Chapter 172: Campaign 2008

There wasn’t going to be a whole lot of grand legislation going on in 2008. This was an election year, and it was going to be a big one. We would start off with the primaries, which would take up most of the late winter and early spring. After that we would have a brief lull through the summer, and then go into the conventions. After the conventions it would be full out bloody warfare. This was on top of the regular fun and games. Every House seat was up for election, as were one in three Senate seats. The chance of accomplishing anything was remote at best.

That wasn’t to say nothing would get passed. Both the Democrats who ran the Senate and the Republicans who controlled the House could be counted on to pass some bills that had absolutely zero chance of ever getting through because they would never be passed by the other house. It didn’t matter what the bill was for, the real purpose was to attach a name to a bill or to a vote against a bill. “ Congressman Blathermouth voted against food stamps for hungry children! It’s time to fire Congressman Blathermouth!” Well, that’s not really what happened. The bill that was voted on was about raising taxes in Congressman Blathermouth’s district, so when he voted that down, he also voted down the food stamp increase rider. Both sides played this game. Congressman Blathermouth would take the same vote and trumpet about how he held the line on taxes, so re-elect him so he can continue leading the fight.

I did expect to get some legislation passed, but it would be mostly bills supplemental to other bills that were already in place. For instance, last year I had pushed through a five-year extension on some major infrastructure spending bills - bridges, highways, water and sewer improvements, canal locks, and such - and this year we would need to pass the proper budget and spending bills. How much that was going to cost in special appropriations and earmarks in order to buy recalcitrant politicians I wasn’t sure yet.

It was amusing in a way. Every year you had various Congressional leaders who would hoot and holler about the pernicious effects of earmarks, and how they were nothing but bribery using the taxpayers’ money. They would promise to ban all earmarks and make all government spending more transparent. God save us if that ever actually happens! If a little bribery is needed to pass a piece of important legislation, then pay the damn bribe! For my money, politics was the art of the possible, and some appropriately spread around cash made a lot of stuff much more possible.

You don’t use the earmarks to line anybody’s pocket. That would be illegal. Instead, you use the money to fund a project or lower a tax for somebody back in your district. If the thankful citizens and businesses in your district wish to reward your outstanding performance with a campaign contribution, well that that’s just peachy!

America has the best government money can buy. As for efficiency, well, that’s a different matter.

In 2004 I ran for re-election, and as far as the Republican Party was concerned, I ran unopposed. Ron Paul tried to run against me, but I don’t remember him getting a single vote. Now, in 2008, we had a race. John McCain was the front runner, and the presumptive winner. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were the only other major players in the game. Everybody else, and there were probably another half dozen candidates running in Iowa and New Hampshire, was praying for a miracle.

John had everything going for him, if we didn’t step on our cranks. That was why the Secret Service scandal was so troublesome. John’s theme was simple - “Four More Years!” I was nowhere near as unpopular as George Bush would have been at this point. The things that sank GWB - two very unpopular wars, a disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, and government spending that was completely out of control and had us trillions in debt - those things just weren’t tainting me. Meanwhile I had managed to win my war, had at least partially fixed some immigration issues, and was pushing a relatively popular infrastructure repair plan. The economy was strong, we had gotten through the Katrina recession, and although we still had Wall Street and housing bubbles, they weren’t anywhere near as crazy as they could have been.

John’s mantra was simple. Keep him in place to keep the good times rolling. We were the grown-ups, and we knew what we were doing. John had been at the heart of all the wonderful things President Buckman had done, so let’s keep him in office to keep it all going!

Mitt and Mike were at the two extremes of the party. Mitt was pushing that he was the strong business leader, having run Bain Capital at the same time I had been running the Buckman Group, and we needed to run the country like a business. It wasn’t something we could really use, but I told both John and the top campaign people that Mitt wasn’t all that great a businessman. The Buckman Group had eaten Bain Capital’s lunch on more than one occasion. In addition, Bain Capital had much more of a shark mentality to it than I had with the Buckman Group. We had invested our money along with that of our clients. Bain had typically invested in takeovers that left the target company highly leveraged. Bain got its money out in fees and preferential treatment; if the target company went belly up or laid off workers, Bain had made their money already. The Buckman Group got its money out in stock appreciation, warrants, and options. The risk is greater, but the upside is very, very nice!

Mitt was unabashedly appealing to Wall Street and the financial sector, and they were funding him lavishly. John was also getting a lot of cash from business interests, but his seemed more diverse. Both men frequently got contributions from the same people, as they tried to hedge their bets. Lower taxes were promised.

Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, was appealing to the party base. He was the designated conservative and Christian, and he was the only one the party base trusted. Unfortunately for him, nobody else wanted him! He could command maybe a quarter of all Republican voters, or maybe even more than that. Unfortunately for Mike, the other parts of the party, like the businessmen and the defense advocates and the libertarian wing, wanted nothing to do with him. Nobody expected Huckabee to do more than win some isolated Southern and Midwestern states, but there was immense concern that he would form a hard-right Christian third party and run in the general election. If that happened, he would split the Republican vote and the Democrats would win in a landslide!

On the Democratic side, the only two serious candidates were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and nobody could figure out who would get the nod. Hillary was the first serious female contender, and she had all the old-style Dems and women supporting her. Obama was the first black candidate who had a chance of winning white votes, and he was very appealing to the minorities who were a major part of the Democratic base. Money was pouring into both of their coffers. They were battling each other tooth and nail, and it was incredibly ugly. Both candidates were promising ‘Change!’ It wasn’t clear to me what they wanted to change, other than to increase social spending programs. Keeping the budget balanced would be accomplished by massive cuts in the military and making business pay its ‘fair share’, whatever that meant (probably a tax hike.) Both candidates were very much old school Ted Kennedy style liberals. Otherwise, the only other significant candidate was John Edwards, who had a lot of name recognition from his run for V.P. in 2004, and the exact same platform as the other two. None of the rest, and there were at least another half dozen with their names on ballots, had a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting a single delegate to the convention.

The first primaries were in January, beginning with the Iowa caucuses on January 3. I will never understand how the whitest, most conservative, and most religious state in the nation got to choose who would be the candidates for national office. If you won in Iowa, or at least beat expectations, you got a major boost going into future races. Donors would start coughing up cash, and you would be able to keep going. Some of the long shot candidates only ran in Iowa and New Hampshire, praying for that long shot victory which would get them the credibility to continue.

Mike Huckabee won Iowa big on the Republican side, getting about a third of the total vote. McCain and Romney basically tied at number two, with a quarter of the vote each. Everybody else picked up a few dribs and drabs. Even the television pundits discounted this win for Mike since the only reason he won was because most of the state was fundamentalist Christian and he had them sewn up. He was not expected to win in New Hampshire, which was a more diverse state. He didn’t. John took New Hampshire with a strong showing by Mitt, and Mike took a distant third place. After that, Romney took his home state of Michigan, beating John by a nose, and both spanked Mike. It was very even going into Super Tuesday.

On the Democratic side things were very unclear. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, despite boatloads of cash being spent, Obama and Clinton were tied dead even. Edwards was way in the back. Obama won big in South Carolina at the end of January, and this was very significant. South Carolina was the first primary in a state with large numbers of black voters, and it told. I suppose there was a black voter who voted for Hillary, but I don’t think anybody ever discovered her name. Otherwise, he took every black vote in the state. He whipped Hillary by over two-to-one and put a real kink in her plans.

Super Tuesday was February 5 and was the day that everybody had to win. All the wannabes on both sides had dropped out by the end of January. The only ones left on the Republican side were McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Ron Paul. Ron had zero delegates and zero money and zero chance, but he was staying in to get his libertarian agenda out there. The Democrats were down to Obama and Clinton, with Obama having about a ten percent lead at the moment. Even John Edwards had quit, but he was making lots of noise about being the best candidate as Vice President. He was hoping that Obama and Clinton would fight such a nasty fight that the eventual winner wouldn’t choose the other one as their running mate. It was the same strategy that got him selected in 2004 as the V.P. nominee.

I’ll be honest and admit that I was surprised by the strength of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The three men weren’t as close as the two leading Dems were, but I had expected John to be the prohibitive front runner at this point. I was doing what I could for him. He certainly had my public endorsement, but that was to be expected. If I didn’t endorse my own Vice President as my replacement, I was telling the world I had picked somebody unqualified, which would reflect poorly on me. Behind the scenes, I was making as many phone calls as I could. John’s big chance was to take Super Tuesday. Over forty percent of the Republican convention votes would be divvied up, covering 21 states, on that one day. John needed to smack down Romney and Huckabee decisively.

John spent a lot of January on the road, campaigning. I had a chance to speak to him towards the end of the month. “How’s it going, John?”

He smiled and asked, “Getting worried, Carl?”

I made a wry grimace. “I wouldn’t say, worried. Maybe concerned is the right word. I never thought Mitt or Mike would be anywhere near this close to you.”

“This game isn’t over yet. Let’s face it, Mike plays well to the religious crowd, but that isn’t going to help him everywhere. They’ve never trusted you or me, and they sure aren’t going to vote for a Mormon. As for Mitt, he’s running against you. I’ve heard he’s been telling the financial types that you’ve betrayed your class,” he replied.

I stared at him briefly. “My class? I’m a middle-class suburban kid who’s made twenty times more money than he’s ever seen! What was it Ann Richards said about George’s dad? He was born with a silver foot in his mouth? Sounds like Mitt to me.”

John laughed at me. “Don’t shoot the messenger! I’m just passing this along. Call some of your old buddies and ask.”

“I might just do that! My class, my ass! The balls on that guy!”

“Like I said, this thing isn’t over yet. What would you say the most important states for me to win on Super Tuesday will be?”

I had to think for a second. “California’s the big prize, and I’m sure they won’t go for Huckabee. Hmmm...” I thought a bit longer. “Illinois is big. So is New Jersey. New York, maybe. They won’t vote for you in the general election, but you need to win the primary. You tie up four or five of the biggest states and the day is yours. Otherwise...” I shrugged again.

He smiled. “I know you’re making phone calls. So am I. I’ve been doing this longer than you have. Don’t go counting me out yet.”

I nodded in agreement. “Okay. I’ll start writing my speech for the convention.”

Mitt’s comments pissed me off. I made a call to Jake Eisenstein Jr. and confirmed what John told me; Mitt really was running down my record at the Buckman Group and, by extension, John’s record working for me. I reminded Jake of my record back in the old days, and also reminded him of the times we spanked Mitt’s ass, which got a few good laughs out of my old partner. “You planning on coming back here after you’re out of a job?” he asked. Technically I had enough stock in the blind trust to let me do that.

“Not as long as John’s the President. If Mitt’s running the show, or God save us, the Democrats, I just might have to! You start telling your buddies the truth about Mitt Romney, huh?”

“Nothing like a little incentive! I’ll see what I can do.” We were good friends, but he liked running the show, like I enjoyed running the show. He wouldn’t want me to come back. We closed our conversation with some gossip about our families and hung up.

To what extent that helped, I’m not completely sure. I do know that within a matter of days, and before Super Tuesday, Wall Street money began flowing more to John McCain and the tap began drying up for Mitt. This was critical for both men. Iowa and New Hampshire are very small states, and the emphasis during those campaigns was very much about meeting as many people as possible. Super Tuesday states are much bigger, and there was no way to shake that many hands and visit that many living rooms. They needed massive amounts of campaign funding to buy the television airtime needed to reach that many people. John also scored some major endorsements from the governors of both California and Texas on January 31. Those were two must-win critical states.

One of John’s strengths was that he had a major funding source not available to either Mitt or Mike. The outfit that Marty Adrianopolis and I had founded down in Austin, Austin Consulting Group, had developed all sorts of Internet based funding schemes. In addition to the traditional campaign and RNC websites Austin managed, they also operated the McCain Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook sites. Nobody knew yet which of these social networks would end up becoming important, but they were operating McCain issue and fundraising pages on each of them. Just as important, they weren’t operating any for Romney or Huckabee. They were pulling in millions off the Internet.

Brewster McRiley wasn’t directly working for John McCain, but his management of my 2004 campaign had propelled him to the top levels of the Republican Party. If John McCain won this fall, Brewster would be a lock for the next RNC chairman. As it was, he was coordinating a lot of funding for the RNC, and at the same time his McRiley Associates group was running three Senatorial campaigns and six House bids. He was also working on purchasing Austin and folding it into his operation. Brewster wanted to become a one stop shop for Republican elections! He wanted John to win, too.

Things got amusing when the pending purchase of Austin was raised in a column on politics in Business Week. Both Marty and Brewster were quoted. Both men were known as longtime friends and associates of yours truly, and the question was raised as to my financial involvement in the Austin Consulting Group. Donna Brazile asked them about it the next Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Brewster laughed at the accusation. “Carl Buckman was involved with the Austin Consulting Group only to the extent of suggesting its creation. That was it.”

When asked where I had come up with the idea, Marty snorted and answered, “Everybody knows about Carl Buckman the billionaire and Carl Buckman the soldier and Carl Buckman the philanthropist, but nobody remembers Carl Buckman the mathematician and computer scientist. They forget about the guy I went to RPI with, who got his doctorate in math at the age of 21, who wrote code for Bill Gates, and who sat on the boards of Microsoft, Adobe, and Dell. Carl told me that it was time for a couple of old Keggers to show people how to raise money by computer. After all, he helped invent modern computer networking.”

“What are Keggers?” asked Stephanopoulos.

Marty smiled. “Kappa Gamma Sigma was our fraternity, KGS. We called ourselves Keggers. It was appropriate, too. Both Carl and I were bartenders during parties back in the day.”

Brewster added, “I so believe that of both of you!” to which everybody laughed. It made for an amusing interlude.

Like a lot of people, I spent that Tuesday night watching the election returns on television. On the Republican side, John McCain showed some real strength, and basically put it away. There were 21 states in play for the Republicans, and John took nine, Mitt took seven, and Mike took five. That didn’t sound like much of a landslide, but it was. John McCain took California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, the four largest states and the ones with the most delegates to the convention. John took two-thirds of all the delegates up for grabs. It was a landslide.

It wasn’t anywhere near as clear on the Democratic side. Super Tuesday wasn’t the day that determined the winner there. Both Obama and Clinton claimed a victory. Obama won 13 states to Clinton’s 10, but Clinton picked up a few more delegates in the bigger states she won. This thing was going to keep going on the Democratic side, probably for at least another month. Meanwhile, they were blowing through money like it was confetti, the rhetoric kept getting uglier and uglier, and everybody was waiting for somebody to completely fuck up and blow it. All it would take would be one idiotic comment to be caught by somebody with a video camera or a cell phone for a campaign to be sunk.

I couldn’t let the primaries be my whole life, no matter what kind of professional interest I might have. In February Fidel Castro resigned as the President of Cuba, to be succeeded by his brother Raul in a unanimous vote. Like The Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” I doubted there would ever be the political will in the U.S. to make nice with the Cubans until both men were in the ground.

Elsewhere overseas, Hugo Chavez was being a major league asshole down in Venezuela. He fancied himself the new leader of the socialist world, fulfilling the destiny of his hero, Fidel Castro. He did this by playing games with the oil they exported, nationalizing businesses, and giving oil and money to various countries he supported, all the while turning the proceeds over to the poor in grandiose schemes designed to buy their allegiance. For years now I had gotten a variety of requests from the right wing of my party to do something about Chavez and install a President more amenable to American influence. I had always pushed this away. I didn’t need to start a war I couldn’t win, and America had a bad enough reputation south of the border for colonialism and interference. Chavez could strut around like a jackass and make all the speeches he wanted to, but he had no ability to harm us.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin was in the last few months of his term as President, and he was term limited; he couldn’t run for President again. This wasn’t a big problem for Vladimir. His handpicked successor was Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister. Medvedev became the President and Putin took the job of Prime Minister and ran the place anyway. It would be the equivalent of John McCain winning the election and naming me the Vice President, and then letting me run the country in his name. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” Nobody expected any difference in Russian policy.

I was scheduled for another Middle Eastern tour during the summer. This was going to be a relatively simple tour, hitting Turkey, Kurdistan, and Israel. This would be my third trip to Kurdistan, and the second to Turkey and Israel. In a way this was a farewell tour for me. The Turks and the Kurds were squabbling, but nothing serious. Nobody wanted to screw up the very nice oil relations they were developing. When they redrew the maps, the Kurds grabbed as much of the oil territory as they could get away with, and they now had an awful lot of oil. Behind the scenes, State and Commerce were developing some nice talking points and a three-way trade agreement which I would sign. I wasn’t asking that they love each other, just that they behave and not shoot each other. They could squabble with each other as much as they wanted, but everybody wanted the oil to flow!

Israel wasn’t as happy with me. Yes, we had destroyed Iraq, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted us to destroy Iran for them! They were constantly screaming about Iranian nuclear ambitions, the plans, and the facilities for an Iranian bomb. The Iranians knew how to build one, but they needed to generate enough fissile material. We had a ton of economic sanctions in place against the Iranians, but they were slowly developing the ability, and there wasn’t much we could do about it short of a full scale nuclear pre-emptive strike. No, I was not going to do that.

Nuclear proliferation was a problem facing the whole world. Technology had advanced to the point that if you could get the fissile material, anybody could build a bomb. It might be big and bulky, but it would work. Shrinking the package down to a size you could put in a missile warhead was a separate issue, and was much trickier, but you could easily make something that would fit in the back of a minivan, and with a little practice, something that could be made into a bomb suitable for an airplane to deliver. In addition to the original five nuclear powers of America, England, France, Russia, and China, the nuclear club now also included India and Pakistan. Israel was known to have nukes, but they wouldn’t confirm that publicly. South Africa under apartheid also had nukes, but had dismantled them before the blacks took over, so there wouldn’t be a “Black Bomb.” Otherwise, there were probably another dozen Western European and Asian nations who had the ability to create a bomb in anywhere from six months to two years.

These nations were all considered relatively sane places. Even Pakistan had strong controls on the nukes and weren’t about to let the nut jobs get their hands on one. That didn’t apply to Iran and North Korea, where the governments were controlled by crazies. Iran was a major supporter of Islamic terrorism, and in poll after poll, at least of third of the population thought nuking Israel and America would be a good idea. In my first life, Iran eventually got the bomb, and within a matter of months had turned one over to Hezbollah, with tragic results for everybody.

North Korea was a different matter. Completely sealed inside its own borders, with about zero contact with the rest of the planet, the world’s only Communist monarchy seemed to believe the nonsense they spewed out. They constantly provoked South Korea and the United States, lobbing shells over the border or harassing ships and planes. If they had been another country, I would have smashed them years ago, but if I responded to them appropriately, they would attack South Korea. There were tens of thousands of artillery tubes and missiles aimed at Seoul, which was close enough to the border that North Korean troops could walk there in a day. Throw in nuclear weapons, and it gets very dangerous indeed. The South Korean administration wanted us to tread very lightly. They were in the middle of an appeasement mode, hoping their pleasant actions would pay dividends. I couldn’t see any, and I knew the next few South Korean administrations would take a considerably different tone.

For seven years my response to the demands that I do something were the same. Ignore them! Behind the scenes, diplomatically I made sure that the Buckman Doctrine was well known to both countries. Yelp all you want, but if you attack us or our allies, you’ll never do it a second time. It was questionable whether the North Koreans believed me or their own press clippings more. To my critics, I simply refused to get into a debate. I didn’t issue challenges or warnings, I didn’t draw red lines or lines in the sand, and I refused to get caught up in hypothetical scenarios. Ambiguity could be quite useful.

As I was leaving office, my inevitable conclusion was that the world was somewhat stable, but massively fucked up in a lot of places. On more than one occasion I wondered what, if any, effect I’d had on things. Sooner or later, in an awful lot of these places, the locals were going to get sick and tired of the assholes running things, and they would revolt. Generally, that led to wholesale slaughter and civil war. The assholes running these countries were often the only people holding things together! Some days you just couldn’t win!

In America, which at times I considered as screwy as any third world shithole, the Republican and Democratic primaries slogged on. John McCain rode his Super Tuesday wins to glory. Mitt Romney dropped out a few days after Super Tuesday and gave a speech calling for unification of the party under John McCain. Mike Huckabee decided to keep going, betting that he could grab enough Southern and Western states with his religious and socially conservative message. It worked, too, but not to the level that was needed. Mike picked up a few small states, but John picked up the ‘Potomac Primary’ of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., and then ran the board on ‘Super Tuesday II’ at the beginning of March. That gave John a mathematical lock on the nomination, and Huckabee dropped out. John was the official Republican nominee.

On the Democratic side, things just dragged out. I thought the damn thing was going to go right up to the convention, something that hadn’t happened since 1980, when Ted Kennedy tried to screw with Jimmy Carter’s re-election run. It didn’t work out that way. While Obama and Clinton were essentially tied after Super Tuesday, Obama ran the board in all of the February primaries, generally beating Hillary two-to-one all month long. The March primaries went back to the draw that the earlier primaries had been. The whole damn thing dragged on into June, with Obama slowly gaining ground on Clinton, using crazy ‘super delegate’ rules to pick up more votes. Eventually Barack Obama clinched the number necessary, mid-June, and Hilary dropped out. There had been huge amounts of bad blood shed by then. The odds that Obama would pick Clinton for his running mate were too low to be meaningful. Meanwhile, reports of John Edwards’ zipper problems were slowly surfacing, despite his repeated denials. Within the next few months, he was going to self-destruct disastrously. He would not be the V.P. candidate.

Amidst all the sturm und drang of the primaries, my personal life continued forward. Holly’s romance with Jerry (whose last name I had now learned was Spicoli) was moving forward. They were now sharing an apartment in Princeton as they finished up their doctoral work. It wasn’t clear to me what would happen after they graduated. They both had a couple of years to go before that would happen. Would they stay together? Split up? For what it was worth, Marilyn and Holly had dragged Jerry to Philadelphia and bought him some decent clothing, and then had taken him to get a haircut and trimmed his beard. He looked human now, and not like something from a homeless shelter. I still didn’t think he was happy with me, but I could live with that.

Bucky and Molly had bought a house in Columbia, Maryland, in January. That was halfway between his operations with Tusk Cycle (four sales locations now and Bucky was the company’s executive vice president) and her job at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. (Yes, I made a call. The Director looked at her resume and agreed that she was qualified. That was the extent of my involvement. Nepotism is not always a bad thing.) She was also working on her doctorate at night. They were even beginning to talk about children, which certainly made Marilyn giddy with delight! I smiled and told Marilyn I already knew my job with the coming generation - load them up with sugar and give them back to the owners! My wife laughed heartily and agreed completely. Grandchildren are a grandparent’s revenge!