Unfortunately, John was right about there being nobody you could pin this on. This crap was like a boiling pot full of raw sewage, bubbling up from the bottom. I could easily envision a scenario, following a statement by me that Barack Obama was an American and a Christian, and an appeal to broadcasters to stop repeating lies that they knew were lies. All it would take was for Rush Limbaugh to repeat my statement on air, and ask for comments.
Rush: “So President Buckman says that he doesn’t need evidence that Barack Hussein Obama is actually an American and isn’t a Muslim. What are your thoughts on this? Let’s hear from some listeners!”
Listener: “That’s not true! He wasn’t born here! He was born in Kenya, and was raised a Muslim! You have to see the evidence!”
Rush: “That’s not what President Buckman is saying.”
Listener: “Carl Buckman is a murderer. You can’t trust a word he says. He’s really a Democrat, and you know it! His whole family is a bunch of liberals! He’s not even a Christian himself. He doesn’t go to church!”
From there it would just get worse. Any vestige of principle I had would be swallowed up with this.
I talked to John again a day later, as more of this crap began to surface. I didn’t need my Veep pissed at me, but he had to know what I was going to say if I was asked, because I would surely be asked. Worst of all, was the fact that the people who were most likely to believe and spout this stuff were simply not going to be swayed by truth or logic. They knew what they knew, and if you disagreed with them, you wouldn’t convince them, but you would definitely piss them off. The best that John or I or his campaign people could come up with was a statement along the lines that, ‘I don’t know who told you Senator Obama was [fill in the blank] but they were mistaken. I know the Senator and he isn’t.’
One of the problems we had, not just as politicians, but as Americans, was the multitude of all news channels. You had Fox on the right, MSNBC on the left, and CNN in a diminishing middle. There were a lot of people who watched nothing but news shows all day long. I even saw this in my own family; since he had retired, Big Bob, Marilyn’s dad, watched nothing but CNN when he watched television. Five hundred channels, but he only watched one; the others could all be taken off the tuner. Since the news channels couldn’t possibly come up with actual breaking news every second of the day, they didn’t even try. A typical 24 hours of ‘news’ was actually only 5–6 of what Walter Cronkite would recognize as news. The other 18–19 was actually commentary, talking heads just like the Sunday morning news shows, only with their pet commentators and lobbyists looking to push their paid interests.
John had to begin doing this dance just a few days after Obama clinched the nomination. He was speaking to a town hall meeting in Nebraska when a woman stood up and asked him what he would do about the fact that foreigners were allowed to run for office in this country, and why we weren’t arresting them and deporting them to Africa where they belonged. John visibly winced at that, and then went into his little song-and-dance. It was a two-parter, where he first gave his ‘I don’t know where you got your information… ‘ speech, followed up by ‘The real issue is not whether Barack Obama is an American. He is. The real issue is that he’s a radical liberal… ‘ He would then highlight the differences between Obama’s positions, taken from Obama’s primary battle, and his own positions. I liked that approach, and decided I would use it as well.
The next big campaign events would be the conventions. The timing on these is always complicated by the fact that the Presidential race is also the same year as the Summer Olympics. In general, you end up with the conventions sandwiching the Olympics, with the challenger going right before, and the incumbent right after. I knew there had been some talk of doing both after, but that would have put the Republican convention into September, and that was too late. I told the RNC to select the standard choice, the week after the Olympics, which left the Dems to go the week before.
This was aided by the fact that I had no interest in attending the Olympics. Marilyn and I just weren’t interested. If we went it would be as representatives of the United States, and that puts a different spin on things. Four years ago I had sent John McCain to Greece to represent the country at the Athens Olympics while I campaigned. This time the Olympics were in Beijing, and were supposed to show how Communist China was such a modern and thriving nation, their ‘coming out party’ for the world. Total bullshit, of course. By keeping our deficit levels down to a net zero during my administration, the Chinese didn’t have anywhere near the influence on our foreign policy that they wanted to have. I didn’t need to make nice with them.
I told John that he and Cindy could go if they wanted; I wasn’t going, and if he didn’t go, they would have to make do with our local ambassador. John and his wife went to the opening ceremonies and came home a day later to continue campaigning. The Beijing newspapers and television, all state controlled, reported this as a snub. Will dismissed this at the next press conference; simply reporting that time constraints prohibited either John or me from attending any further. I hadn’t traveled to Beijing on any sort of foreign relations visit either, and hadn’t hosted the Chinese President either. We had met, cordially, at a couple of Asian conferences, but that was it. They had an outsized opinion of their importance at times, and thought that the South China Sea was their personal lake. I made sure that our Navy sailed through there repeatedly to remind them it wasn’t.
Chapter 173: The Home Stretch
The Democratic convention was scheduled to begin Monday August 4 and run through Thursday August 7, and would be held in Denver. The Olympics would begin the next day, Friday August 8, and run for just over two weeks, to close on Sunday August 24. Right after that, the Republicans would take the field, with a convention in St. Paul running from Monday August 25 through Thursday August 28. After that the campaigns would begin in earnest, and it would be tooth and nail for the next nine weeks.
There is a certain rhythm and protocol to the convention speeches, on both sides of the aisle. Normally, the first night the previous President speaks. In this case, I was speaking, and Bill Clinton, despite the cloud he had gone out of office under was speaking to the Democrats. The second night is the keynote speaker, supposed to throw out lofty rhetoric and nothing of substance. The third night is the Vice Presidential choice, and the fourth and last night is the Presidential nominee himself.
Barack Obama picked Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his V.P. choice, a solid liberal white male choice. From what we could figure out, he couldn’t stand Hillary, and they were both smarting from the bitter primary fight. She was actually their keynote speaker on Tuesday, trying to rebuild the bridges she had burned during the primaries. From what I remembered from my first shot, he would end up with her in the Cabinet.
John McCain had been all over the playing field trying to figure out his Vice Presidential selection. He debated picking one of his primary opponents, like Huckabee (a favorite of the conservative base) or Romney (a favorite of the business and liberal wings). He also looked at some of the second tier candidates who had dropped out early, like Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who had been a Governor and a Cabinet member, and a few Senators, Governors, and Cabinet members. Ultimately he selected Jeb Bush. I had suggested Jeb, but I wasn’t the only one to do so. Unlike on my first round, George hadn’t had a chance to sully the Bush family name, so Jeb was a very viable choice, and acceptable to the base. Mitt would be the keynote speaker on Tuesday.