Meanwhile, I was living proof of the old adage ‘protect me from my friends; I could take care of my enemies.’ Rush Limbaugh was slamming me with complaints that I wasn’t conservative enough. I was much too liberal; I was pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-gun rights, anti-church. In short, I wasn’t a real Republican. I wondered where he was getting some of this stuff. My pro choice stance was well known, and I had never hidden it. The anti-gun rights was a convoluted take on my passage of the Defending the Second Amendment Act, where I had agreed to restrictions on magazine sizes, even though I had managed to increase concealed carry privileges across the country. I wasn’t sure about the anti-church claim; no, I didn’t go to a Protestant church, but my wife and children were active members of the Catholic church, and I occasionally went with them to Mass. Being Catholic was not a big seller in the heartland, but it was a long time since Kennedy had to address it, and Marilyn wasn’t running for office.
The pro-gay bit wasn’t a real surprise to me. That had been dogging me for a few years now, since I had voted against the Defense of Marriage Act back in 1996. The homophobes had decided we needed to do something about the wave of gay marriages inundating the God fearing Christians of our great nation, so they passed a law stating that only straights could marry. It would ultimately be found unconstitutional. I had been the only straight Republican in the entire Congress to vote against it, which had not endeared me to Newt. My argument was on a purely constitutional basis. States have the power to regulate marriage, not the Feds. Some states would end up allowing it, and some would ban it. I simply reiterated my position that marriage is up to the states, not the Federal government.
This didn’t sit well with the true believers on our side. Worse to come was when I got a call from Marty Adrianopolis in the office in Rayburn. I was in a motel room in Santa Fe when he called. “Hey Marty, what’s up?”
“I’ve got reporters around here sniffing around the place. It would seem that Carter Braxton isn’t as far in the closet as he thinks he is.”
“Tell me something I didn’t already know.” Carter Braxton was my Assistant Legislative Director, and was quite good at it. He was also gay, and hiding it. He hid it pretty well, too, but both Marty and I had been dinged by our gay-dar. I talked it over with Marty and we basically shrugged. It wasn’t our business and Carter was a good staffer. Our biggest question to each other was how come Carter was a Republican, when the party basically wanted to have him tarred and feathered.
“Yeah, well, he’s freaking out. He has reporters following him around. Limbaugh outed him today and the phones have been ringing off the hook. He had never told his parents.”
“Great! This is 2000, not 1950. It’s not illegal,” I replied.
“So, what do you want to do about this?” he asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
“Rove’s office called and they want us to cut him loose. Come up with some bogus reason, but cut him loose and get rid of ‘the little faggot.’ Their words, not mine.”
I rolled my eyes at that. “Screw that. Carter has enough problems now. I do that and I play straight into the hands of Al Gore. Tell Carter he’s safe. I’ll tell him he’s safe.”
“He’s not here. I sent him home.”
“Have him call me tomorrow morning. I’ll tell him.”
I was hit with this in the morning, before I even had a chance to talk to Carter. “Congressman, is it true you are planning on firing one of your key Congressional staff members because he is gay?”
Good question! If I say yes, I look hypocritical and the Democrats rake me over the coals. If I say no, the hard core Evangelicals in the Republican Party have ‘proof’ I’m not really one of them. It was time to play that most trusted of cards — always answer a hostile question with another question. I gave him my most confused look. “Excuse me? Has one of my staff members been accused of a crime?”
“Are you claiming that being gay is a crime?”
“Do you think it’s a crime?”
“So, what about the demands from Rush Limbaugh that you fire Carter Braxton?” asked somebody else.
“Is that who this is about? Carter Braxton? He’s on my legislative staff. What’s he done?” I asked innocently.
“Are you claiming that you weren’t aware Carter Braxton was a homosexual?” asked a third voice.
I shrugged. “Is that something I should be finding out about my staff?”
“So you aren’t going to do something about this?”
“What do you want me to do?”
I just kept up the dumb question routine and let them blather on. Later that morning I talked to Carter and told him he wasn’t being fired. Fox News wasn’t amused, but I just didn’t care. George couldn’t repudiate my actions either, without painting himself into the same corner.
That made me wonder about the whole event. I wouldn’t put it past Rove to throw me under a bus, but in doing so he put Bush at risk. Cheney wasn’t going to make a stink, not when one of his daughters was a lesbian. This was shaping up to be a close election. Screwing me over prior to the election didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Likewise, it was too easy for a campaign stunt like outing a staffer to backfire if it had been done by the Gore campaign. It was more likely that this was the random investigation of the millions of reporters currently investigating me.
I was now being publicly vetted at a level beyond anything I had ever contemplated during my public life up to this point. Huge sums were being spent to find any conceivable snippet of information about the candidates. My classmates at every school I had ever attended were being tracked down and interviewed, to see if they remembered me. Every speech and vote was being examined by partisan reporters from both sides. Everybody I had ever done business with, from coast to coast, was being interviewed, and every deal was being put under a microscope.
Some of the problems we had were self inflicted. One of the Bush campaign’s bullet points was that George Bush was a businessman, and knew how to run the country like a business. Never mind that countries and companies are two different things. Now they had me as another successful businessman. One of my handlers opened his fat yap and said that as a businessman I had invested in companies to increase jobs in America. I remembered how that had bit Mitt Romney in the ass. All it would take was a single company to report that they had laid off a single worker to put some serious hurt on the campaign.
I grabbed Matt Scully and pulled him aside. “Shut that asshole up! He is going to bury us!”
“What is the problem, Congressman? We are pushing your success as a businessman. This plays to that perfectly!”
“This is a disaster. Just follow my lead on this and tell him to knock it off!”
At the next question and answer period, I was asked, “Congressman, is it true that you only invested in companies that were hiring American workers?”
I gave a wry smile, but shook my head negatively. “I think that statement is a bit of a misrepresentation of what actually happened. I invested in companies to make money for my shareholders and investors. While I certainly hoped that I was creating new jobs, that wasn’t my only concern. I had a legal duty to maximize returns on investment, not jobs. I was pretty successful at that.”
I could see the others staring at each other. There were all sorts of wonderful ways to use this to try and sink me. How dare I say that creating jobs wasn’t a politician’s primary purpose! The fact that I wasn’t a politician at the time meant nothing! A worse case, however, would be trying to have it both ways, which had really fucked over Romney. In this case I had to stick to a single and solitary message, that I was in the money business back in the Eighties, not the political business. I left it to Matt to come up with better ways to tell that message.