Chapter 147: State of the Union

Tuesday, January 29, 2002

I was right, of course. It was going to get worse, a lot worse! By Sunday night, everybody in the White House, and seemingly half of Congress, knew about ‘The Carl Buckman Experience.’ All week, CBS was running blips and teasers from the interview, and I knew that little segment was going to be a big piece of it.

Ari was a little more even on it, surprisingly. Yes, it was going to be a bit embarrassing (A bit? You think?) but was it really that bad a thing to be known as a great lover? I just groaned at that. I began getting grief about it well before the broadcast, because somebody from CBS got in touch with Marty Adrianopolis and asked him about the party where Marilyn and I met. Then he was asked if he had ever heard about the Carl Buckman Experience. I gather they didn’t get a great interview because he was laughing too hard to answer the questions. Afterwards he called me and gave me a major ration of shit on the whole thing.

I went home that weekend to watch it. Sunday night the special ran from 8:00 to 10:00, and even before the show was over the phone was ringing off the hook. At one point I had Tusker on my cell phone, Suzie on the house phone, and Tessa on Marilyn’s cell phone. Meanwhile the girls were on both their phones. Marilyn was laughing and the girls were making gagging noises. Tusker told me I deserved whatever happened to me. What a friend!

The Monday morning press briefing was a lengthy and hilarious exercise in futility. Ari ordered me, under pain of arrest by the Secret Service, not to be anywhere near the Press Room, and the agent nearest me damn neared died laughing. Ari got hit with all sorts of questions and could barely keep a straight face throughout it. He was hit with the expected questions about what the ‘Experience’ involved (“You’ll need to ask the First Lady that one.”) along with questions about whether the White House was getting complaints about how I played with Stormy (“Yes.”) Some fellow out in LA named Cesar Millan was calling himself the Dog Whisperer and was telling people how bad I was at raising a dog. PETA tried to organize a protest out in front of the White House.

The list of complaints was endless. Native Americans, anti-immigration groups, and pro-immigration groups began arguing about the melting pot and whether I was a racist - somebody took the comment about ‘ Heaven only knows what our kids will end up dragging home someday!’ as somehow insensitive and racist. Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained about underage drinking (“It wasn’t underage in 1974.” - that went nowhere!) Donald Wildmon, a preacher who ran a ‘family values’ group complained about my lewd and lascivious behavior and ran down fraternities as houses full of drunken hooligans! (Ari’s response? “I asked the President about that, and he told me that was why he joined!”) Drug companies were complaining that since I wasn’t an expert in psychology, I obviously didn’t know how wonderful their pills were. It seemed as if I had spent the entire two hours offending the entire nation.

Meanwhile, the late-night comics had been granted a gift from the gods! On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart ran an experiment setting booze on fire (He did two flaming shots, like I had done. His judgment? “Holy [bleeped.] He’s one tough son of a [bleeped!]”) One night he put Stephen Colbert in a dog suit and labeled him their ‘Senior Canine Correspondent’. Leno brought out Santa Claus and a couple of good-looking actresses in sexy elf costumes; Santa put me on the Naughty list, while the elves put me on the Nice list. Letterman made the Experience a Top 10 List, straight from the home office in Omaha, Nebraska.

It culminated on Saturday, December 22. Saturday Night Live started the show with the Carl Buckman Experience. Forget Santa Clause! They had a Christmas present from the President of the United States! Darrell Hammond was the designated Carl Buckman impersonator. He had already done Bill Clinton, and Will Farrell had been doing George Bush. Darrell was the closest to looking like me, I guess, if he put some sort of skull cap on with thinning hair. He had done a few bits on me, but hadn’t been too tough, since 9-11 was only a few months ago, and it was too raw to make fun of me bombing the Afghans in response. There had been one segment of me firing everybody I met one day, done shortly after I got rid of Dick Cheney.

The show opened in a replica of the Oval Office. It was late and ‘I’ was meeting with Tina Fey. I was behind my desk, and she was sitting in front of it, playing the part of a Congresswoman. I was arguing for her to support my position, while she was refusing to support me.

Darrell: “What can I do get you to support the bill, Congresswoman?”

Tina: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I just can’t do it.”

Darrell: “Nothing at all? Are you sure?”

Tina: “My mind is made up, sir.”

Darrell: “This is critical, Congresswoman!”

Tina: “No, Mister President, I won’t change my mind!”

Darrell: “Then I have no other choice. You’ll just have to receive the Carl Buckman Experience!”

With that a large red button rose magically up through the desk. He pushed it, and suddenly the lights began to dim. Overhead speakers dropped down and “Love Is In The Air” began to play. A disco ball dropped down and colored lights began sparkling. A Murphy bed dropped down from the wall. Darrell stood up from behind the desk, and it was apparent he had been sitting there in boxer shorts with hearts on them.

The camera began to pull back, moving backwards through an open door flanked by two ‘Secret Service agents’ who closed the door and stood there stone-faced. From behind the door could be heard loud sounds of passion. After about thirty seconds the door opened and Tina Fey came through, her hair messed up and her lipstick smudged, her blouse half buttoned, and carrying her high heels in her hands. She was panting, and gasping out, “You have my vote, President Buckman, but first ... LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!”

Marilyn was dying of laughter while this was going on. We didn’t normally watch the show, but I knew something was bound to happen. The next morning the Sunday morning talk shows made hay out of this. John Boehner, who was on ostensibly to talk about the Airline Safety and Security Act and was known to be a friend of mine, was asked if he knew about the Experience and if it had ever been necessary for me to use it. He just started laughing and said, “Not with me! Maybe you should ask one of the lady Congressmen or Senators.” Barney Frank, the openly gay Massachusetts Congressman who was talking on another show about financial reform, reported that I wasn’t his type in any case, and they needed to ask some of the ladies on Capitol Hill. Finally, Frank Stouffer, who was appearing on behalf of the airline bill, upon being questioned about it by Tim Russert, admitted that when Marilyn and I went on our next vacation the Oval Office was to be remodeled to include a disco ball and a Murphy bed.

Wonderful!

On the plus side, and it was the only plus side I could find, Marilyn’s reputation soared! She had come across as funny and loving and a good wife and mother. Most First Ladies have higher approval ratings than their husbands (except for Hillary) and Marilyn was going to be no different. By the time we left on our Christmas vacation, the networks were clamoring for interviews just with her.

The Christmas vacation was a disaster. One year ago, I had been a simple Congressman, the Vice President Elect. We had a Secret Service detachment, but it wasn’t too big, and we had used my Gulfstream, first to go to Utica and see Marilyn’s family and drop off the girls, and then to fly to Nassau. Nobody gave a shit. Now, one year later, I was the President of the United States of America, and they don’t just take vacations!

On Sunday, December 23, we flew in Air Force One to Griffiss Airport in Rome, New York. This was an old SAC base which had been shut down and was being considered to replace the Oneida County Airport in Oriskany. They sent a crew up there to reactivate the tower and runway ahead of time. No little visit this, I was greeted by the Governor of New York and the Mayor of Rome, despite my request that I didn’t need any formality. Then it was off in the limo to the Radisson in Utica, where I was greeted by the Mayor of Utica. WKTV covered both locations. We probably were renting out half the Radisson. We debated visiting Marilyn’s family at their home on the Parkway, but that would just be crazy. We dined on room service that night.

The next morning, Christmas Eve, we went over to the house. Security was over the top! It had snowed overnight, and some of our nephews decided to toss some snowballs at Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Carl; one agent began to reach for his gun and stopped in time to keep from shooting our relatives. That was just a sign of things to come. An advance team had come through and ordered everybody off the street, and somebody had complained to Harriet, who complained to Marilyn, who complained to me. Shit flows downhill, I guess. I ordered the Secret Service to lighten up. They simply were not set up to handle the giant family coming and going. We had agents patrolling around the yard, an agent at each door, checklists of who was invited ... one of our nieces decided to bring over her boyfriend and they almost didn’t let him in.

The only thing remotely amusing was that the Lieutenant Commander with the football parked himself in the downstairs family room, where he was found by some of the littlest kids. They found it fascinating that he had a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and the little girls promptly decided to have a tea party with him. I wandered through at one point to find him sitting in his shirtsleeves drinking fake tea with a pair of four-year-olds. I told him he was having more fun than I was.

It became too much. Nobody was enjoying themselves, and by mid-afternoon we apologized and went back to the Radisson. We managed to have dinner in the restaurant, which got us a lot of stares. By that time the Observer Dispatch had a reporter tailing us, too. After dinner we called Marilyn’s parents and apologized for the foolishness. We couldn’t put them through this! We passed the word to the 89^th and cut short our visit by a day. We dropped our daughters off with their grandparents, along with their detachment (a shitload smaller than ours!) and flew to the Bahamas on Christmas Day.

It was the first time we had been there as President and First Lady. I knew they had upgraded the security when I became the Vice President, and that must have been adequate. I didn’t see anything obvious about the changes, although we had more of a permanent staff. Also, the Coast Guard cutter off the beach had been replaced with an Arleigh Burke class destroyer. The Prime Minister greeted us at the airport, but we told him to go back to his family and then call us in a couple of days. He refused and insisted that we come by Government House in the morning and join him in watching the Junkanoo, the Boxing Day parade. We didn’t have a reason not to, so we agreed to visit and participate. We had seen the parade a few times over the years, but it was the first time we would see it with such an important guide. We also agreed to a small dinner and invited him and his wife to Hougomont in return.

I told Marilyn that next year we would stay home. This was simply too much.

Marilyn was still teasing me about the Carl Buckman Experience, so as soon as we got to Hougomont and were alone, I undressed her and tossed her clothing in the closet. All she was allowed to wear was a long silk robe. She protested some, but not too hard. The next morning, she did protest when I made her attend the Junkanoo commando style, in a long halter-topped sundress.

This turned out to be a remarkably short-lived idea. It turns out that even on vacation I am surrounded by advisers and people who have to see me right away. I had the National Intelligence Officer every morning with the Daily Brief, Deputy Chief of Staff Frank Stouffer, Deputy Communications Director (Ari had picked a guy from the Cato Institute to back him up) Will Brucis, Secret Service agents, and so forth. Marilyn tried hiding in the bedroom the first time somebody barged in, but after that she just laughed and got dressed while I grumbled. So much for romance, or any facsimile thereof.

We flew back to Washington New Year’s Day and spent the night on our own, and the next day the twins flew down on an Air Force C-20, a Gulfstream much like mine. It’s a damn good thing I’m rich. The rules are such that since it isn’t fair for the taxpayers to have to pay for the President’s vacations and travel, he has to pay for his trips - on Air Force One! However, if he can come up with any sort of excuse - giving a speech or ‘foreign relations’ or ‘fact finding’ - he doesn’t. That’s why, no matter where they go, Presidents always give a speech. As a result, every time I flew home to Hereford, or Marilyn and the girls flew around, I footed the bill. At least I didn’t have to pay for all the support personnel and Secret Service agents. Since they were all required by Federal law to accompany us, the taxpayers paid for them. As it was, I suspected that being the President was going to cost me a damn sight more than they paid me, and since my paycheck was going to the American Red Cross, the experience was going to cost me dearly.

And then it was back to work. My next big project was going to be the State of the Union Address. This was scheduled for Tuesday, January 29, which had already been selected by George Bush before his untimely demise. I could change it, since there is no specific Constitutional date for the Address. Theoretically I could have simply mailed it to them. The Constitution simply states that ‘ He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient. ‘ From Jefferson through Taft the Presidents simply sent a report to Congress and had a clerk read it into the record. Wilson revived the practice of making a speech, and I suspect if I tried to mail it in, I would probably be impeached.

In practice, the State of the Union is supposed to lay out for Congress and the public the President’s themes for legislative action through the coming year. In between the soaring rhetoric and grandiose pomposity, you need to highlight the various things you want to accomplish in the next twelve months. Some Addresses have worked out better over the years. Some Presidents used it as a grab bag, throwing all their plans into the hopper, stunning everybody with their overblown interests, most of which would be ignored or go down in flames. In the hyper partisan Clinton and Obama eras you occasionally had half the Congress standing and cheering while the other half sat there in stony silence or even heckled. By all accounts, the best Addresses were those in which you chose only three or four themes and hammered those alone.

The first theme was the easy one, at least in picking it out. It was only four months since the 9-11 attacks. People wanted to hear how I was going to personally hold their hands and protect them from evil. I needed to outline my plans to increase security and improve intelligence. In this I was outlining my plans for a new counterterrorism center (already under operation via an Executive Order) as well as mentioning the about-to-be completed report by the Three Amigos. We would also need to raise spending on preparedness and security, and at least change some priorities. Of course, none of this would affect civil liberties, or at least so I told people. In reality, probably somewhat. On the other hand, I didn’t want to say out loud what I was really thinking, that some fancy new weapons programs would need to be cut to pay for some of this. Congress might not like approving new weapons programs, but it hated cutting them, since the manufacturers would spread the subcontracting across as many Congressional districts as they could, and nobody wanted to be seen cutting jobs. Tom Ridge and I were going to have to sit down for this.

So, what was left? Defense was number one on the list, but what would be number two, or three, or four? Anything beyond that would be simply wishful thinking, and probably counterproductive. The only thing I could figure was along the lines that a strong defense required a strong economy. We were already heading into recession, much as I had pointed out with Paul O’Neill months ago. Unfortunately, the last thing you really want to do during a recession is get Congress involved. Recessions are part of the regular business cycle, boom and bust. It had been a few years since the last major correction, and we were due. Economists know it, businessmen don’t like it, politicians don’t understand it. What politicians understand are campaign contributions and votes. They understand that when donors and voters complain, they have to do something to show they are concerned and are fixing the problem.

As a rule, they almost always end up doing the wrong thing. Recessions are nature’s way of saying the economy was overheated, and now we are taking a breather. For instance, everything is going great guns, but wages are rising too fast and interest rates are getting too high. At some point the economy collapses, some people lose their jobs, and some companies go out of business, things calm down, interest rates and wages drop to a point where they make economic sense, and people get new jobs and new companies are formed. It’s painful, but it happens, and in general things will be better after than before. Every time a bubble collapses, there is a fundamental reason it failed. Meanwhile, there are certain things that can be done to alleviate the problem. The Federal Reserve can fiddle with interest rates and bank requirements and the money supply, and the Fed is quick to respond to problems. Congress, on the other hand, is anything but quick and is usually ham-handed when it does get involved. A typical response to a recession is that everybody hoots and hollers for six months before passing some sort of stimulus bill. Nine times out of ten, the stimulus is for the wrong part of the economy, and by the time it passes, the recession has peaked, and we are now stimulating a growing economy. The other typical choice Congress makes is to decide to cut spending just as the economy starts tanking normally, thereby aggravating the recession.

Now we were going into a recession. As such, there was no reason it would be a killer, but it would be uncomfortable, and there would be loud cries that we needed to do something. That was a given, and if I didn’t handle that, somebody in Congress would, and not necessarily to the betterment of the nation. Still, there are good ways to goose the economy with government spending and bad ways. One of the bad ways is to simply cut taxes or give people checks; the money is used to either pay off credit cards (debt reduction) or is spent buying things (consumption.) Debt reduction is a good thing, but generally is only temporary. Most of the consumption goes overseas, as payments on oil or finished products - does Wal-Mart sell anything made in America? Good ways to spend on the economy require a longer-term view. The best ways to spend would be infrastructure and research. Fill some potholes and fund some R&D projects. The money tends to stay in America, and you get a much better bang for your buck. So, to fight the recession, let’s invest in America, and send Congress a spending bill to do so, and make that a point in the speech.

What else do I talk about? I don’t know who said it first, but it really applied here. Never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste! We had a crisis, and I needed to milk that sucker for all it was worth. I had a golden opportunity to do it, too. What I could do was dust off some of George Bush’s ideas, fix them so they weren’t as fucked up, and ram them through. In so doing I would be appealing to the newest Republican icon, St. George of Bush. Dust off his ideas, tweak them, wrap them in a mantle of compassionate conservatism, hoist an American flag over them, and away we would go! All I had to do was hold my nose.

It wasn’t that outlandish an idea. I had high popularity right now and a lot of credibility from destroying the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That translated into political capital, which I could spend on various votes and projects. The same had occurred with George on my first trip. Unfortunately, he wasted his on various horrendous efforts, setting up Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration, neither of which was all that popular, and dragging the nation into a couple of losing wars. He drove a stake through his heart during Hurricane Katrina. By the end of his administration, he couldn’t get Congress to agree that the sky was blue, let alone give him what he wanted.