Amy shyly admitted, “Democrat,” as she blushed in embarrassment.
“That’s okay. I’m a Democrat, too. I still haven’t made up my mind who I’m voting for. Is this going to be your first election?” Marilyn and Amy started talking, and I led them inside. Amy insisted on being our waitress. A handful of other people from the crowd came in. Brew McRiley and George Tilden sat with Marilyn and me in the same booth this all started at the other night. I pointed out what I had witnessed and how it went down.
The security video made the entire event the lead item on all three Friday night news shows, and by Sunday had made the national news. I drove down to Washington with Brew and we made the round of the Sunday morning talk shows, this time without Andy Stewart able to toss in his two cents worth. That was fine by me. CBS had even commissioned a poll in conjunction with the Sun that showed me for the first time leading Stewart, and by a ten point margin to boot.
This was just totally surreal to me. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I mean, really, there was no way anybody was going to vote for me for Congress.
Chapter 104: Momentum
The campaign continued to gain momentum after the diner incident. During the next month I picked up another fourteen endorsements from various local police chiefs and fire department captains. We were on a roll! Okay, the Sun had endorsed Stewart, but everyone had known that was going to happen. He was a Democrat and the Sun was a City paper, which heavily favored the Democrats, and they had endorsed him for every election he had run to date. It wasn’t an issue for us; we didn’t expect it to matter to anyone out in the Ninth.
Andy Stewart was running scared. He was spending money like he owned a printing press, and he had bankers donating cash to replace it. We matched him ad for ad, and what surprised me was how many donations I was pulling in. It wasn’t all coming out of my own pocket. I was constantly calling people and thanking them and writing notes to them. He was slinging mud left and right, and any semblance to the truth was accidental. He brought up the ‘billionaire buying a seat’ theme, the ‘murderer’ theme, the fact I was disowned, that I was a ‘rogue vigilante’, I was ‘unstable and mentally deranged’ (that one he got from some shrink he bought who never even met me.) He even claimed that I didn’t need a cane and that I was faking the limp for sympathy! We just released the medical report from Walter Reed declaring the damage to be permanent and qualifying for a medical discharge from the Army.
One of the silliest points in the entire campaign came when Andy Stewart dug up my valedictory address from Towson High and used highly edited excerpts to show my many flaws. “We are the largest, the richest, the most privileged, and the most pampered generation of Americans yet born” and “Ours seems to be a legacy of entitlement” and “We will be known as a bunch of whiny bastards.” He even sliced words out of multiple sentences. All these were plastered in ads and television ads to show how out of touch I was with my own generation and with my fellow citizens.
We responded by taking out a full page ad and reprinting the speech in full. It was too long to make a television ad out of, but we did highlight some of the better phrases and had an actor with a nice deep baritone repeat them. Brewster was all over me about not telling him about the speech. He loved it and would have used it earlier in the campaign. I simply told him I had forgotten it; it happened seventeen years before, for Christ’s sake! Brew just chewed my ass and asked what else I had forgotten. (How do you ask for something that somebody has forgotten? There’s a major logical inconsistency in that!)
At that point even the Baltimore Sun began to be exasperated by their favorite son. They began reporting a tally of the lies coming from Stewart headquarters. The Sunday Sun two days before the election even ran a cheeky cartoon on their editorial page. It showed a couple examining two identical graphs, one showing a rising line called ‘Buckman’s Poll Figures’ and the other showing a matching line called ‘Stewart’s False Claims’. One character was saying to the other, ‘It looks dead even to me.’ That one we cut out and put into a scrapbook.
And then, suddenly it was over. I campaigned right through Sunday and Monday and called it quits at dinner time. Marilyn’s parents drove down Monday. My wife had told them that no matter what happened in the election, we were going on a vacation, and we needed them to babysit for a week. Tuesday we got a sitter for the kids and then we drove her parents over to campaign headquarters and showed them around. The place was practically deserted, though. We had done what could be done. There would be no more ads, no more interviews, no more mailers or flyers, no more posters. We had a few people in making phone calls to see if supporters had made it to the polls yet, and a few volunteers were out driving old folks to the polls. Otherwise, we were done. If we hadn’t won by now, there was very little we could do on Election Day to change things.
At lunchtime, we drove Big Bob and Harriet over to the Westminster Diner. They had seen the video, like about half of America had. To be honest, when we walked into the place, I damn near died laughing. Nick Papandreas had festooned the place with “Buckman for Congress!” posters, which simply astonished Big Bob. A hard core Democrat from before he was born, it was a wrenching change in his worldview to realize that by this time tomorrow his baby girl might be married to a Republican Congressman!
Nick came out of the kitchen as we came in the door, and he rushed over to us. My hand was shaken so vigorously I thought it was going to come off, and he gave Marilyn a hug. “Come in, come in! I get you a good table!”
“Nick, thank you! I want to introduce you to some people. These are Marilyn’s parents, Bob and Harriet Lefleur. Bob, Harriet, this is Nick Papandreas. He owns the Westminster Diner.”
“Welcome! It’s nice to meet you! Come, follow me!” He led the way over towards a large round table on the side, and then snapped his fingers at a young man who scurried over. “Get water and have Anastasia come out.”
“Sure thing, Uncle Nick.”
To Big Bob and Harriet I said, “Nick’s got more relatives working for him than you two do.”
We sat down, and Nick stood there at the side. “Anastasia will be your waitress today.”
“Where’s Amy?” I asked.
“She has school today, but she’ll be in this evening.”
“How’s she feeling? She alright now? No scarring?”
“No, she’s fine. A little scar, but it is fading away. I tell her tonight you asked,” he replied.
I smiled. “You do that, but more important, you tell her to make sure she votes for me. I need all the help I can get!”
“I do that, too! I tell everyone, ‘Vote for Buckman!’ I tell all my family, too! I a Democrat, but I tell them to vote for you.”
I laughed at that. “If I can get your entire family to vote for me, I’ll win for sure! Thank you, Nick, I appreciate it.”
“After that night, I have to vote for you. That was a bad night. Me down, Amy down, that poor girl getting beat up in my own restaurant… that was a bad night! Congressman Stewart, he should be ashamed of himself!”
Harriet was just sitting there open mouthed, listening to all this. Some more customers came in, and Nick went off to help them. A twenty-something waitress came out of the kitchen and smiled at us. She looked as Greek as Nick did, but her accent was pure Maryland. “Uncle Nick bending your ear, Congressman?”