their caste systems of Mardi Gras balls and debutante parties. In the Quarter, everybody from the gay community to the bar owners had panicked after real estate prices spiked a few years after Katrina, when federal dollars had rained on the city like a July thunderstorm. After the Crash, there was almost a sick relief that nobody wanted to buy real estate, and the good citizens of New Orleans were relieved of the need to talk about how much somebody's house had sold for and could instead focus on drinking, sex, crime, and the New Orleans Saints as the normal topics of conversation.

The old Werlein's Music Store was on my left, on the north side of Canal, closed now but once a place where Uptown families shopped for Steinways alongside blues musicians looking for the perfect harmonica. Then for a while it had been a restaurant, but that had closed. I'd bought my first Fender Stratocaster here; my brother Paul had driven me to the store and lent me the money for the down payment. He always had a lot of cash in those days, Paul did, money stuck in his pocket at Touchdown Club luncheons from grateful alumni. And then there was the cash that sports agents slipped him, hoping to represent Paul Callahan, LSU great, when he turned pro. Only Paul never made it to the pros, sidetracked by a hotshot young DA who was determined to break up gambling and didn't think it was altogether a bad thing to get some headlines when he netted the great Paul Callahan for making big bets with bookies. Paul didn't even try to fight the charge but spent every penny he had and could borrow to prove he had never bet against LSU. That helped with the public, but he still was convicted: a felony conviction, a year in jail, suspended.

Ten years later, when the governor officially pardoned him, there had been so much serious corruption in the post-Katrina cleanup that Paul's sins seemed almost quaint. He'd been required to do a stint of public service, which turned into him going around the state to schools to tell his story. Then he coached high school football, reaching a state championship with a New Orleans team pieced together after Katrina. Talk about rehabilitation. He was damned near a folk hero, and now he was running for public service commissioner. He'd been calling me since we got to town, and I should have called him back; but there were a lot of things I should have done.

There was a string of pawnshops and jewelry stores on the west end of Canal, each covered in steel bars and alarms, a Doberman or German shepherd asleep on the floor. Pawnshops had exploded after the Crash, and so had the number of people trying to rob them. It was the same with the jewelry stores. With the Crash came a deep, almost mystic need to buy—or steal—gold and silver. In New Orleans alone, four jewelry shop owners had been murdered in the last six months. Now young Uptown couples shopped for wedding rings with the help of a jeweler wearing a 9mm in a holster, a shotgun never far from reach. You were crazy to expect help from the NOPD, which was as bankrupt as the entire city, a department so rife with corruption that it was routine to put a twenty-dollar bill behind your license when you were stopped for speeding. And for a thousand dollars, it wasn't hard to find a cop who would be happy to settle any problems you might be having by drilling a 9mm slug into the troublemaker. The Crash had brought deflation of all sorts, even for hit men.

Two blocks from the Superdome, I passed a huddle of sleeping bodies in front of the Catholic storefront mission. Five years ago there had been three homeless centers in New Orleans; now there were more than twenty, some as small as the home of a nun who had opened her doors. The mayor had wanted to close the Canal Street and French Quarter missions down before the convention to clean the streets of the homeless who congregated on the nearby sidewalks and parking lots, turned out of the centers during the day and waiting for them to reopen at dusk. But a
New York Times
reporter had gotten wind of it and done a story that forced the Republican National Committee to contribute to various homeless charities. A vet who had been homeless but managed to get back on his feet was speaking on the second night of the convention. We had wanted a single mother, but Armstrong George's people had balked, and a vet was the compromise. It was amazing what you could fight over at a convention.

Outside the Superdome, gray NOPD buses were pulling up, discharging sleepy-looking uniformed cops. They were assembling in squads, waiting for their sergeants to brief them. Even with my all-access pass it took fifteen minutes to work my way inside the Dome. I couldn't believe what I was seeing—a second cordon of security was being erected inside the already-tight security. This was a disaster. For months I'd studied the layout of the convention floor, poring over diagrams with Eddie, looking for every way to maximize our chances in a floor fight. We knew exactly how many feet it was from our command trailer to every delegation's spot on the floor. We knew which aisles were most likely to be crowded and had alternative routes mapped: if center aisle C was blocked with a floor demonstration, the fastest way to the Maine delegation was around the CBS trailer, past the visitors' locker room, through the floor to the left of the stage, and down side aisle F-6 to F-7. Approximate time of travel: four and a half minutes. One of Eddie's hotshot digital team had made us an app we could use to time exactly how long it would take to get from any point in the convention hall to another, given the current crowd conditions. It was the sort of thing that campaigns did to convince themselves they had an edge. Sometimes it was even true.

Blindfold me and I still could have moved around without a problem on the convention floor. And always, in every diagram, planning session, mock-up, and app, there was one security perimeter with the new bomb-scan devices at each door, twenty-two security stations in all. Now there would be a second interior security border, a smaller, concentric circle through which everyone would be funneled. I quickly worked the numbers: 2,472 delegates, 2,400 alternates with floor passes, 2,100 journalists, 3,000 staff, another 2,000 or so assorted families and friends, odd hangers-on, contributors. All of these people herded through two security levels. It was going to be a train wreck.

The worst thing about the added security was the inevitable feeling of paranoia it would create with the delegates. More security, more guards with guns: this was hardly an environment that helped a do-good healer like Hilda Smith. To believe in Hilda you had to be convinced that the country needed a president to appeal to our Better Angels. That was her pitch, when you really came down to it. She was hope against fear. Armstrong George was the fear candidate, and right now, watching the most intense security in the history of presidential conventions going up on the floor of the Superdome, you had to believe that fear was looking a hell of a lot better than hope.

I stepped out of the tunnel onto the convention floor. Dozens of workers were still erecting the high-definition television screens behind the stage. I felt like an athlete walking onto the empty Super Bowl field hours before the game began. It was the kind of vainglorious image that I liked—star athlete, hero. Even a gunslinger headed toward high noon was okay. Anything but a beat-up political hack who was trying to drag a wounded candidate over the line. Out on the convention floor, sleepy workers were just starting to set up chairs. I closed my eyes and pictured the scene: state chairmen screaming into iPhones, the desperate promises, the deals, the lies, the threats. All that emotion jammed into seventy-two hours. It would be brutal and wonderful, and, with a little luck, I would show the world that J. D. Callahan was back—so I could get out.