During broadcasts, the studio was off-bounds to everyone. No friends or visitors. No live guests. The shows belonged to Strong and his callers.
“State your case,” the host said.
“What the hell’s going on in Washington?”
Strong recognized the voice and smiled. Last time was on his late night show. Strong had become so popular over the course of the election and the controversial aftermath, that he now occupied two time slots: a three-hour afternoon shift and another four hours overnight. Depending upon the time zone, he was carried live or replayed at a later hour. In eighteen months, Elliott Strong had out-paced his rivals, and Strong Nation had become an extreme conservative mouthpiece for an audience who thought they were getting the news from talk radio.
“What’s going on?” Strong said through a laugh.
“We’ve got a president we didn’t elect and a vice president we voted out, that’s what’s going on. Both are part of the military establishment, which I don’t remember electing. And now they’re running everything. Two people, and as far as I can remember, Americans didn’t give either of them their jobs.”
The caller was pressing a nationwide hot button. Henry Lamden ran hard for the Democratic nomination and probably would have gotten his party’s nod until Vermont congressman Theodore Lodge, clearly in second place, was thrust to front-runner status after his wife was shot on the campaign trail. A gunman fired just one bullet. It appeared to be a bungled assassination attempt. It wasn’t.
Lodge quickly swept ahead of Lamden in a wave of sympathy. Lamden, a decorated Navy commander, became a reluctant number two on the ticket. The Lodge-Lamden team won the November election, defeating the incumbent president, Morgan Taylor. However, minutes before Lodge was to have been sworn in, he was killed on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda. The assassin, presumed to be the same man who killed Lodge’s wife, had disguised himself as a Capitol Police officer. He escaped.
The rules of succession, enumerated in the 25th Amendment, required that the vice president-elect take the Oath of Office. To the surprise of everyone watching, Henry Lamden became President of the United States. He then proceeded to startle the country again with two revelations. The first: Lodge was not really an eligible candidate, but a sleeper spy, posing as an American. Second: former President Taylor, a Republican, would be his nominee as vice president.
The reporters covering the inauguration were as shocked as the millions of people tuned to the ceremony.
Other countries have based their rule on a parliamentary system, where fragile coalition leaderships typically struggle through constant and predictable disarray, until they ultimately implode. This has not been the case with the U.S. Executive Branch. One party controls the presidency, with both the chief executive and the vice president representing the same party, though serving the entire nation. On the state level, there are instances where a governor from one party is elected along with a lieutenant governor from another. The scenario usually leads to infighting, a dubious lack of cooperation, and a recipe for political disaster. But in the case of the Lamden-Taylor administration, the new president made the controversial choice to solve problems, not to cause them.
Lamden sought to lay down the spirit of cooperation with his inaugural speech. The country narrowly averted a constitutional crisis, he told the people. America had elected a Russian-trained, Arab national sleeper spy as president. His ultimate intent: to end U.S. support of Israel and change the balance of power in the Middle East. Lamden explained how proof of the conspiracy was extracted by an American Special Forces team dropped into Libya just hours prior to the inauguration. In a well-orchestrated assault, they took a building in Tripoli that housed the media empire of Fadi Kharrazi, son of the dying Libyan dictator, General Jabbar Kharrazi. Records proved that Fadi had not created the plan. He bought the three-decade-old operation from Udai Hussein prior to the fall of his father’s regime. In Fadi’s mind, the plan would have propelled him into a leadership position ahead of his brother Abahar.
President Morgan Taylor personally oversaw the mission and returned to Washington with hard evidence, minutes before the chief justice was to swear in Teddy Lodge. Taylor confronted Lodge and his chief aide, Geoff Newman, in the Capitol Rotunda. Newman grabbed a gun from a Secret Service agent. Before it was over, two law enforcement officers were dead. So were Newman and Lodge.
Back in Libya, Fadi Kharrazi made indignant denials. One week after the general’s death in March, Fadi’s brother, Abahar, assumed power. A week later, Fadi died in a car accident that no one witnessed.
Congress convened an unprecedented emergency session to begin its inquiry. Thousands of pages of testimony later, Morgan Taylor, on a strangely bipartisan vote, was enthusiastically confirmed as vice president. The United States had its first coalition government in more than a century.
Reporters dove into the history books for precedent. They were surprised it existed. John Adams, the nation’s second president, served as a Federalist. His vice president, Thomas Jefferson, was a member of the unified Democrat Republic party. America’s sixteenth president also ran on a coalition ticket. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, had Democrat Andrew Johnson as his second VP.
“It’s a jackalope,” the caller continued. “I don’t care if they did it way back when. We’re talking about now. And I can’t tell what kind of government we have. It’s not Republican. Lamden is a liberal Democrat. And it’s not Democrat. Taylor, who got defeated, is a moderate Republican, if you can call him a Republican at all.”
“My friend, you hit the nail on the head,” Strong said, nudging him on more.
“But it’s even worse. They’re moving us toward a military regime. Next thing you know, they’ll be clamping down on our freedoms.” The caller was beginning to sound the survivalist clarion call. “We’re gonna have the army running the police, and the navy boarding everybody’s boats. From the Great Lakes to Tahoe. I don’t care where you live. And you know what they’ll be after?”
“No, what?” asked the radio host in a smooth, soothing, encouraging voice.
“Our damned guns, that’s what. From a governor we didn’t elect president, and his vice president-master who’s really running things…who we voted out.”
“So you’re not happy?” Strong said jokingly.
“How can any American be happy? The election was a total fraud. We should have a new one.”
“But according to the Constitution, there can’t be another election.”
“Then what the hell can we do?”
This was just where Elliott Strong wanted the conversation to go. It would start simply enough. A question. Then a call to action. Then another listener would up the ante. An echo. More callers. A chorus. In the morning, a publicist for Strong’s national syndicator would mention it to a few newspapers. It would make the wire services, certainly Fox News, and after that, the network news, CNN and CNBC. Then an e-mail campaign to the House and Senate, blogs, then…
“A good question. What can we do?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Yeah. Well, why not another election? We elected a foreign spy, and now we got two losers. There’s got to be something better.”
Here was the moment. The seed needed watering. “The only thing I can think of…and I don’t even know if it’s possible…it would take an amazing effort…a really Strong Nation…” He loved utilizing the name of his show, “…to make it work. I don’t know.” The talk host drew it out. “Probably impossible. Unless…” he stopped in mid-sentence for impact. “Unless we band together.” The operative word was we. It brought his listeners closer to the radio. “Then it could happen.” He hadn’t even hinted at the idea yet, but Strong knew that the truck drivers tuned in were mesmerized. The insomniacs lay in bed with their eyes now wide open. The conspiracy theorists were hanging on his words.