Chapter 131: Campaigning

Friday, we all flew out to Shawnee, including Stormy, where we were met by Frank Keating, who traveled with us to Springboro. It was a mutual love fest, with Frank thanking me for saving his citizens and me thanking Frank for his inspired leadership and help during the crisis. We started at the school, now being rebuilt, and toured the town, and then met with the Torquists. Along the way I said wonderful things about Springboro and Oklahoma, and whatever it was they did there. I gathered it was either farming or ranching, neither of which I knew crap about. I made a few jokes about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, and everybody seemed to think that was amusing. I also had Marilyn write out several donations to the fire department, the ambulance squad, the school, and so forth. Doctor Shooster showed up, so we wrote out a check to the hospital as well. Leaving aside the wear and tear on me, being in a catastrophe was expensive!

The most amusing part was when we got to sit down with the Torquists for a bit. They were staying with her sister, Anna Simpson, while their house was demolished and then rebuilt. Mrs. Torquist seemed to be in good spirits, though she was wearing enough bandages to cover the state and wasn’t walking yet. Her husband, a truck driver for J.B. Hunt, was effusive in his praise, and kept shaking my hand. Little Molly didn’t really remember me, but Billy asked all sorts of questions and then told me that after I went to the hospital, in the ensuing publicity, he was able to find homes for all three of the other puppies!

I looked over at Frank and said, “Either he’s going to end up taking our jobs, or he’s going to be a used car salesman!”

“Some days there’s not much difference!” he replied. I nodded agreement.

I asked Sylvie Torquist about Stormy’s parentage. The critter was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was wondering where it would stop! Marilyn and I listened in horrified fascination. Mama, who I had hoisted out of the basement, was mostly Golden Retriever, but an Irish Wolfhound had snuck in somewhere down the line. Papa was the St. Bernard next door, who had managed to jump the fence and find true love. I looked at my wife and remarked, “This thing is going to grow up bigger than you and me! Combined!”

“She’s going to end up in the bed and we’re going to be in the doghouse!” Marilyn replied. Our daughters thought this was a great idea!

After our trip to the heartland, Marilyn and the girls flew home with Stormy, and I headed to Florida in a leased 737, which we had to travel to Oklahoma City to catch. The plane was packed, with a staff that seemed to grow by the day, and with many more reporters than before the tornado. The staff now included Frank Stouffer and Matt Scully, assigned to me as speechwriter and ‘liaison’ to George Bush; the reporters were all hoping to see me get killed doing something newsworthy.

They were also hoping for me to mouth off about something. Ever since the tornado, for about the last two weeks, the Gore campaign had been laying off me. It’s real hard to campaign against a guy fighting for his life in the hospital after rescuing puppies. They had been laying low, reduced to de rigueur prayers for my recovery and praise for the rescue. Now that I was well enough to campaign again, I was fair game!

Before the plane had even lifted off, I was being slammed for my hard-line debt reduction push. I was a heartless billionaire who was throwing widows and orphans off of welfare and shutting down Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I had also managed to do all these horrible deeds while raising taxes on hard-working middle-class Americans. Why I was running as George Bush’s Vice-Presidential choice was a mystery unless it was symbolic of the fact that George Bush himself deserved to be burned on the same bonfire that I had so richly earned.

None of this was unexpected. It was pretty much standard operating procedure for a modern political campaign. We managed to return the favor. Even comments like the ones I had made about chocolate milk and cows were ‘milked’, to show how out of touch I was to the voters in the heartland. They would compare me to Al Gore, who grew up on a farm in Tennessee. The truth was that Al Gore was the son of an extremely wealthy father, Al Gore, Sr., a Tennessee Congressman and Senator. He had been born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row. He knew even less about farming than I did!

The convention gave a serious boost to George Bush’s poll numbers. I had made the cover of both Time and Newsweek after I was announced as his running mate, with major bio pieces on the inside. They also ran small pictures of me along with the Springboro devastation, and pictures of both George and I on the cover during the convention. I knew it wouldn’t last, though. As soon as Al Gore made his selection, they would be all over the news.

Meanwhile, I was living proof of the adage ‘protect me from my friends; I could take care of my enemies.’ Rush Limbaugh was slamming me with complaints that I wasn’t conservative enough. I was much too liberal; I was pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-gun rights, anti-church. In short, I wasn’t a real Republican. I wondered where he was getting some of this stuff. My pro-choice stance was well known, and I had never hidden it. The anti-gun rights bit was a convoluted take on my passage of the Defending the Second Amendment Act, where I had agreed to restrictions on magazine sizes, even though I had managed to increase concealed carry privileges across the country. I wasn’t sure about the anti-church claim; no, I didn’t go to a Protestant church, but my wife and children were active members of the Catholic church, and I occasionally went with them to Mass. Being Catholic was not a big seller in the heartland, but it was a long time since Kennedy had had to address it, and Marilyn wasn’t running for office.

The pro-gay stuff wasn’t a real surprise to me. That had been dogging me for a few years now since I had voted against the Defense of Marriage Act back in 1996. The homophobes had decided we needed to do something about the wave of gay marriages inundating the God-fearing Christians of our great nation, so they passed a law stating that only straights could marry. It would ultimately be found unconstitutional. I had been the only straight Republican in the entire Congress to vote against it, which had not endeared me to Newt. My argument was on a purely constitutional basis. States have the power to regulate marriage, not the Feds. Some states would end up allowing it, and some would ban it. I simply reiterated my position that marriage is up to the states, not the Federal government.

This didn’t sit well with the true believers on our side. Worse to come was when I got a call from Marty Adrianopolis in the office in Rayburn. I was in a motel room in Santa Fe when he called. “Hey, Marty, what’s up?”

“I’ve got reporters around here sniffing around the place. It would seem that Carter Braxton isn’t as far in the closet as he thinks he is.”

“Tell me something I didn’t already know.” Carter Braxton was my Assistant Legislative Director and was quite good at it. He was also gay and hiding it. He hid it pretty well, too, but both Marty and I had been dinged by our gay-dar. I talked it over with Marty and we basically shrugged. It wasn’t our business and Carter was a good staffer. Our biggest question to each other was how come Carter was a Republican, when the party basically wanted to have him tarred and feathered.

“Yeah, well, he’s freaking out. He has reporters following him around. Limbaugh outed him today and the phones have been ringing off the hook. He had never told his parents.”

“Great! This is 2000, not 1950. It’s not illegal,” I replied.

“So, what do you want to do about this?” he asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“Rove’s office called, and they want us to cut him loose. Come up with some bogus reason but cut him loose and get rid of ‘the little faggot.’ Their words, not mine.”

I rolled my eyes at that. “Screw that. Carter has enough problems now. I do that and I play straight into the hands of Al Gore. Tell Carter he’s safe. I’ll tell him he’s safe.”

“He’s not here. I sent him home.”

“Have him call me tomorrow morning. I’ll tell him.”

I was hit with this in the morning before I even had a chance to talk to Carter. “Congressman, is it true you are planning on firing one of your key Congressional staff members because he is gay?”

Good question! If I say yes, I look hypocritical, and the Democrats rake me over the coals. If I say no, the hard-core Evangelicals in the Republican Party have ‘proof’ I’m not really one of them. It was time to play that most trusted of cards - always answer a hostile question with another question. I gave him my most confused look. “Excuse me? Has one of my staff members been accused of a crime?”

“Are you claiming that being gay is a crime?”

“Do you think it’s a crime?”

“So, what about the demands from Rush Limbaugh that you fire Carter Braxton?” asked somebody else.

“Is that who this is about? Carter Braxton? He’s on my legislative staff. What’s he done?” I asked innocently.

“Are you claiming that you weren’t aware Carter Braxton was a homosexual?” asked a third voice.

I shrugged. “Is that something I should be finding out about my staff?”

“So, you aren’t going to do something about this?”

“What do you want me to do?”

I just kept up the dumb question routine and let them blather on. Later that morning I talked to Carter and told him he wasn’t being fired. Fox News wasn’t amused, but I just didn’t care. George couldn’t repudiate my actions either, without painting himself into the same corner.

That made me wonder about the whole event. I wouldn’t put it past Rove to throw me under a bus, but in doing so he put Bush at risk. Cheney wasn’t going to make a stink, not when one of his daughters was a lesbian. This was shaping up to be a close election. Screwing me over prior to the election didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Likewise, it was too easy for a campaign stunt like outing a staffer to backfire if it had been done by the Gore campaign. It was more likely that this was the random investigation of the millions of reporters currently investigating me.

I was now being publicly vetted at a level beyond anything I had ever contemplated during my public life up to this point. Huge sums were being spent to find any conceivable snippet of information about the candidates. My classmates at every school I had ever attended were being tracked down and interviewed, to see if they remembered me. Every speech and vote was being examined by partisan reporters from both sides. Everybody I had ever done business with, from coast to coast, was being interviewed, and every deal was being put under a microscope.

Some of the problems we had were self-inflicted. One of the Bush campaign’s bullet points was that George Bush was a businessman and knew how to run the country like a business. Never mind that countries and companies are two different things. Now they had me as another successful businessman. One of my handlers opened his fat yap and said that as a businessman I had invested in companies to increase jobs in America. I remembered how that had bit Mitt Romney in the ass. All it would take was a single company to report that they had laid off a single worker to put some serious hurt on the campaign.

I grabbed Matt Scully and pulled him aside. “Shut that asshole up! He is going to bury us!”

“What is the problem, Congressman? We are pushing your success as a businessman. This plays to that perfectly!”

“This is a disaster. Just follow my lead on this and tell him to knock it off!”

At the next question and answer period, I was asked, “Congressman, is it true that you only invested in companies that were hiring American workers?”

I gave a wry smile but shook my head negatively. “I think that statement is a bit of a misrepresentation of what actually happened. I invested in companies to make money for my shareholders and investors. While I certainly hoped that I was creating new jobs, that wasn’t my only concern. I had a legal duty to maximize returns on investment, not jobs. I was pretty successful at that.”

I could see the others staring at each other. There were all sorts of wonderful ways to use this to try and sink me. How dare I say that creating jobs wasn’t a politician’s primary purpose! The fact that I wasn’t a politician at the time meant nothing! A worse case, however, would be trying to have it both ways, which had really fucked over Romney. In this case I had to stick to a single and solitary message, I was in the money business back in the Eighties, not the political business. I left it to Matt to come up with better ways to tell that message.

The Democratic Convention was held two weeks after the Republican Convention and took place in Los Angeles. Al Gore kept his selection secret until the second night of the convention, when Joe Lieberman nominated John Kerry as Vice Presidential nominee, and put it to a voice vote. I was watching the entire event on television and was simply stunned into silence. The others in the room noticed my staring at the television, and I waved them into silence. I needed to think!

On my first trip through, Gore had selected Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his VP pick. Lieberman was noticeable for three separate facts. He was considerably more conservative than Gore, he was the first Jewish candidate for national office, and he was quite possibly the only potential choice even less exciting than Gore. Now, everything had changed.