You have to be real damn careful with consultants. Consultants are professional worriers. You can’t make a joke, since it might just offend somebody. You can’t say you are for something, or against something. You can’t give details lest they be turned against you. The best politicians know when to ignore the consultants and let the chips fall where they will. The worst campaigners ended up like Mitt Romney, afraid to say anything to anybody without it being run through a consultant, and ending up looking phony and plastic.
Do all this for twelve hours a day or more, and it gets real old, real fast. The twins learned not to eat very much at these things. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure where I even was, and I needed help to not fuck up by not knowing where I actually was and who I was speaking to. By Thursday the girls were making up mock versions of their speeches, and our chief handler caught them practicing them in front of some laughing reporters on the bus. As a VP candidate, I had national correspondents along with me, not so much to cover what I was saying, but in the hope I would manage to fuck up massively on camera. I was sent back to stifle my daughters, and it really burned his britches when I sat down with the reporters and laughed along with them. Afterwards I told him that as long as my daughters were poking fun at their dad, the reporters would laugh along. If they poked fun at the Governor, I’d clamp down on them. What a nitwit.
I figured I’d call Marilyn and get them sent home over the weekend. It would give them a break and she could use some feminine companionship for a bit. I probably wouldn’t see her again until the convention. At 2:00 we rolled into Springboro, Oklahoma, which was somewhere east of Shawnee, which was somewhere east of Oklahoma City. We had already been through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Friday and Saturday would see us into Nebraska and Kansas. By Sunday I would be doing mock speeches in the back of the bus myself!
Still, everything looked fairly average. It was warm, but not ridiculously so. The weather forecast was for a heavy thunderstorm in the afternoon, which is pretty normal. My speech was in the high school gymnasium, and even though it was the summer, they had the “Pride of Springboro” — the Springboro Okies basketball team and the Okie Cheerleading team — there to liven things up. Well, that was the plan, anyway. As we got off the bus and headed into the school, I commented to the girls that it looked like we were going to get a real thunderboomer, it was dark and getting darker, with clouds on the horizon, and that in these flat plains, they’d probably be able to see it coming from miles away.
We went inside and used a couple of empty first grade classrooms as makeshift dressing rooms before heading towards the school gym. Outside the sky kept getting darker, and the wind seemed to be picking up as well. Still, I’ve been in thunderstorms before, and as long as the power stayed up, nobody cared. We were directed to the gym, where a stage and backdrop were set up, and were moved to hide behind the backdrop. The local dignitaries were there, the mayor, the school principal, the town council, and the local Republican honchos. I would meet the various Congressmen and Senators at dinner that night in Oklahoma City.
After a few minutes, Holly and Molly made their way to the stage, amid a lot of cheering and applause. They did their speech and then called me out. I came out and gave them both a hug, and sent them off the stage. “Thank you! Thank you! I am so glad to be here! Now, let me ask you, are those girls great, or what!” There was some more cheering and applause, and the twins dutifully came back out with smiles on their faces, waved again, and departed. “It’s good to see the cheerleading squad here, since my girls are cheerleaders back at Hereford High. As for you fellows on the basketball team…” More raucous cheers “... basketball is a big deal in Oklahoma! … Sorry guys, they’re still a little young for you! I might let them start dating when they hit their thirties!” More laughter at that.
Suddenly the world’s loudest siren went off, seemingly right over my head! Everybody in the room started talking, and I looked over at the guy next to me, who happened to be the mayor. “Fire alarm?” I asked.
“Like hell! That’s a tornado siren, mister!” He grabbed the microphone from me and started giving orders. “Everybody, down to the crawlspace! We’ve got the time, but drop your stuff and get down to the crawlspace!” He kept exhorting people to move their butts, while the school principal and a few members of the basketball team started directing people.
One of the campaign guys yelled in my ear, “We should be leaving now!”
Just that moment I heard a big crash outside, probably from the wind picking something up and throwing it around. I grabbed my girls and yelled back, “Like hell! We’re going to the crawlspace!” Maybe the twit could go outside and check, and he could beat us to Nebraska, air express, so to speak. I pushed the girls in front of me towards the crowd heading down a flight of stairs. Suddenly the lights went out, but emergency lighting kicked in, and we found ourselves in a large and filthy concrete basement. The noise from outside the building reminded me of a freight train, and the ceiling above us was shaking and dust was raining down. I pushed the girls to the floor in a corner and lay on top of them. Then I felt somebody land on top of me, and I looked around to find the terrified face of Jerry McGuire, one of my traveling security guys. I was protecting the girls, but he was protecting me.
The freight train kept getting louder and louder, and there was a sound of screeching torn metal, and dirt was falling around us, probably decades’ old dust off the ceiling of the crawlspace. I should have been terrified, but I was too scared for that. I had my eyes closed to keep the dust from blinding me, and around me I could hear people crying and screaming. I don’t think I was one of them, but I know my daughters were. Eventually the freight train left, just vanished suddenly, and all we could hear were some sirens, regular sirens. The tornado siren was quiet, mercifully.
People started climbing to their feet, and helping others up. Somebody opened the door to the school, and light came in, and people began moving out of the crawlspace. Everybody was gawping at the sight. The roof was missing over part of the school, and that’s where the light was coming from. We kept moving out. All of us who had been in the crawlspace were filthy, and the twins had runnels of tears going down their faces. They had their arms around me. “It’s okay, it’s over,” I told them. “Let’s keep moving.”
The surprising part to me was that after the storm blew through, the weather outside was bright and sunny. The general direction of traffic was towards the outside, so we moved in that direction. For once the reporters were ignoring me. They had a real life calamity to play with! Outside it became really obvious that Springboro had been well and truly trashed! The tornado siren over the school had been toppled over and had crashed through the front end of the campaign bus. We were stuck in Springboro for the foreseeable future. Around us, the remains of several houses were laid flat. Off to one side a sudden fireball lit the sky, and a bunch of people began running that way, including the reporters.
Organization began to grow, however. The school gym and lunchroom were still viable and safe, and they would be a makeshift shelter. A volunteer fireman and the mayor were on a walkie-talkie sorting things out. Another local big shot called for volunteers to search some of the nearby homes. I turned the twins to face me. “You two need to stay here. I want you to go down to the gym and volunteer. People need help.”