Born to Run (25 page)

The clip ended abruptly with the crashing sound—but no image—of a breaking plate. The focus groups loved it. The lawyers hated it. The American Bar Association, no bunch of wimps,
came out blubbering it was vilification, but apart from them few others cared.

The ad was working beautifully for Hank. And it was only one of four.

Don Thomas retaliated for Foster but made a titanic miscalculation. In truth, his ads were hardly more negative than Gregory’s but the voting tide was rushing so fast ahead of him he
couldn’t seem to catch up. His most poisonous stole its venom from Hillary Clinton’s “It’s 3 AM and your children are asleep and the phone is ringing” anti-Obama ad
during their 2007 primaries. Don’s opened with a shaky nail-bitten index finger hovering over the nuclear button. A voice, genteel and plummy like Hank’s, said “
Fire
”
but what flashed up on screen was a newscast video of the Boston nightclub blaze. This time, the public rage was savage and Don had to pull the ad within hours.

“SO now I’m the desperate one,” Foster fumed as he slammed down the newspaper. “Clemens attacks me and that’s fine, yet I can’t even whisper
he’s a fucking arsonist without it creating a stink. Go figure!”

SNAP!

“And Don, get that fucking Niki Abbott out of here. She gets no more, ah, access. None.”

Niki had already enjoyed plenty of access to Foster. More than Don knew.

IT was getting down to the wire. Just as the polls had swung violently in Hank’s favour a week ago, Gregory knew they could easily swing back, especially if the
“old Hank” revealed himself. There was no way he, or Hank, or Bill were going to let up the pressure on their most valuable asset, Isabel. No way could they countenance anything short
of stapling her to Hank’s right hand during the final stretch.

“If I’m stuck here, courtesy of you,” said Gregory in mock complaint, “you’re going to stay here too. This could be…”

Isabel placed her finger over his mouth. She wouldn’t be quitting, not after what she’d gone through to get to this point. This wasn’t about her; it never had been. It was
about doing what was right; about winning the best government for the nation.

And with the right backup, even Hank Clemens would do fine.

She smiled at Gregory like a cat that had just finished off a careless sparrow.

I
T WAS FRIDAY before Election Tuesday. The weekend pundits were firming up their predictions for Saturday’s editions. The near-miss subway
attack had blown Don Thomas’ strategy way off course and Hank had strong odds in his favour. Don had to manufacture an alternative scare campaign. It was a hackneyed classic, sure, but what
else did he have? In it, Hank was portrayed as a lightweight, a stooge at the beck and call of sinister faceless men, all Republicans and thus evil, white, rich and old.

He didn’t know how close he was.

Again, the public reaction was not what Don had expected. Was he losing his touch? What came back to campaign HQ from the focus groups was… Hank seems so, you know, nice, chirpy, and he
does know about national security… and so what if he is a stooge, so long as he’s Isabel’s stooge, and she’s rich, sure, but she’s not evil, white or old. We like
her
, so…

With Isabel’s in-your-face, day-in-day-out backing, Hank’s mediocrity had strangely become an attribute and perversely Don’s ad would only give it air.

Don’s heaviest campaign burden had again become “that woman,” a term he had winced at in an earlier frustrating era. But
this
woman had clout with the electorate, not
just sway in the corridors and closets of power.

Even though she wasn’t officially running, Isabel Diaz was Foster’s real opposition.

“This is a fucking phantom election,” Don swore to Foster over the phone. “We’re fighting Clemens, but everyone’s convinced that a vote for him’s a vote for
Diaz. She’s not even on the voting paper. How do we fight that?”

“You’re asking me?” said Foster.

DON knew they couldn’t attack Isabel—she was America’s sweetheart, even more so after an absurd legal technicality had shouldered her to the sidelines. What
the Foster campaign did now had to be directed squarely at Hank and yet, the cynical wine-soaked Washington media were already sloshing around and toasting the guy.

But Don had faith. He’d only lost one campaign in his long career and this wasn’t going to be another. In his game, you could lose one presidential campaign and survive, but not two.
He’d honed his instincts with experience and doggedness. His famous stoop developed over decades poring 24/7 over newspapers, newsletters, magazines, TV and web pages, never sleeping till
every angle was covered, analysed and dealt with. A veteran of more campaigns at both federal and state level than almost anyone in the party, Don Thomas knew how to recognise a flake, and Hank was
a flake.

He had to expose him… he just didn’t know how, yet. And time was no friend.

Don cloistered himself in Democrat campaign headquarters’ media room with a six-pack of Bud, two 25s of Marlboro Red and a small package from FedEx he’d just flown in—a DVD,
according to the label his assistant saw before he snatched it from her hand and double-locked the door behind him. The tittle-tattle within the team was that Don had lost it; he’d given up
on winning and had imported some porn, some beers and some smokes and was going to blow the campaign.

Don ignored the stares and elbow nudges as he flicked one switch to turn the glass partition opaque and another to cut the lights. He twisted his first Bud long-neck open and took a swig. The
first Marlboro flew to his mouth, as if it were guiding his hand there, and he let it droop waiting for a thought to emerge.

It didn’t. So he inserted the DVD and hit Play. He ran it for a second before skimming ahead on fast-forward. After a while, he paused it and lit his cigarette. He took several long drags
as an idea staggered its way out, but he rejected it. He pressed play briefly then fast-forwarded again. He repeated this cycle ten or fifteen times. What was he looking for? He still had no clue.
For the first twenty minutes it was an exercise in desperate hope, no more than a frustrating time-filler and an excuse to get through three cigarettes and two beers. By the third beer, his
concentration was intense and he was leaning so close into the screen he was almost in it, almost tongue-close to the monitor. What gripped his attention was the brow that Hank Clemens kept digging
into his face, filling it with soothing gravitas. At Don’s insistence, this DVD had been loaded up with every TV interview Hank Clemens had given over the last rotten godforsaken week. The
“brow” started with
Meet the Press
and, as the week’s clips progressed from there, Hank’s forehead developed more and more of these brows and the furrows notched in
deeper and deeper. He was no Mr Country Club, not any more.

Hank was Mr Responsibility. Mr Trust Me.

Mr Fake.

Don banged down his Bud with such force that the geyser of beer it shot up spilled over the table. He drew back on his smoke. Don’s revelation was about imagery, not Hank’s actual
words; especially since Don had intentionally kept the sound on mute the first and second times around. It was in the way Hank said whatever crap he’d been schooled to say. It was like the
guy had just learned up the whole series of “How to Appear Presidential in Ten Easy Lessons,” a course the GOP must have designed only after George W. Bush left office.

Why hadn’t Don picked up on this before? It was so damned obvious.

Don lit up another cigarette unaware he still had one in his mouth. In campaigning, he reminded himself, there was nothing wrong or immoral about phony sincerity. Politics was built on it. What
was wrong was getting caught.

No one had noticed it because they didn’t want to or, like Don, they weren’t looking hard enough. Don fumed at how the subway attack had played into Republican hands. The media, the
public—everyone—had gone soft on Hank, respectful, toning down their previously harsh critiques… this wasn’t the time to be petty… we need to elevate the
debate… let’s not sink into the gutter… or break a plate.

Don loathed that plate. If the election weren’t being played on damn Queensberry Rules over the last two weeks, Hank Clemens would have been knocked onto the mat and counted out. It was
time to rip off the gloves and go for the kill.

Fuelled by beer, cigarettes and rage, Don hunkered down alone for two hours lifting two-or three-second grabs from the DVD and, with the editing machine, he stuck together a quick-and-dirty ad
with Hank himself doing Don’s dirty work, all thirty beautiful seconds of it. Pure vote-catching magic.

“
So how will you deal with another terror attack, Mr Clemens?
”

The initial furrow of the brow, “
I was at Homeland Security as you know
…” The deeper crease, “…
and you saw what we… er, they… did this
time.
” Crease unwinds into smarmy smile, “
I think the people can trust me on this one, Tim
…” Earnest puppy-dog brown eyes to camera, head tilting just a tad to
flop his light brown fringe down to soften the image. Cut.

And so it was also with Julia, and Phil, and Barbara, and Larry, and… Whether these six, no seven, repeat episodes were conscious ham-acting by Hank or not, Don couldn’t care.
Jammed up one after the other—BAM! BAM! BAM!—they looked like it. The gestures, even the words, were pretty much identical, even down to the fireside golly-gosh ums and ers.

Don leant back with his hands clasped behind his head and took a deep, long drag of his sixteenth Marlboro—but who was counting? It was sweet. Very sweet. He had sniffed out the rancid
whiff of the disingenuous Republican prick and he was going to dig right in, yank him out and pump the fucker dry for all he was worth.

Through the smoke cloud of three more cigarettes, the punchline for Don’s makeshift ad materialised, “
So… WE’RE gonna trust HIM to do WHAT?
” It would be
spoken over an old sepia snapshot of a young Hank bowing deep on a schoolboy stage, arms spread, soaking in his parents’ uncritical applause. With a good ol’ fratboy like Clemens,
Don’s media hounds would be able to scavenge a shot like that from somewhere, for sure.

And they did.

The ad got to air Saturday night and Don had it running all Sunday and all Monday. No voter registered in any of the swing states could have missed it unless they were on vacation and lodging
their postal votes from New Zealand.

“HANK, this Foster ad is despicable,” said Gregory, crushing his empty Diet Coke can for emphasis. It was still an hour before Don’s new ad would first hit
the airwaves—a “friend” at CBS, still trying to suck up after the
Close-up
debacle, had slipped Gregory a soft copy by email and he’d forwarded it to Hank.

“Why?” Hank asked, doe-eyed with naïveté. “It’s what I believe… It’s why we’re winning.”

“You are kidding, right?”

He wasn’t.

To retaliate, Gregory upped the frequency of his negative Foster ads, turning the volume on the dish drops way up. He also revived an early one: a clip showing Isabel and Hank in serious
discussion with the newly added caption, “
What Isabel Diaz likes about Hank Clemens is that he listens
…” If Don’s ad got any grip, this one—Gregory was
certain—would loosen it. If you couldn’t trust Hank, don’t worry; Isabel was behind him.

By Monday morning, Gregory felt sick.
The Times
’ editorial stank and even the generally pro-Republican
Wall Street Journal
questioned his strategy. “Buy one
Hank… get one free Isabel?” it asked, rejecting the notion.

The polls were no better either.

Foster was back. By a nose.

H
ANK’S ELECTION NIGHT concession speech was initially seen as respectable, mostly because it was short:

It was the usual billowy fluff that a loser would plump up to express his grace in defeat and to charm his followers into accepting that their months of unpaid toil
weren’t wasted. Yet, Hank’s words failed both objectives and, worse, twisted themselves into the ultimate sword of humiliation, skewering any scraps of dignity his campaign workers and
supporters had clung to. As headlined the following day, even in defeat Hank was a phony.

Bobby Foster had been ensconced in his hotel suite putting the final touches on his victory speech and his Big Entrance but, in case he needed to respond to something, he kept one eye and one
ear on Hank’s teary TV act. Hank wasn’t long into it when Bobby’s other eye was drawn to Don Thomas who he caught over in the corner mumbling. Mumbling was something Don, a
stickler for the spoken word, never did. On closer inspection, Bobby thought he saw Don’s lips flapping perfectly in sync with Hank’s.

“How are you doing that?” Bobby asked.

Don knew Hank’s words especially well since he’d written most of them. Word-for-word, Clemens was reciting Al Gore’s concession speech from the 2000 election. Don would never
forget those words… or the five seesaw weeks of legal wrangling that had hollowed him out and drooped his stoop by a whole other inch.

As Bobby and his swollen entourage swished out of the suite, Don stayed behind to phone Gregory on his cell; Don could see his peer’s bald head on TV with Clemens—over to the side,
of course—and he watched as he took the call. “What the hell was that?” snapped Don.

Gregory knew Don’s voice instantly and, wisely, stepped off camera to speak. He too had recognised Gore’s words. “So, Don,” he said, wiping his brow, “WE trusted
HIM to do WHAT? Your ad. That was the, ah, inconvenient truth, wasn’t it?”