Chapter 120: Mister Perfect

I couldn’t remember for the life of me exactly what had happened on my first go-around, but I knew it had been bad, with Newt and Bill shutting down the government for a chunk of the winter. It was the same now. From November 14 through December 22, for 39 days, they wrangled and snarled at each other. It unfolded along the lines I had predicted, with both sides losing respect from the public, but the Republican House losing more than the President. Then it got ugly.

It came out by the end of November that Gingrich and Clinton had gotten into a pissing match when they both flew to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral at the beginning of the month. Gingrich complained, to a reporter no less, about how he had to exit Air Force One from the back of the plane.

When the President flies somewhere in Air Force One, the cameras focus on him coming out the front door, waving to everybody, and meeting the dignitaries. Everybody else - and I do mean everybody! - wife, kids, friends, reporters, staffers - they all go out the back door, and nobody sees them on television. Newt decided that he deserved to go out the front door with the President! He was shut down and sent packing to the rear. New York’s Daily News ran a cartoon on the front page showing a crying Newt in a diaper, which made national headlines. It only made Newt more difficult to work with.

I avoided the man as much as possible. He had been heard to mention my ‘disloyalty’ for disagreeing with him, even though I had voted with him. I heard about that from John Boehner and Jim Nussle. I shrugged, and they did, too. They were smart men and could see the damage being done even if Newt couldn’t. There was even some grumbling from a few people about whether making Gingrich the Speaker of the House had been such a wise thing after all.

Three days before Christmas, Gingrich caved and severed the link between the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling. Clinton promptly proposed a smattering of budget cuts and tax increases so we could pass a budget in January. It wouldn’t balance the budget, but it would cut the deficit.

In some ways, I didn’t care. I had bigger fish to fry than Newton Leroy Gingrich. The Democrats were feeling frisky, and with the populace starting to reconsider their decision two years ago to throw out the Democratic rascals, a new crop of Democrats was pushing to throw out the Republican rascals. My last two re-elections had been easy. In ‘92 I faced the stunned and half-beaten survivor of a nasty primary fight. In ‘94 I had been gifted with an opponent who spent more time insulting the Democrats than coming after me. The Democratic Party was hoping that the third time was the charm, and I was very much afraid it would be!

My opponent was to be Steve Rymark, an Assistant State’s Attorney for Baltimore County. He was thirty-six, four years younger than me. He was tall, lean, and trim. He ran marathons. He had a full head of thick blond hair. His wife Donna was a runner-up Miss Maryland, tall, blonde, and leggy. Between the two of them they had about a million perfectly capped and blindingly white teeth, which they both showed in their incessant smiles. They had two adorable children, both blonde and with dimples. Donna was two months pregnant when Steve announced he was running against me. They lived in Cockeysville, just inside the district line. They were the most beautiful and adorable family on the planet!

It just kept getting better. He had made a name for himself in a case putting away a couple of Republican county commissioners last year for bribery, and then followed it up with the successful prosecution of a cop killer in the fall. (There went the law-and-order vote!) She had just written and illustrated a children’s book about a family of happy dragons, which had been reviewed by the New York Times. (And goodbye to the family values vote, too!)

If I wasn’t running for office, I would have voted for him!

Marilyn looked at their picture in the paper and pronounced, “He’s cute!”

“Nothing like a little support there, honey!” I told her, earning a raspberry in response.

Charlie looked at the picture of Steve and his wife standing next to him, and pronounced, “Wow! She’s hot!” I might have to put up with Marilyn, but not Charlie. I smacked him with the newspaper, and he took off, laughing.

I was using John Thomas as my campaign manager, and we ran a preliminary poll two weeks after Rymark announced he was running. The results were dispiriting, to say the least. So far, I had won three elections by margins of fifteen to twenty-five points. Right now, I was down in the single digits. John and I looked at each other and called a meeting of everybody we could think of for the following Friday. I got on the phone, called Brewster McRiley, and told him to shag ass to Westminster; we were going to need all the big guns this time around. We brought Marty up and called in the various heads of the Republican Committees in the three counties I represented. For some extra flavor, we had Marilyn and Cheryl Dedrick, my Field Representative present. If anybody had a feel for the pulse of the Maryland Ninth, it was the person who spent her time sorting out the problems of the locals. Theoretically she was to keep her time separate from the campaign, as was Marty, as government employees. On the other hand, if I lost and Steve Rymark took over, they wouldn’t be government employees for long. They had a stake in this, too.

We agreed that we had to do the usual things, opposition research and extensive polling, as well as research into what the voters were thinking about me. In this regard Cheryl had a few comments, though, which were unpleasant but not unexpected. “The letters we are getting here at the office are relatively content with how we handle the routine stuff, but they aren’t too happy with some of your policy stands. You are being linked closely to Newt Gingrich and that is not playing well here. We got a lot of letters and calls about the monuments down on the Mall being shut down. We’ve had some calls from veterans complaining that they can’t get any response out of the VA, Johns Hopkins oncology department is complaining about the shutdown at the National Institutes of Health ... the list is endless.” She laid out a spreadsheet with a summary of complaints and shutdown departments on it. “For all that people complain about hating big government and wanting to shut it down, when it actually happens, they don’t really like it.”

Marty nodded and tossed a stack of phone logs on the table. “We’re seeing the same thing in Washington. Everybody wants to shut down government, just not the pieces they like, which turns out to be the whole damn thing anyway. You and the rest of the Gang of Eight and Gingrich are considered by many to be the reason for the mess.”

I sighed and nodded. “The Gang of Eight is no more. We were just a group of guys who liked each other and could work with Newt to topple the Democrats and ram through the Contract with America. We’re not even eight now; Rick Santorum is a Senator and above this pettiness. Besides, Newt isn’t talking to me at the moment.”

There were a few snorts and chuckles around the room. Jack Nerstein summed it up nicely. “Even worse than being wrong is being right, when being right means you disagree with the other guy.” I gave him a wry smile, pointed a finger at him, and nodded.

“So, we can’t expect any help from him?” Millie Destrier commented.

“You don’t want any help from Gingrich,” interjected Brewster, who had been listening up until now. It had been a bit over six years now since I had met McRiley, and he was no longer the brash kid. He had managed or overseen seven Congressional and Senatorial elections by now and won a total of six of them. The one loser was caught in bed with a hooker and his wife divorced him, serving him with the papers at a campaign rally designed to put his problems behind him. That one gave the late-night comedians a lot of fun!

“Yeah,” I agreed sourly.

He continued, “He doesn’t forgive or forget, and if you aren’t an ally, you’re an enemy.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he waved me quiet. “I know, I know, you’re not an enemy, I know that. Newt is incredibly shortsighted at times, and he doesn’t look past the immediate tactical victory to the long-term strategic loss. Right now, all he sees is that he just lost to a man he despises. Newt’s natural instinct is going to be to double down and attack again. That is not going to be in your interest.”

“I am going to have to distance myself from him, which I am sure he will be happy to help with.” I could just see running ads saying I wasn’t really a key ally in the Contract with America. Unbelievable!

There wasn’t much we could come up with. This was going to come down to plain old-fashioned campaigning. We came up with two major thrusts.

First, just like an old time smash-mouth football game, we were going to have to keep running the ball, going for two or three yards at a time, and not give up too many yards to the other team. There would be no Hail Mary passes or glorious 99-yard kick returns. The legendary Vince Lombardi, longtime coach of the Green Bay Packers, would start each season by holding up a football and saying, “This is a football!” We were going to go back to the basics.

In campaign terms, this meant doing the basics. I needed to contact everybody who had ever donated or helped or worked on a campaign and ask them to do it all over again. Nobody could come up with any dirt on either of the Rymarks. (When discussing Donna Rymark, John Thomas had shaken his head in disgust and commented, ’What are we going to say? Her tits are too big, and her legs are too long?’ Millie and Cheryl countered by pointing to a picture of Steve Rymark in running shorts, with what looked like a roll of socks stuffed down his pants, and said, ’Some of us like other things, too.’; Marilyn simply giggled. Great! American democracy was being determined by penis length and bra size! How the hell did I ever get in this mess?) We were going to have to buy a lot of ads and push all the wonderful stuff we were doing for everybody, and not dwell on any of the big policy debates in Washington. It was going to be expensive.

There was a very strange response to Donna Rymark, one that I hadn’t expected. I came home one evening to find my wife chatting on the telephone in the kitchen. She tilted her cheek towards me, so I leaned down and kissed her. I glanced at her and noticed that something seemed different, but she was yapping away, so I dumped my briefcase in my office and went to the bedroom and changed out of my suit. When I got back to the kitchen Marilyn was hanging up the phone. “How was work?” she asked.

“Every day it is a privilege and honor to represent the Maryland Ninth and protect the citizens thereof from the godless hordes bent on their utter destruction.”

“You’re a selfless hero.”

“And in need of a drink.” I pulled a bottle of Louis Jadot Burgundy from the wine rack. I looked at Marilyn again. “Is that a new outfit?”

She lit up. “You noticed!”

“I always notice what you’re wearing.”

“No, you don’t!”

I had to smile at that. “Guys always notice what women are wearing, so they can figure out how to get it off of them.”

That earned me a squawk of protest. “You are an awful person! If I told the citizens of the Maryland Ninth what you said, you’d lose the women’s vote, for sure!”

“But I’d gain the men’s vote,” I said, shrugging. “So, that’s new?” Marilyn had on a tight black skirt that ended about an inch above her knees but had an interesting slit up the back a few inches higher. Up top she was wearing a tight fitted red tunic-shirt that overlaid the skirt, unbuttoned down to a point you could see a touch of cleavage, with a gold sash tied asymmetrically at the waist. She also had on some nice sheer hosiery, and some pointy-toed high heels.

“You like it?”

“Yeah. Very nice.” She looked both cute and sexy. “Are those pantyhose or stockings?”

“None of your business,” she replied primly.

“I think it is precisely my business!” I moved closer and managed to back my wife against the kitchen island. Even as she laughed and protested, I reached down and begin tugging the hem of her skirt northward. Marilyn’s propriety was saved, however, when the back door slammed, and the twins roared in.

“You can behave!” she told me, grinning.

“Huh! So, this is how you spend your day, while I am off serving the populace? You go shopping?”

“Precisely. Some of our friends decided to do an intervention.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said,” she admitted. “It was decided that we needed to fight fire with fire, so to speak. I needed to dress better to match Donna Rymark, so Taylor, Cheryl, and Missy decided we needed to update my wardrobe.”

I rolled my eyes. “Just how much did all this cost me? And by the way, Missy Talmadge is a Democrat. Isn’t she rooting for Steve Rymark?”

“Yeah, but she wanted to go shopping, so she went with us anyway.”

“Good Lord!” I muttered. “So, you bought some new outfits?”

She smiled and nodded. Then I took an even close look at her. “There’s something else.” Marilyn had a mysterious smile on her face, and it took me a few seconds. “Did you do something with your hair?”

She put a hand up to her head and said, “Do you like it? I got it trimmed a bit.”

“Very cute.” Still something seemed a touch different. I looked at her from different angles, and then it hit me. I grinned and said, “You colored your hair!” Marilyn had been starting to get a few gray strands, and they were now gone.

Marilyn’s eyes opened wide! “No, no, I didn’t!”

She looked way too guilty! “You did! I can tell! You did!” I started laughing, and it only got worse when she slugged me in the shoulder. That made me keep going. “Does the rug match the drapes? Do the collars match the cuffs?”

Marilyn shrieked at me loud enough to get the girls to come into the kitchen, and she tried to punch me a second time, so I wrapped her up in my arms as I kept laughing. Holly looked at her sister and said, “They’re crazy!”

“They’re weird!” replied Molly.

That made Marilyn start laughing, too. At that time, I was informed that I wouldn’t be seeing any collars, cuffs, rugs, or drapes for the rest of my life, which just kept me laughing. I just had to keep going, though. “Did you guys go shopping for new glasses?” Marilyn is nearsighted. It hit me when I was eighteen, but before I ever met her. She had never known me when I didn’t wear glasses. For my wife, however, it had started in her early thirties, and was now to the point where she needed glasses to be able to watch television or see a movie. Since she refused to admit to her vision problems, and refused to wear her glasses, she was constantly squinting or trying to fake it.

“NO!” She smacked me again and started me laughing some more.

I retaliated by wrapping her up again in my arms, and this time I managed to pull her skirt high enough that I could feel the tops of her stockings. “Want me to find out if you’re going commando?”

She laughed. “Later, and if you don’t start behaving yourself, never!”

“Since when did you want me to behave myself?” I pinched her ass and then let her go and poured the wine. Marilyn blushed at that. “Any chance you guys did some shopping at Victoria’s Secret or Frederick’s of Hollywood?” That got an even bigger blush as a response.

With Marilyn trying to match Donna Rymark in the style department (although she would never be able to match her in height) our other big thrust was going to be somehow publicly distancing myself from Newt Gingrich. We had to paint him as an out of touch demagogue who had lured me astray, but now I was back on the path of goodness and righteousness. This left a sour taste in my mouth. I had known full well what I was doing when I helped to oust the Democrats, and I firmly believed that the elements of the Contract with America were for the good of all of us.

The one thing I agreed with, though, was that Newt was nowhere near done with his feud with Bill Clinton. I knew he was going after Slick Willie on every front he could, and in the most over the top fashion possible. For one thing, Monica Lewinsky was already working at the White House as an intern. I had seen her in passing once, and almost did a double take when I realized who she was. Pretty girl, I suppose, though more than a bit chunky for my taste. On the other hand, I like curvy brunettes, and if she had lost about twenty or thirty pounds around the midsection even I might have been tempted. Maybe she just gave great head! Clinton couldn’t keep his dick in his pants if you sewed the zipper shut, and no matter what I did in the here and now, Newt was going to hammer him on it.

In other areas, Clinton was equally vulnerable. On the personal side, Ken Starr was already investigating the Clintons about their Whitewater Development investment, and this was just going to dive deeper and deeper into their messy and complicated financial affairs. On the public side, there was the controversy about the White House Travel Office, improper access to various FBI files, and already some glimmerings of various espionage scandals involving Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing. I told Marilyn that he was a great politician, but I wouldn’t let him in the front door of the house, and I wouldn’t leave her or the kids alone with him. I’d make him come in through the utility room, and then wash my hands after shaking his.

All this meant that Gingrich had plenty of fuel to build a fire under the man, and he had no intention of not lighting the match.

What did it mean for me? No matter what my personal thoughts, I couldn’t be seen being petty. If Newt started pushing on Clinton’s marital infidelities or his pot smoking or draft dodging, I couldn’t allow myself to be drawn into it. I had to stand back and maintain a statesmanlike attitude. Some of it I didn’t care about (smoking marijuana) and some didn’t apply to me (my zipper was firmly closed, thank you very much, but Newt was a well-known womanizer; the pot was calling the kettle black) and some I just didn’t want to touch (I served, but nothing good would come of me going after Clinton; better to just behave myself when asked about it.)

There was one way to differentiate myself from Rymark, though, and that was to push myself as a leader. Every politician worth his salt tells the voters he is going to be a leader, but damn few ever really are. In my case, I could point to legislation I had sponsored or co-sponsored, and the Contract with America, and say, ‘Like it or not, you have elected a leader of Congress. Do you want a leader, or not?’ I was going to have to run on my record, such as it was.

More than a few moments for this occurred during the election season. The President had signed the updated version of the Defending the Second Amendment Act into law in November. Almost all laws have some form of waiting period, typically ninety days or more, before the law kicks in. This period allows the states to take measures to put the law into effect. For instance, if we passed a law requiring the states to inspect school cafeterias (just for example; they do it already anyhow) the delay allows the states to write the rules, hire a few inspectors, print up inspection forms, and so forth. In the case of D2A, the law went into effect on February 20, 1996, the day after President’s Day.

The new law was, to put it mildly, controversial in Maryland. It proved popular with large portions of the public, but not with the higher ups in the State Attorneys’ offices or the Maryland Attorney General, or with upper ranks of the State Police. It was surprisingly popular in Baltimore itself, which is very black and very Democratic, but when you thought about it, you realized most violence in the black community is from other blacks. Regardless, Rymark was publicly against the law, and the Attorney General for Maryland had vowed to sue, all the way up to the Supreme Court, to have it overturned.

That gave us an opportunity for some showmanship. The current Attorney General was Joe Curren, a longtime political powerhouse with a history of supporting gun control laws. He was so anti-D2A that he had ignored the 90-day requirement to prepare for ‘shall issue’ concealed weapon carry permits. He simply said that Maryland was going to ignore the law and deny all permits and refuse to accept out of state permits, just like before. I got together with John Thomas and Brewster McRiley, and we decided to fight fire with fire. We announced publicly that I would be traveling to Baltimore on February 20 and would apply in person for my federally approved gun permit. Curren took the bait and responded on the evening news that he would be on hand to personally deny the permit, and if I were to have a concealed weapon on my person, he would order me arrested on the spot!