“John, it’s Carl. I’ll do it.”
Chapter 96: In the Running
After I hung up the phone, Marilyn looked over at me from the dishwasher. “I thought you told me you didn’t want to run for Congress.”
“I thought you told me you did want me to run for Congress!”
“I never said that! Besides, you never listen to me anyway,” she responded with a smile.
I stared at my wife for a moment, and was interrupted in my reply by the twins racing through. I snagged Holly and asked, “Do you know where Mommy keeps the camera?”
“No.”
“Well I want you and Molly to go look for it. I’m going to strangle Mommy and I want a picture for when I go to jail.”
The two girls squealed and giggled and ran out of the kitchen. Marilyn gave me an amused look and said, “That’s not going to get you the family values vote!”
“You are pushing your luck, lady!”
That got her to laughing at me, and she threw the dish towel at my head. “Dry the dishes and put them away, Congressman!” I made a rat tail out of the towel and flicked it at her rear. “You just lost the women’s vote, too!” she added.
“Yeah? Well, I just picked up the exasperated husbands voting block, so I’m covered.”
Tuesday morning John convened a meeting in my office. When we had talked on Sunday, he had told me not to talk to anybody about this but Marilyn, and that Marilyn wasn’t to tell her friends either. Or family, a pack of lefto pinko Commies if ever there was one! Okay, my words, not his.
Tuesday we had John, Brew McRiley, Bob Destrier, Rich Miller, and Jack Nerstein in my office, and we bolted the doors, closed the drapes, and lowered the Cone of Silence. Jack was the equivalent of John in Carroll County, the head of the Republican Committee for the Maryland Ninth. He had been out of town on Sunday. It was time to talk politics.
It was Jack who started it off. “I heard you turned down the idea on Sunday. What made you change your mind?”
A good question. “I talked it over with Marilyn, my wife, over the weekend. She told me not to worry about her and the kids, but to do it if I thought I could make a difference. I think I can.”
“What kind of difference?” asked McRiley.
I smiled at him. “I thought you wanted me to run?”
“I’m serious. We’ll need something more than just platitudes and feel good stuff to do this. We’ll need to develop what makes you different and what makes you right. Answer the question.”
“You’re a pushy little bastard, aren’t you!? Okay, what do I believe in? My biggest position is going to be the need to balance the budget. Fiscal policy in this country is a disaster. If we can’t draw a distinction between me and Stewart on that, we all need to rethink this!”
“There’s more to it than that. What about on social issues? Where do you stand on gun control? Abortion? Are you pro-life? Defense? What about the Republican platform?” asked Rich.
“If we make this about social issues, we are screwed! Maryland is one of the five or six most liberal states in the nation. If we start harping on Democratic hot buttons, they will bury us,” I replied.
“We’re not that liberal, Carl,” responded John. “Maryland voted for both Reagan and Bush, remember.”
I shrugged. “Maryland voted for Reagan in ’84. In ’80, they voted for Carter. In ’84, Jesus would have lost against Ronald Reagan, and in ’88 my eight year old could have beaten Mike Dukakis. You ain’t making your point, John. We can’t make this about Democratic hot buttons. We will go down in flames!”
We spent some time going over the 1988 Republican platform. Somebody actually had a copy of the platform, so for each item we marked off where I stood. Sometimes it was amusing. McRiley asked, “What about gun control?”
“I’m in favor of gun control. I always hit what I aim at!” I answered. That set the others to laughing, and that was written down as a line to be used. I thought it was a bit glib, especially when the last thing I had hit was my brother.
It was less amusing when they got to abortion. Pro-life or pro-abortion? “I’m pro-choice, guys,” I told them.
That set Destrier and Miller back a peg. It was Destrier who pushed, “That’s definitely not in the platform, Carl.”
I shrugged unrepentantly. “Then it’s not in the platform. You want a pro-life candidate, then fine. You go find one and see how he does. You will piss off three quarters of the woman in the district and half the men, but hey, what do I know? I will say this until I am blue in the face. If you want to win this election, you have to focus on economic issues. If you want to lose, focus on social issues. This is Maryland, not Arkansas.”
“Meaning what?” asked Miller.
“Meaning, this is not the Bible Belt! Now, there are plenty of rural areas in Baltimore, Carroll, and Frederick counties, but this district is becoming more and more suburban. They have pushed out from Baltimore and Washington along 83 and 795 and 70. There’s a whole lot more soccer moms and commuting dads than farmers. You start thumping a Bible and you will be playing to deaf ears! We need to play to what the people want, which is how the Republicans are going to help their pocketbooks and keep them safe, and not tell them how to pray and behave.”
Miller looked like he was about to explode. “This is a Christian nation! Are you even Christian? It certainly doesn’t sound like it!”
That caused the others, the locals and Brew McRiley, to stare at Rich Miller curiously. “Is that what this is about? I need to be vetted by a church before running? Oh, boy, that ain’t going to go too far!” I told him.
Miller calmed down slightly. “No, but we can’t have you making disparaging remarks like that in public.”
Again, I shrugged. “That’s fine, I won’t. What happens when somebody stands up while I’m speaking and wants to know about some social issue? Abortion or religion or evolution or birth control or something? What do you want me to say then?”
“Well, we can simply create ahead of time some neutral sounding quotes that won’t contradict the platform,” he told me.
“Uh, huh.” I glanced at the others. John looked a bit horrified by this all, McRiley was rolling his eyes, and Destrier and Nerstein looked like they wanted to dump Miller in a river somewhere. I got the overall impression they wanted the guy to drop it.
I was right. Nerstein smoothly interjected, “Well, let’s table that for the moment, shall we. We can develop some responses more closely attuned to local needs.” The rest of us just nodded.
We all took a potty break at that point, and when Miller headed out to the bathroom, I leaned over towards Jack Nerstein and asked quietly, “Do you think I should mention my wife is a Democrat and a Catholic to him?”
Jack, who I had met a few times before at fire department fundraisers in Hampstead and Westminster, grinned and shook his head. “No! He’s a hard core evangelical. He’d probably have her tarred and feathered.”
“Great! We’ll just have to get them together!” I replied.
Destrier chimed in at that. “Just keep your mouth shut until we can send this guy home. Let us work with you on the local stuff.”
I nodded in agreement.
When we got started again, the topic was what I had mentioned at the dinner party. No matter what I believed in or didn’t believe in, we had to overcome the issue of the Billionaire Murderer campaign posters. Everybody seemed to feel that the ‘billionaire’ part of the poster was a non-issue. “Stewart’s a millionaire himself,”, commented John, “and he doesn’t even live in the state!”