Chapter 166: Lame Duck

2006-2007

It took me the better part of a month to get to a point where I really felt back to my old self, and even then, I knew I was lying. The therapists had me doing exercise and lifting some light weights to rebuild torn muscle tissue in my right side and taking a lot of long walks and some laps in the pool to rebuild my stamina. With my shitty knee, long walks were a real problem! One of the things I did was talk to Doctor Tubb about getting a knee replacement. He wouldn’t do the work, but he could at least let me know the questions to ask a specialist. We brought one in, quietly, and had a long talk. The answer wasn’t a happy one, as far as my job was concerned. Yes, I was a candidate, and the surgery and follow-up care were relatively straightforward. However, the big problem was going to be post-operative. I was in for at least several weeks of hospitalization followed by several more months of physical therapy. It would make the fun and games with getting shot seem simple. I decided to hold off. In just over two years I would be out of a job anyway. I could do it from the unemployment line.

Once I was up and around, we had a number of awards ceremonies. Most were for the heroes from the Kurdish War, and I awarded a lot of medals as I visited their home bases. Unlike television, where the President shows up five minutes after the battle and hands out a medal, in the real world there is a ton of paperwork and review. I gave the Presidential Unit Citation to the 82^nd, the 101^st, the 1^st Brigade, and the 2^nd Strykers. There were a shitload of Purple Hearts, a number of Bronze Stars, a few Silver Stars, several Distinguished Flying Crosses, one Distinguished Service Cross, and two Medals of Honor. Too many of the medals were awarded posthumously, including both Medals of Honor, which went to a corporal and a lieutenant in the 82^nd for service in the Azwya Valley. Also awarded posthumously was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I gave to Bismarck Myrick, for his service leading up to the war. The most painful to me was when the mother of 1^st Lieutenant Martin Stevens, one of the Medal of Honor recipients, told me that her son, Marty, had been one of the members of the West Point football team that I had eaten cold MREs with after that ridiculous bet, and she said he had been so proud to meet me and talk to me.

Afterwards I simply went into a private office and cried. God, but there were times I hated this fucking job.

A different award ceremony was much happier. I gave the Secret Service’s Award of Valor to John McEnrole, the agent who got between me and the bullet which did a through-and-through on his arm, and a Baltimore City Police Medal of Honor to William Hopper, the police sergeant who grabbed Mooradian and took him down, while still taking two rounds to the chest. We did a very nice ceremony back at the Meyerhoff, under very high security.

One thing the shooting had done was to totally screw up my plans to campaign for Republican candidates during the last part of the 2006 mid-term elections. Marilyn and the doctors wouldn’t even let me get out of the White House until the beginning of October, which only left me about five weeks to help. On the plus side, I had pretty good approval ratings. The Kurdish War had been successful and had boosted me to the low 80s. I had dropped as soon as it was over, and people understood some of the budget problems it had caused but getting shot had boosted me back to the low 70s. (Nothing like almost getting killed to make you popular. Try it sometime and find out!)

Still, I managed a campaign swing every weekend through the remainder of the election season. I would fly into a town on Friday night, meet the Congressman or candidate, and give a speech and attend a fundraiser. Saturday morning, I would travel to a nearby district and repeat the process through lunch, and then on to another district in the evening. Maybe I would try to help a Senator in a tight race. Sunday we might fly someplace else, and repeat the process, and then fly home Sunday night, late. It was quite exhausting, and by the end of the season I was worn down to a nub. I had lost at least ten pounds during my hospital stay, had only regained some of it after I got out, and then lost another ten during the election. I needed a vacation. I told my staff that I intended to lay low over the winter and build up my strength and stamina.

Unfortunately, as President, you really don’t get a vacation. Never mind the fact that everybody and their brother is constantly coming to you so that you can fix their problems. No, the biggest issue is that it is politically a bad idea to take a vacation if you are the President. People want to know who the hell he thinks he is, taking time off at government expense, to fuck around! It doesn’t matter that the expense is come out of my pocket. I am obviously goofing off on their tax dollars! I need to stay in Washington, at my desk in the Oval Office, working twenty-four hours a day, and I should pay the government back for the time I wasted going to the bathroom!

There were actually reporters who counted the days you took off and reported them, and not to your benefit. One report, which made it onto MSNBC, showed that I had spent 107 days in 2005 on vacation. When Will Brucis told me that, everybody on the staff was completely mystified. The best that anybody could figure out was that they were counting any day that I was not physically present in Washington for a complete twenty-four hours as a vacation day. In other words, if I took Marine One to Hereford on Friday night, and then flew back at the crack of dawn on Monday morning, that counted as four days of vacation. Even that didn’t account for everything, so we were rather confused. Will tried to get the network to detail what days they were counting, but they refused, citing freedom of the press. Fox and CNN, in a pleasant little bout of commercial rivalry, looked at the travel logs and came up with a vastly lower number, on the order of about twenty that year, including a week at Hougomont, another week in the backyard in Hereford, and four days in Ireland following the G-8 summit in Scotland. MSNBC never retracted their story, but they did stop pushing it.

The Irish vacation was one of the better ones we took. We were staying at a very nice and very private hunting lodge in County Cork, not that either Marilyn or I ever hunted. No press was invited or allowed on the grounds, but the day we left the G-8 summit some reporter asked what we planned to do. My first thoughts were to say something rude and unprintable, and Marilyn knew it, so she laughed and wagged her finger at me, telling me to behave. Instead, I laughed and made a joke about doing quality control inspections of Irish distilleries. Some smart fellow over at John Jameson must have heard the interview, because the next day, right after we woke up, one of our Secret Service agents asked us about our plan to visit the John Jameson distillery in Cork. Marilyn and I gave him confused looks, and he told us the invitation had come in that morning, and then chided us on changing the schedule without their knowledge. I promised Marilyn, I would take her on a tour of a rum distillery if she went along with this, and we did a distillery tour. I did quality control checks on I don’t remember how many different samples and got pleasantly snockered with some of the John Jameson execs, and then took several cases back home of some very select whiskies that don’t make it to the stores. Good trip!

Since I had become President, I had only been to Hougomont four times. It is just politically lousy to be known for owning an ‘estate’ or a ‘vacation resort’ in a foreign country. It hadn’t been sitting empty, however, because I used it frequently to give staffers a nice vacation, and Congressmen and Senators (and their staffers) could be reliably counted upon to be bribed with a nice vacation there as well. It pays to be wealthy. In 2007, during the winter Congressional recess, I planned to make a ‘national security inspection’ into a vacation. We had some big military bases in Guam, and I was told it had some lovely beaches. Marilyn and I decided to find out.

The election results on the morning of November 8 turned out to be pretty much the same thing we had on the morning of November 7. The Democrats had a thin majority in the Senate and the Republicans had a slender but significant lead in the House. All that had been accomplished by the expenditure of several billion dollars was that they rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real winners were the lobbyists on K Street. The real political discussion from here on out was going to be the 2008 Presidential race, and the fact that I was now a ‘lame duck’ and unable to accomplish much more during my time in office.

Well, screw that! I had maybe one more year of being able to accomplish anything in this town. 2007 was going to be the last year anything would get done. 2008 was going to be an election year, and a big one. It was time for a new President, and the Democrats would be all over it, and even with my backing and the incumbency of the Vice Presidency, John McCain was going to face a primary challenge. If I wanted to do anything, it would have to be in the next twelve to fourteen months.

Certain things were going to pretty much handle themselves. We had won Kurdistan, and the next few years there would be some consolidation. By reacting to the chemical warfare, but not invading Iraq, we had shown a lot of ‘moral leadership’ around the world and in the Middle East. Winning the peace was going to be a slog, and expensive, but straightforward. Come to terms with the new Iraqi leaders, keep the peace going between the Turks and the Kurds, and try not to get too big for our britches. I knew there would be calls that we use our military strength to face down Iran and make them behave. That would simply be disastrous. We had a military that was second to none in killing people and breaking shit, and generally worthless when it came to keeping the peace or nation building.

The Kurds did authorize a standing military force and basing rights, which the Pentagon eagerly dropped on my desk. They had plans to station a couple of heavy armored brigades and a fighter wing there. I shot that down as being too big and expensive. They grumbled, but I did sign off on a composite brigade and some military infrastructure projects. Tom Ridge told me that was what they wanted all along. The composite brigade would combine a heavy armored battalion, a Stryker battalion, and an airmobile infantry battalion, along with some engineering and logistical support elements. In command of this composite brigade was freshly minted Brigadier General Buford, now sporting a nice and shiny Distinguished Service Medal (which is not the same thing as the DSC, which is a combat medal) for coming up with the ops plan for Kurdish Dragon. He was young for the rank, and I suspected he was a rising star. We also coughed up some cash to do some infrastructure upgrades at Incirlik, with the Turks. Depending on circumstances, I could see making one more Middle Eastern trip before I was out of office, to touch bases with the Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and Israelis.

We also had a major training element with the mission, training and building up the Peshmerga as a regular infantry army. They were still a light infantry force, but they were going to have access to some captured T-72s and APCs. Several Western arms firms had an interesting trick where they would take crappy Soviet era equipment and refurbish it. They could take a T-72, yank out the Russian diesel engine and put in a decent German version, rip out all the electronics and fire control systems and put in American or British, chuck the Iraqi-made ammo and get much better quality Western versions, take off the appliqué reactive armor and bolt on some nice Israeli upgrades, and any number of other things. You end up with a tank that was two or three times the quality of what you started out with, for a fraction of the price. It was still a T-72, but it could take on any other T-72 in the world and probably beat it. (Western gear could still blow it away without getting a scratch.) Elsewhere around the world, similar events were taking place where Western firms would rebuild Soviet planes like MiG-21s and -23s and Hind helicopters, taking basically decent airframes, gutting them, and rebuilding them as decent gear at a reasonable price. The Russians hated us for it, since it really showed how shitty their equipment really was. We generally thumbed our nose at them.

In November, Marilyn and I flew back to Forward Operating Base Thunderbolt to share Thanksgiving dinner with the troops still on duty in Kurdistan. We were at peace, but it was a watchful peace, where you patrolled the border with your weapons locked and cocked. The 82^nd, 2^nd Strykers, and 1^st Brigade had all been sent home, but the 101^st was still patrolling the new border, and the British 7 ^th Armored was based in Erbil as an armored backup. General Buford’s 47^th Brigade Combat Team was still being created and hadn’t shipped in yet, but was scheduled for some time around February, at which time the 101^st and the 7^th would transfer back out.

Marilyn and I flew from Andrews to Aviano, Italy, on the regular Air Force One, the 747. Erbil was still too small to handle something that needed such a long runway, so this time we transferred to a cleaned up ‘VIP’ version of a C-17 for the flight to Erbil. Marilyn commented that it was a lot quieter than our last flight in and out, and I just smiled at that.

This was not a ‘state visit’ type of flight. The 101^st was not going to have the band playing, and there wasn’t going to be a lot of pomp and flash. I did expect to meet President Barzani, as well as the commanders of the 101^st and 7^th, and there were going to be reporters along and already present and set up for the landing. (That was in case we went down in flaming wreckage on the final approach; the reporters were all looking forward to that!) Mostly, though, it was to simply sit down with the troops in a combat zone and share dinner. We would be gone the next morning.

We actually had two dinners with everybody. The first was at Thunderbolt in Erbil, and of course we invited the Kurds and the British to join in. The Kurds weren’t quite sure what to make of this strange American ritual, but we made sure to have plenty of extras, and President Barzani and his family joined us, along with any Peshmerga who happened to be around. As soon as we were done, however, Marilyn and I hopped into a Blackhawk and flew with a flight of Blackhawks and Chinooks carrying food down to a base south of Kirkuk, where one of the 101^st’s battalions was deployed. This was a fair bit rougher than back at HQ, but a good hot meal of turkey and stuffing was greeted with some real appreciation.

As always, you end up with two sets of conversations, one with the officers and commanders, and one with the troops. When you are talking to the commanders, it’s always discussions of the overall objectives, liberally laced with ‘What do you need me to do to make this work?’ With the troops it’s always personal stuff - ‘How’s the food?’, ‘Getting your mail?’, ‘Are you able to call home?’, and the like. Late November in Kurdistan gets nippy, so I asked about the weather and how they were holding up and patrolling, that sort of thing. I had been in their shoes once, and I cared; not all politicians do, and the troops can tell the difference.

I refrained from a lot of speechifying during the visit, but I did make sure I thanked everybody. I did this before the meal.

“I’ve been where you guys are. I’ve missed holidays and birthdays and anniversaries because I had the duty, or I was on alert. My son was born while I was deployed to Honduras, and my wife...” (I pointed over at Marilyn.) “ ... wasn’t too happy about that. So, I thank you for what you are doing. I wouldn’t ask this of you unless it was important, but I do ask you, because it is important. It has been said that we sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to fight those who would harm us. Today, you are those rough men, and I thank you, and your nation thanks you for the protection you provide.”

Both times I spoke I received a standing ovation from the troops. Great kids. How many had died because of the orders I gave them?

I had a few more Cabinet replacements coming up. Tom Ridge in Defense had had enough, and was leaving; He suggested Robert Gates, who had been a big wig in the CIA under Bush 41 and Reagan and seemed a good choice. I sort of remembered him from my first trip through. Also leaving the Cabinet was Paul O’Neill, who had been Treasury Secretary for six years. I decided to ignore all the various suggestions and I plucked a woman named Elizabeth Warren from the depths of the FDIC. There were howls of protest at this, since she was an academic and pro-regulatory, and worst of all, a Democrat! It wasn’t unusual to have somebody from the other party in the Cabinet, but they were almost always in the who-gives-a-shit areas, like Commerce or Interior or Veterans Affairs. It shows you are fair and bipartisan, without having to put up with them telling you what to do. It is quite unusual to name one to the Core Four.

The one thing I didn’t want was a repeat of my first life, where one Goldman Sachs partner after another ran Treasury like it was a piggy bank for investment bankers. Those guys made Bonnie and Clyde look good by comparison! I managed to ram her name through the Senate, despite a rather rancorous confirmation process. Her fellow Dems loved her, but the Republicans didn’t, and everybody was worried that she would screw up their cozy relations with the finance industry. I smiled and told her to lie through her teeth as necessary, and then once she was in, to rampage through them as needed. That cozy relationship was more than a little too cozy. I wanted the finance industry clamped down on, hard, and I wanted names for every open regulatory slot who would go along with that.

I also was privately pushing the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, to tighten up on every banking regulation he could get his fingers on. When Greenspan had retired in 2006, I had named Bernanke as the Chairman, mostly out of a lack of anybody else I felt comfortable with. He was both an academic and a member of the Federal Reserve Board when I named him. With Congress constantly wrangling and generally bought and paid for by both K Street and Wall Street, I wanted as much financial regulation rammed back into the system as I could manage without getting Congress involved. I also gave both Bernanke and Warren standing orders to slow down the housing bubble, and ignore whatever Congress wanted to do with that mess.

That wasn’t the end of it, however. Harry Reid and the Democrats were still busting my nuts by delaying confirmation hearings on any number of appointed officials. Most of the governmental agencies that regulate the financial markets all had bosses that needed to be confirmed by the Senate. This included the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and so forth. Some of the seats had been empty for a year or more. I had a list of two dozen names ready to go.

I made a preemptive move. After it became obvious that the Congress that would return was the same as the one we had, I called a meeting at the White House of the leaders of the Senate, and of the Finance and Banking Committees, both Republican and Democratic. The Dems wanted to bust my nuts and the Republicans wanted more influence than the Dems would give them, and nobody wanted to piss off the financial firms who flooded their campaign coffers with cash. Nobody wanted to fill these positions; they really wanted them to go away so that we could have unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which is what the financial firms dreamed about.

Screw that idea! I laid out the game rules to the Senate leaders. Here is my list of candidates. There are just as many Democrats as Republicans listed, which in many cases was required by law. They have extensive experience and have been properly vetted, and most of these names are well known to you already. Pick two, any two, you don’t like, and I’ll withdraw them. Otherwise, I expected confirmation hearings to begin before the end of the session, and I expected them to be approved. If you didn’t like that, I would wait until after the Senate reconvened in January, and during the first available recess would name them all as recess appointments.

There was a lot of squawking at this! How dare I usurp the power and privilege of the United States Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body! My God, I was a dictator in the mold of Stalin and Hitler! I let them rant, and then stood up and smiled. “You heard me. Pick two. I don’t care if you flip coins. The rest get approved by the end of the year, and I don’t care if you have to run the confirmation hearings by candlelight in the wee dawn hours! Frank will stay here to let me know your plans. Otherwise, watch me on television in January. I’ve done it before and, by God, I’ll do it again!” I left the room.

Secretly I had given Frank the authority to raise the limit from two candidates to three, but that still left almost two dozen appointees. He came back to my office two hours later grumbling and exhausted, but the Senate had caved in. At that moment I was a hell of a lot more popular with the American public than Congress was. Frank let the three candidates know they weren’t going to be confirmed.

Lame duck, my ass!

One major legislative push I had planned was more infrastructure investment. I didn’t expect this to be a problem, though. In 2002 I had rammed through several major spending bills on infrastructure as part of my first year in office. I had wrapped them in the mantle of GWB’s martyrdom as cynically as possible, and they all passed. A few them, however, were five-year bills, so 2007 was when we had to let them die or renew them. I wasn’t just going to renew them, I was going to expand them, and just like in 2002, they were going to get a prominent mention in the next State of the Union Address. I expected more of a fight, simply because George was now cold and forgotten, President for only eight months, and I couldn’t wave that flag anymore. I simply told Matt and Marc to start typing and figure out a different approach.