John was the presumptive nominee, and to the extent that my blessing meant anything, he had it. My blessing meant nothing with the right wing. By now I had proven myself to be anything but a true Republican. I made deals with Democrats, had put two Supreme Court justices in place who hadn’t banned abortion, I didn’t go to church (and they whispered about my Catholic wife and children), and I hadn’t lowered taxes or cut spending enough. That was roughly one quarter of the party, and they did not like me or John. Three quarters, however, did like us, so that was good for John. One permanent worry we had was that Huckabee might run a third party candidacy when he lost in the primaries, which would doom the party in the national election.
On the Democratic side, things were rather unsettled. The field was wide open. John Kerry had been thumped the last time, so he was staying in the Senate. His VP nominee, John Edwards, was running, as was Hillary Clinton, and that new darling of the Democrats, Barack Obama. In reality they were the only serious candidates, but just about every other Democratic Senator and Governor had announced they were either exploring the possibility or were actively running. Iowa and New Hampshire were making money hand over fist on television ads.
John had the upper hand. A decent economy always favors the party in power. On the Republican side, he was getting the lion’s share of the donations, and was the presumptive favorite. As long as he didn’t step on his crank, he would do fine. I was pushing him to pick a moderate running mate, and not to pander to the base. He needed to always remember that the Vice Presidential selection might not help, but could always hurt. A loud mouthed nitwit would come back to bite him in the ass. On the Democratic side, it was a tossup at the moment, and we just were waiting and watching for somebody to self-destruct. They all had some fatal flaws, but which ones would show first?
I was able to take it all with a certain degree of relaxation. This was the end for me. I just needed to make it to the election without fucking up. I wasn’t running, and if I campaigned too much, it might hurt John. Marilyn was happy, as well. I would be getting out of politics for good, although it was expected I might still have a say from the sidelines. We could go home, and visit Hougomont and travel, and it wouldn’t be a zoo any longer. I promised her we would take a long vacation trip, somewhere, anywhere, just the three of us, her, me, and Stormy. That got her to laughing pretty good. I also told her I was going to get my knee replaced, which was a bit more sobering, but she agreed with me on that, too.
2007 was relatively quiet. We continued catching various terrorists, but generally it was overseas. For most of these guys, while they would love to visit the Great Satan and kill themselves gloriously for the Jihad, it wasn’t all that easy. The average jihadist wasn’t very well educated and didn’t speak English. Half the time they would balk at the idea of shaving off their beards and trying to blend in; I guess Mohammed wanted them to wear beards or something when they got to Heaven. Regardless, they stood out to most Customs officials like flashing lights, both here in the States and overseas. It was vastly simpler for them to carry out their grand vision somewhere overseas, where they might be able to drive across a porous border and kill their neighbors.
That didn’t mean we didn’t still have problems. One of the big changes we had made in 2001 was simply to require that all airplane cockpit bulkheads and doors were changed to bulletproof titanium and were locked before flight, and were never unlocked until after landing. If the pilots had to eat MREs, so be it. At least once a year since then, terrorists had managed to get on board a plane, generally overseas, and tried to take it over, but couldn’t get the door open and ended up being taken down by the passengers. The results might be gruesome back in the cabin, but we didn’t have planes flying into buildings. If something happened, the pilots could radio a warning, and be diverted to a landing at an isolated military airstrip, at which point the local SWAT team could board the plane and remove the bodies. In a couple of cases they removed the terrorists’ bodies as well, and looked on any questionable circumstances with a blind eye.
Likewise, we had now instituted a continuing armed combat air patrol over most major American cities. Most of the time it was just a way for the local Air Force and Guard pilots to rack up some flying hours with nothing to do, but every once in awhile, something exciting happened. One suspicious 727 was shot down coming into Miami when it refused to answer a routine FAA flight query, and then ignored an F-16 ordered to intercept it. It turned out to be a bogus transport flight that was being piloted by an Arab flight crew that stole the plane in Bogota. The F-16 put a few rounds across the plane’s nose (which is surprisingly difficult, since the pilot had to disengage the tracking system designed to prevent wasting rounds.) At that point the 727 tried to ram the F-16, which evaded and shot him down. It was like something out of some techno-thriller!
Meanwhile, the FBI continued to catch jihadist wannabes. Now they were learning how to kill, and why, over the Internet. The results were often amateurish, but could still kill if they made them work. The counterterrorism people were working overtime chasing these assholes down.
There were still some things I needed to get involved in. Vladimir Putin was really starting to feel his oats, and he cut off oil and gas exports to Western Europe for several days at the beginning of the year. The excuse was that he was actually punishing Belarus, White Russia, and the pipelines to the West simply went through Belarus. Not everybody was buying that. I ended up taking a lot of phone calls from Germany, Poland, and the Balkan States, asking me to use whatever influence I had with Putin to get him to open the valves up. That sounded great in theory, but the reality was somewhat more limited.
The ‘karate summit’ had been one of the high points of our relationship. The simple fact was that Putin and Russia had more money, and they were spending that money rebuilding their armed forces. The more they rebuilt, the more confident and feisty they became. Vladimir didn’t really need me or the U.S. anyway. They didn’t have a lot of trade with us, and while everybody was a whole lot more polite about it that on my first go, they could tell us to go pound salt.
One sticking point was the fact that I had destroyed Iraq during the Kurdish War. Iraq had been a major Russian client state, and we, along with the Brits, had run through them like shit through a goose. The Russians had argued against any sort of U.N. involvement, and then had vetoed a formal U.N. condemnation or intervention. I had ignored his complaints, and treated it as a NATO problem, and the Russians hated NATO. The new junta running Iraq was spending more money rebuilding than buying weapons, which had been one of the conditions we had insisted the Saudis stick into their loan agreements. Worse, after two disastrous wars using Russian equipment, what rebuilding they were doing involved recycled and modernized Russian equipment bought on the open market. None of that money was going to Russia.
Russia was trying to parlay their dislike for us by sucking up to the Chinese. They had the one thing the Chinese really wanted, which was resources. They began offering trade deals to the Chinese. Two can play at that game. I had Condi Rice lead a trade mission to Germany, and give our blessing to a new liquefied natural gas offloading facility in the Baltic. With American natural gas supplies rising, we could export to them. If it worked as well as the experts said it should, the Europeans could build three or four of the things along the Baltic coast line, and we could feed them natural gas for years to come. If nothing else, American gas, while possibly more costly, was probably going to be a lot more reliable and a lot less political. That got Lee Raymond off my back.