“Running away brought her to me,” he replied.
I smiled at that. “So, please, make her happy. She’s a big girl now, but I never wanted anything else for her.”
I led him out through the patio door onto the deck and showed him around. Maybe I was getting jaded, but John was astonished. He couldn’t believe we owned almost a quarter of a mile of prime beachfront property. After a bit we went back inside.
At that point the rest of the crew came in. Marilyn carrying her baby nephew, Suzie shooing Alex in front of her, and Holly and Molly wandering in behind the others. Out the window I could see Charlie showing Jack around the beach and deck and pool. “I should have known the two of you would be drinking!” protested my sister.
“Outrage? Or jealousy?” I commented.
Suzie refused to answer, so Marilyn simply pulled two more bottles of beer out of the refrigerator. “Glass?”
My sister smiled and shrugged. “The bottle is fine for me.”
“You’re still a Buckman, all right, barbarian to the core!” She poured her own beer into a glass.
I simply made a funny face at her and gave her a loud raspberry. The others laughed. Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me, and then we made lunch. Boiled hot dogs. We could get creative later.
My sister and her family stayed the rest of the week with us. We kept the kids a couple of nights and let Suzie and John have some adult time out on the town, and they returned the favor one night. The rest of the time, we talked. There was a lot of catching up to do. The twins spent a lot of time playing with the littlest Rottingens, although by the end of the week Alex’s constant trailing around after them was proving quite exasperating, and Charlie delighted in showing Jack all the various hiding places and nooks and crannies around the place. At the end of the week, we all loaded onto the plane and flew back to Westminster. They came out to the house for a night with us to see our regular home. The verdict — appallingly normal! Marilyn and I were happy with that and sent them on their way the next day.
It was good to have my sister back in my life, and I was really glad she had found a good guy and a good life. Still, things just weren’t the same anymore. Maybe too much time had passed. Maybe we had both changed too much. I wasn’t sure how that was going to work out.
Chapter 100: The Race Begins
One thing I did with Brewster was to start spending some money. In the military they teach you very early on the value of reconnaissance. In business, it’s no different. If you are going to win, or just even hold your own, you need to know who you’re going up against, and what they have planned. In the Army you can add espionage to the mix. That’s a bit frowned on in the business world, at least if you get caught, so we generally avoided that, but I knew of companies that did it.
Why should politics be any different? Andy Stewart was not going to conduct a gentlemanly campaign, not against Bill Worley, who had already announced a primary battle, and certainly not in the general election against me. The more information we had on him, the better. The first thing that McRiley and the accountant and I agreed on was the need to have Stewart investigated.
One aspect was to look for ‘gotcha’ moments, where he had said one thing and voted for something different. Why would a dedicated public servant do such a thing? Not to seem cynical about it, but perhaps he had been paid to change his mind. That led to a second subject for investigation, Stewart’s campaign finances. Who was donating money to Stewart, and what were they getting in return?
The sort of thing we needed was his financials, as well as some very discreet inquiries into everything else. Specifically, how had a guy who had never once worked in the private sector, but had always worked for the government somehow, become a multimillionaire? Inquiring minds wanted to know! We needed to hire a forensic accounting team, and perhaps not look too closely at the techniques they used to get some of the information we asked for.
Who was to do all these wonderful things? A quick answer was to hire a clipping service, to go through newspapers and magazines and find anything being reported on Stewart. John suggested we expand the search to what they were reporting on me, since Andy was certainly going to do that. We needed professionals to do the investigating of the finances, but for a lot of the other work we needed volunteers. There was no way I could afford paid personnel to do all the scut work; that would blow through our campaign budget way too fast. I needed campaign volunteers, and fast. One of our first priorities after officially announcing my candidacy was to start rallying the troops. McRiley laid out a timetable and a plan for doing this. We would start out with captive audiences, the local Republican groups. One problem we had was that there was only a couple of colleges in the district, Carroll Community College and Western Maryland College in Westminster. College kids make for great volunteers, but on the downside, they are usually Democrats. Win some, lose some. I would certainly rely on whatever resources the local Republican committees had available.
Campaign finance was one area where I had the advantage. The estimate we had out of the RNC was that it would cost approximately $350,000 to run for Congress this year, but that was a national average. I knew that number would skyrocket; I remembered reading (back on my first go) that by 2010 the cost would be three times that, and by 2020, it would double yet again. Senate runs could cost five or six times as much, easily. For a typical Congressman, every moment of their day is spent trying to come up with cash for their next campaign. That’s their job, and if they can work on laws or fix the country in the meantime, that’s nice, too. They have to come up with at least $500 in campaign funds every day for two years to even have a chance. If you have a primary battle, or a rich competitor, you can double or triple those numbers.
The need to pay for a home and schools in the D.C. area only made it worse. Various ethics rules allowed for some of those speeches to be considered not as fund raisers, but as personal educational discussions, which could be considered income. Income that could go towards paying their local mortgage. Income from book sales was also income and not allocated to the campaign. There was never enough money to go around.
So, how to come up with that cash? Congressmen are constantly holding fundraisers, dinners, and speeches where they can pass the hat and collect money. A $100 a plate dinner, with 50 paying guests, collects $5,000, with maybe only half of that going into the coffers. That covers five days worth, but there are only so many dinners and speeches you can give. Also, there is a limit to how much you can charge. Presidents get $10,000 and above; Congressman wannabes get maybe $50. You end up constantly begging for money.
Enter the lobbyist. He’ll be happy to funnel some cash to your campaign, because he knows you’ll be happy to give the group he represents an adequate hearing and consideration on their concerns. The quid pro quo is obvious — vote our way or there is no more cash. There are thousands of lobbying groups in Washington. Some of them compete against each other and some duplicate each other. The money comes from various corporations. Even Big Bob and Lefleur Homes hired lobbyists. They paid a small amount on every home they sold to the New York Manufactured Housing Association in Albany, which funneled some of their proceeds to the Manufactured Housing Institute in Washington, and there were at least another half dozen housing related lobbying groups I knew of, not including the ones for construction and real estate.