This deceptively simple reconfiguration of the business model turned out to bring a sea change to the industry. But for David, it was simply a way to relieve the stress of waiting. Because what is the news business, really, except the work of hypochondriacs? Anxious men and women who inflate and investigate every tic and cough, hoping that this time it might be the big one. Wait and worry. Well, David had no interest in waiting, and he had never been one to worry.
He grew up in Michigan, the son of an autoworker at a GM plant, David Bateman Sr., who never took a sick day, never skipped a shift. David’s dad once counted the cars he’d built over the thirty-four years he worked the rear suspension line. The number he came up with was 94,610. To him that was proof of a life well lived. You got paid to do a job and you did it. David Sr. never had more than a high school diploma. He treated everyone he met with respect, even the Harvard management types who toured the plant every few months, sluicing down from the curved driveways of Dearborn to slap the back of the common man.
David was an only child, the first in his family to go to college. But in an act of allegiance to his father, he declined the invitation to go to Harvard (full scholarship) in order to attend the University of Michigan. It was there that he discovered a love for politics. Ronald Reagan was in the White House that year, and David saw something in his folksy manner and steely gaze that inspired him. David ran for class president his senior year and lost. He had neither a politician’s face nor charm, but he had ideas, strategy. He saw the moves like billboards in the far distance, heard the messages in his head. He knew how to win. He just couldn’t do it himself. It was then that David Bateman realized that if he wanted a career in politics, it would have to be behind the scenes.
Twenty years and thirty-eight state and national elections later, David Bateman had earned a reputation as a kingmaker. He had turned his love of the game into a highly profitable consulting business whose clients included a cable news network that had hired David to help them revamp their election coverage.
It was this combination of items on his résumé that led, one day in March 2002, to the birth of a movement.
Chapter 7
David woke before dawn. It was programmed into him now after twenty years on the campaign trail. Marty always said, You snooze you lose, and it was true. Campaigns weren’t beauty contests. They were about endurance, the long, ugly blood sport of gathering votes. Rarely was there a first-round knockout. It was usually about who was still standing in the fifteenth, shrugging body blows from rubbery legs. It’s what separated the something from the something else, David liked to say. And so he learned to go without sleep. Four hours a night was all he required now. In a pinch he could get by with twenty minutes every eight hours.
In his bedroom, the wall-size windows across from the bed framed the first glow of sunlight. He lay on his back, looking out, as downstairs the coffee was making itself. Outside he could see the towers of the Roosevelt Island tramway. Their bedroom — his and Maggie’s — faced the East River. Glass as thick as an unabridged copy of War and Peace blocked the endless roar of the FDR Drive. It was bulletproof, along with all the other windows in the town house. The billionaire had paid for the installation after 9/11.
“Can’t afford to lose you to some jihadi cabdriver with a shoulder rocket,” he told David.
Today was Friday, August 21. Maggie and the kids were out at the Vineyard, had been all month, leaving David to pad the marble bathroom floors alone. Downstairs he could hear the housekeeper making breakfast. After a shower, he stopped at the kids’ rooms, as he did every morning, and stared at their perfectly made beds. The decor in Rachel’s room combined scientific gadgetry and horse worship. JJ’s was all about cars. Like all children, they tended toward chaos, a juvenile disorder the house staff erased systematically, often in real time. Now, staring at the sterile, vacuumed order, David found himself wanting to mess things up, to make his son’s room look more like a kid’s and less like a museum of childhood. So he went over to a toy bin and kicked it over with his foot.
There, he thought. That’s better.
He would leave a note for the maid. When the children left town she was to leave their rooms as she found them. He would tape them off like a crime scene if he had to, anything to make the house feel more alive.
He called Maggie from the kitchen. The clock on the stove read 6:14 a.m.
“We’ve been up for an hour,” she said. “Rachel’s reading. JJ is seeing what happens when you pour dish soap in the toilet.”
Her voice was muffled as she covered the mouthpiece.
“Sweetie,” she yelled. “That is not what we call a good choice.”
In New York, David mimed drinking and the housekeeper brought him more coffee. His wife came back on the line. David could hear the frazzled energy she got in her voice when she spent too long parenting by herself. Every year he tried to get her to bring Maria, the au pair, with them to the island, but his wife always refused. Summer vacation was for them, she said, family time. Otherwise, Rachel and JJ would grow up calling the nanny Mommy, like all the other kids in their neighborhood.
“It’s super foggy out,” his wife said.
“Did you get the thing I sent?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, sounding pleased. “Where did you find them?”
“The Kiplings. They know a guy who travels the world collecting old-world clippings. Apples from the eighteen hundreds. Peach trees no one’s seen since McKinley was president. We had that fruit salad at their place last summer.”
“Right,” she said. “That was yummy. Were they — is it silly to ask? — were they expensive? This seems like something that you’d hear on the news is the price of a new car.”
“A Vespa, maybe,” he said.
It was just like her to ask price, as if part of her still couldn’t fathom their net worth, its implications.
“I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Danish plum,” she said.
“Me either. Who knew the world of fruit could be so exotic?”
She laughed. When things were good between them, there was an easiness. A rhythm of give-and-take that came from living in the moment, from burying old grudges. Some mornings when he called, David could tell that she had dreamed about him in the night. It was something she did from time to time. Often she told him afterward, biting off her words, unable to look him in the eye. In the dream he was always a monster who scorned and abandoned her. The conversations that followed were chilly and brief.
“Well, we’re going to plant the trees this morning,” Maggie told him. “It’ll give us a project for the day.”
They made small talk for another ten minutes — what his day looked like, what time he thought he’d be out tonight. All the while his phone chimed, breaking news, schedule changes, crises to be managed. The sound of other people’s panic reduced to a steady electronic hum. Meanwhile the kids buzzed in and out of Maggie’s end of the line like yellow jackets scouting a picnic. He liked hearing them in the background, the melee of them. It was what set his generation apart from his father’s. David wanted his children to have a childhood. A real childhood. He worked hard so that they could play. For David’s father, childhood had been a luxury his son could not afford. Play was considered a gateway drug to idleness and poverty. Life, Dad said, was a Hail Mary. You only got one shot at it, and if you didn’t train every day — with wind sprints and grass drills — you would blow it.