“I hope that’s not a suggestion of what’s possible, Bud,” Casey said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s ludicrous,” Casey answered.
“Then pick another possibility,” Bud challenged the thirty-eight-year-old political wunderkind. “Iraq. Iran. Mexico. The IRA. Hezbollah. South Africa. Israel. Which one? You know, it doesn’t matter, which is my point. The unexpected, the thing that you would not have predicted with all the best intelligence, will rear up and slap you across the face just like this incident has.”
“And like now it will be controlled by the proper part of the government,” Casey said.
Bud would have loved to let Casey know what was still facing the country, but he had no need to be privy to that information. “The voice of the president is sometimes the only sound some people hear when things get dicey. If the Iranians ‘accidentally’ loose a missile at one of our ships in the Gulf, Drew Meyerson is not going to be the one the American people will want to hear from, and he is not the one the Iranians will need to hear from. That’s nothing against the secretary of defense, it is simply a statement of fact that it is somewhat disingenuous to believe you can cast the president as a domestic manager who can delegate responsibility for the crises of tomorrow to his advisers simply because an election is looming. It’s disingenuous, and it’s dangerous.”
“I tend to agree with Bud, sir,” Coventry said. “Thinking in purely political terms, I believe the strategy Earl’s laid out could backfire.”
“How so?” the president inquired.
“For the same reasons Bud just presented,” Coventry answered. “If you are set up as focused entirely on the domestic agenda and reality rears its head and draws your attention away, you become a target for your opponents.”
The president considered the statements of his national security adviser and secretary of state while sipping his coffee. “Ellis?”
The chief of staff, his white shirt only three hours in use and already wrinkled, looked to the leader of his country, the man he had grown up with in the Golden State. “If you want pragmatism, Mr. President, then I agree wholeheartedly with Bud and Jim. But a campaign is not about pragmatism, like that or not. It’s about ideology and image. A segment of the electorate buys ideology, another buys image. And it’s the image factor that is going to be the challenge for you.”
“Ellis, things are getting better,” Coventry said. He wasn’t an economist, but he understood enough to be able to intelligently analyze the numbers coming from various agencies.
“Tell that to the guy in California whose job was just sold to China along with the steel plant he worked in for twenty years,” the chief of staff countered. “Because that is the guy the media will have endless interviews with, along with every naysayer the opposition can drum up. You can’t ignore image by throwing numbers out that are supposed to convince people who see hurt on the tube every night that things are really okay. That is also disingenuous.”
Casey saw that the chief of staff’s argument had scored some points with the two critics of his strategy. “And, Mr. President, the economy is only part of the domestic agenda that people are crying for action on.”
The president nodded and bent forward, setting the cup and saucer on the coffee table. “I know. Crime.”
“Exactly,” Casey agreed. “You’ve made only minor dents in the overall crime rate, and coupled with big incidents that grab the headlines the image is one of stagnation on this front.”
“Nothing happens overnight, Earl,” the president said.
“The election of a new chief executive does,” Casey reminded the president, and the rest of those gathered. “Look, we not only have to deal with what you have done, are doing, and will do on crime, we have to be able to respond to the big failures. Take the case of that Barrish asshole this week. What happened there?”
“The legal system worked in its most flawed way,” Bud said.
“Wrong,” Casey said. “For my purposes, which include keeping your boss in this job, it means an animal walked. That is what the voters see, and they also see it as a failure by the Justice Department to do its job, and they know who hires, supervises, and fires the attorney general.” Casey unashamedly pointed a finger at the president. “This man, Bud. Ultimately, when the voter goes into the booth to pull the lever, he remembers things like his next-door neighbor being out of work, he remembers four little girls lying dead in a church, and he remembers very clearly the image of John Barrish leaving court a free man. Those are the things he remembers.”
The chief of staff leaned in to take the floor. “You know, relating to what Earl just said, I had a meeting with Rabbi Levin—”
“How is he?” the president asked, interrupting. “I didn’t have a chance to see him.” Aside from the donations the rabbi could deliver, the president genuinely liked the man.
“He’s fine,” Ellis said. “He was just here for a few hours yesterday. Anyway, he had an interesting story. His synagogue was sponsoring some sort of seminars on racial tolerance. The attendance was entirely white until a couple of nights ago, when the father of one of those little girls showed up.”
“Oh my God,” the president said.
“He told Levin he came because he said he was starting to hate as much as the people who killed his daughter.” Ellis paused for a moment, out of necessity. The emotion was real, as real as it had been when Levin shared the story with him. “The man was destroyed. So was his family. And he was there, begging for help without saying a word.”
“Did someone get him some help?” Bud asked.
Ellis nodded. “The person giving the seminar, a psychiatrist from UCLA, I think, is going to do whatever she can…free of charge.”
“Thank God there is still some altruism out there,” Coventry commented.
“Mr. President,” Casey began, “this is the kind of thing that will make or break you in the eyes of the voters. This man and how others perceive the future.”
Bud felt that his point had just been completely superseded by emotion, and he had a hard time arguing with that reality. One couldn’t help but be moved by that story and the people involved.
But there were other stories yet to be revealed that could have a greater impact on a larger number of people. It wasn’t a thought meant to minimize the tragedy of a horrid event, just a statement of fact.
“Mr. President, a great many things external to this nation can have an impact on events internal,” Bud posited. “We are living with that now. A former Russian scientist was involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons on our soil. The event itself may be a domestic issue, but at least part of it began an ocean and half a continent away.”
He was the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Millions, arguably billions of people depended on his steady hand to keep them free, and he was sitting among his advisers discussing how best to keep his job. On the hierarchy of things vital to the nation it seemed very mundane to the president, but he had jumped willingly into the political arena many years before. From this vantage, though, with nowhere left to go but down, the hoop jumping and spin doctoring, farcical as it sometimes seemed, was life. It was reality.
“Earl, you said the State of the Union speech is going to be the jumping-off point,” the president recalled, letting the debate of the previous moments take a backseat. “Why?”
“It’s your strong point,” Casey answered. “You convey ideas and feeling through words better than any president since FDR. We have to seize on that strength to get a running start. Remember, you’ll have an audience of a hundred million that will be watching you in a setting that is very presidential. That’s something Paul Collins and Moe Stone don’t even have as a campaign tool.” Collins, the Republican senator from Florida, was practically pre-anointed as his party’s nominee some eight months before their convention. Moe Stone, on the other hand, had only to anoint himself. The former Republican congressman, seizing on a populist groundswell, was almost certainly going to run as an independent, and polls indicated there was enough support for his message of traditionalism and values to put him on the ballot from Hawaii to Maine. “Between next week when you formally announce and the State of the Union in January we’ll be running a slow court press, building anticipation of the speech.”