It was a hard sell on the candidate, who saw himself as some kind of latter-day JFK.
Randy stared at the poster with his handsome face in profile and the slogan.
“Can’t you come up with something a little more positive? This makes me sound like something on a menu that you’re not sure you want.”
“That’s the whole point,” Cass said. “That’s why they’ll go for it. We focus-grouped it. They loved it. Anyway, we’re not doing traditional TV and radio advertising.”
“We’re not? Who signed off on that?”
“I did. We’re putting all the money into podcasts and social networks. We’re making major buys on Google, Facebook, and MySpace.”
Randy looked uncomfortable. “Shouldn’t we be appealing to more than just …kids?”
Terry said, “There are twenty-five million voters under thirty. There may be as many as seven or eight candidates on the ballot in November. There may be as many as three or four new independent parties. Our old friend Gideon Payne is gathering signatures for his SPERM party. It’s going to be a crowded field. If we throw everything we’ve got at the under-thirties, we might pull it off.”
“How do we even know they’ll vote?” Randy said. “They never do. They’re too busy shrugging and putting out, what do you call it, attitude.”
“Because we’re going to scare the shit out of them. We’re going to convince them that if they don’t vote this time-for you, the ‘No Worse Than The Others’ candidate-they’re not going to be able to afford iPods and Mocha Frappuccinos. They’ll be too busy paying for bedpans for Boomers.”
“Hm…,” Randy mused. “Not a bad line. But for the slogan, what about…‘Jepperson, Leading the Way’?”
“What, into minefields?” Cass said. “Forget it. You do demagoguery, I’ll do message.”
“Hold on a mo. Who’s paying whom here?” Randy grumbled.
And so Randolph Jepperson became the most formally modest candidate ever to seek the office of president of the United States.
The Establishment commentators, the punditariat, were initially appalled by the slogan. They felt insulted. Pundits expect, even demand, a certain minimal level of pretension in political candidates. This gives them something to deplore in order to affirm their own superiority. Randy’s shrug of a slogan denied them this moral high ground. But they recovered quickly, and they were soon going after him for other than just his shamelessly modest campaign slogan. They attacked him for his scorched-earth Senate campaign against poor old Senator Bradley Smithers; his wealth; his affair with the Tegucigalpa Tamale; his embrace of legal suicide as a means of solving the Social Security impasse; even the Bosnian incident. There had been a lot of new wink-winking about that one on the talk shows.
“Let’s face it,” Cass said to Randy and Terry one day after a particularly nasty press conference, “we’re going to have to deal with the were-they-or-weren’t-they-doing-it-in-the-minefield thing.”
Terry interjected, “Before you two go rushing out to put myths to rest, I had a focus group on that.”
“A focus group?” Randy said.
“Yup. Doing a lot of I-d-I’s these days. All under-thirty. In this one, a majority of them didn’t even know about the minefield. So we told them about it. Then we fed them two scenarios. One where you two were screwing-”
“Aw, Jeez, Terry,” Cass said.
“Hold your horses. The other scenario we gave them, you weren’t banging each other. Then we asked them how they felt in the event scenario number one was true and how they’d feel if number two was the case. Want to hear the results?”
“Not really,” said Cass.
“They preferred scenario number one. By four to one. They thought it was quote-unquote aces, whatever that means. They actually prefer a guy who’ll risk getting his leg blown off trying to get laid in a war zone to one who just bumbled into it. So-you sure you want to go issuing Shermanesque statements about how you weren’t playing hide-the-salami in the minefield?”
“What manner of planet do we inhabit?” Randy said, rubbing his temples.
Chapter 33
Gideon Payne, candidate of the SPERM party, was grappling with a similar problem. His press secretary, an old Washington hand named Teeley, had raised the subject as delicately as he could: “We, uh, probably ought to figure out a position on the, uh, matter of”-cough-“Mrs. Payne?”
Gideon was beyond embarrassment on the point. He said, “You’re saying that the voters might want to know if it’s true that I killed Mother?”
Teeley shrugged. “Something…along those lines. Basically. Yeah.”
“Well,” Gideon said, making a steeple of his fingers. How he missed his watch. “How shall we address that dismal business?”
“Tragic accident,” Teeley said. “Painful subject. These things happen.…”
“Yes,” Gideon said. “Mothers go off cliffs all the time. Happens all the time. Well, it is tragic, certainly. Painful, no question. But there are people back in Payne County with mischievous tongues that wag, wag, wag all day in the noon sun. I’m surprised they don’t burn up. And when the national press goes a-calling on them, they will cluck and say, ‘Oh yes, he killed the poor old dear. Terrible affair. He left not long after, you know, head hung in shame.’” Gideon considered. “There does exist a medical record. A few weeks before the incident, her doctors had informed her that she had a tumor. A tumor of the brain. She didn’t have long to live.”
“So,” said Teeley, “she would have died anyway.”
Gideon said, “Um…I suppose that doesn’t quite solve the question of whether or not I sent her plunging to her death, does it? An unusual problem in a presidential campaign, I should think. Or have some of your other clients been under suspicion of murdering their mothers?”
“There was one whose uncle turned out to have been on Hitler’s staff during World War Two. Pretty high up, too. But no matricides that I can think of offhand.”
“Hm…Well, it may just be an intractable problem. We’ll just have to work around it. I have dedicated my entire career to the preservation of life. The unborn, the halt, the lame, the brain afflicted, the elderly. We’ll just have to run on that. There is the unfortunate Arthur Clumm business, but we’re paying off the families-I must say, most of them seem quite happy to have the money-so I shouldn’t think that will trouble us. It ought to be more of a problem for the Jepperson campaign, I should think. Ms. Devine on his staff was the inspiration for Mr. Clumm’s serial murdering. I do look forward to the debates.” He shrugged. “Perhaps some voters might even be attracted to someone who sent his mother off a cliff, though I don’t suppose we should adopt that as our platform. Now let’s have a look at those television spots your people have devised.”
In his office at the papal nunciature on Massachusetts Avenue, opposite the residence of the vice president, Monsignor Massimo Montefeltro was confronting his own incipient media problem.
When the Transitioning commission issued its “further study” report, the monsignor sighed with relief and offered a prayer of thanks to Our Lady of Prompt Succor. Now, with the issue losing steam, surely Rome would calm down and not demand that he go on television and denounce Transitioning, exposing him to further harassment from the Russian putanas and the gruesome enforcer Ivan the Terrible.