Domestic Affairs (6 page)

T
he email showed up like a mass email, but then Olivia noticed there wasn't any subject.

[email protected]
:
Hey, Hoya, what's your pin?

Pin? What did that mean? Was it for her? Was it him? He couldn't actually have that email address, could he? She felt a flurry of nervousness in her stomach.

[email protected]
:
My pin?

That seemed like the only thing to write back. That way, if he didn't mean to send it to her or if it wasn't him she could figure it out. She stared around her office, a small room left over from the district attorney's large campaign space, which, aside from her, had since been emptied. It was packed with boxes on their way to storage and remnant posters, as well as clothes she needed to take home. She waited impatiently for the blinking red light.

[email protected]
:
Press reply then type in “mypin” and then hit the space bar.

She followed the instructions and when she pressed the space bar the “mypin” turned into the red letters and numbers that she assumed were “her pin.”

Cool
, she typed, still not understanding what the heck a pin was. As the little arrow in the corner started to send the message she flinched.

I probably should've said, “Nice to meet you. So excited to work for you.”
Or something. Jeez. Near leader of the free world and that's the message I send? “Cool”?
But before she could think another thought, her BlackBerry lit up. A red message stood waiting.

PIN 317323: So you ready to raise me millions or what?

Olivia smiled. She could almost feel his smile through the text.

PIN 678018: Hmmm. Depends really. You ready to pay me millions?

Her “pin” was sent back in red. She wasn't supposed to be this casual. She knew that.
But he did start with “Hey, Hoya,” right?
She hated these mini nervous breakdowns between messages. You were supposed to be able to discuss and analyze these with at least three friends before replying.

PIN 317323: If hope and inspiration are currency in your world then yes.

Ahhh, I get it. A “pin” is how people who totally have you pinned send you a message.
Before she could come up with something to write back, another reply came in.

PIN 317323: I hear you officially start here in a month. How about we pull a test run a little early next week? You, me, and the NY donors.

It was all starting.

Olivia walked down the hall to the office of her current boss, newly elected district attorney Tom Adams. The whole floor looked, as most state government offices do, like a midlevel law firm designed and decorated in the eighties, with brownish carpeting and cream-colored wallpaper that was probably a little brighter, maybe even white, when it was put up. Each new occupant changed a picture here and there, the Democrats adding Clinton's portrait, the Republicans Reagan's. But all in all, it stayed exactly the same. Olivia peered into some of the offices, saying her hellos to those she knew from the campaign, all of whom seemed eager to get right back to work. Fundraisers were the most popular kids at the table up until the election, but the minute it was over—win or lose—they lost all worth.

Olivia told her boss she was going to take the day to help Governor Taylor with meetings. When she originally let him know she would be leaving his office entirely to work for Taylor, Adams had flinched,
but there wasn't really any question of whether or not she should stay nor negotiations he could offer her. As expected, Adams was actually glad to let her go. Even he was surprised that she had been offered the high-ranking job, and with Taylor on the brink of possibly being president, having a former staffer on the inside was a total coup. Also, it would connect the two of them in the donor base, and Adams, like any politician considering a future run, saw the upside to that. More specifically, Adams relished the possible access to Taylor's lists.

Lists. Campaign Lesson #12: Political fundraising lists are hot commodities. Olivia understood the idea of it: political donors who gave to one person were most likely to give to another of the same ilk. The weight that candidates put on those lists, though, seemed completely irrational to her. They would spend hours going through them, picking out names they knew or making connections to how they could get to them. The candidates' view was, almost across the board, that the money raised directly corresponded to the number of people on a list. Statistically that made sense, but the truth was that cold-calling a list, no matter how good it was, would warrant only two or maybe three contributions you wouldn't have gotten anyway.

Adams was an extreme version of the politician who dreamed that every new list held a fortune just waiting for his campaign coffers. He was obsessed with other peoples' lists. Olivia was constantly having to download other politicians' filings and translate them into usable formats—a horribly laborious task. For their last event they'd mailed to twenty-two thousand people and got two hundred and fifty donors, none of whom came from anything other than Olivia's core list anyway. Even the thought of it made her cringe.

Plus, the truth was that Olivia had just about overstayed her welcome at Adams's PAC, and given the continued failure of her resolutions for the past four New Year's—to go teach skiing in Colorado—they both knew she would need a new job soon.
PAC, political action committee—what a stupid name. It isn't political, it rarely takes action, and there's never any actual committee.
In practice, a PAC was more of a holding company that allowed politicians to either keep paying the staffers they didn't want to lose between campaigns or to offer those staffers a needed cushion between Election Day and a new administration job. Adams knew,
with four years before his next serious election, that her time with him was about up and that Taylor would be a great new place for her to land.

Walking out of Adams's office, she didn't even wait until she reached the water cooler before enthusiastically grabbing at her pocket for her BlackBerry.

Looking forward to it,
she pinned the governor, doing her best to play it cool, and then immediately started plotting out what she would wear.

Getting back to Georgia after a New York trip usually left Jacob with almost a hangover feeling, but the past two days had been different. Getting Olivia on board meant the campaign could really start moving, and his date with Sophie had left him unable to stop smiling. He loved the adrenaline of both. The pieces were falling into place.

He paced with antsy steps outside of the governor's office, waiting for him to get off whatever call was taking him so long. He flopped down on the visitors' maroon leather tufted couch that had become more comfortable as it got a little more worn in and stared up at the framed map of Georgia that hung across from him. Offices in the South seemed so much more regal than those up north. Almost an extension of Southern manners, they were decorated with a certain grace and tradition that just wasn't found in New York. The ceilings were high and each corner had a beam that seemed like it had been taken off a plantation. Of course, Taylor had added a wall of Georgia sports heroes and the ten-foot mural of himself, Aubrey, and the kids, both of which detracted a bit from the elegance of the place.
Classic Taylor
, he thought,
Southern tradition with a twist of superstardom
.

“What is taking him so long?” he mumbled under his breath.

The governor's assistant, a thin woman, probably in her sixties, named Arlene, who talked with a particularly slow drawl, glanced up almost as if he had yelled the question. She was a career assistant who had been passed down from one governor to the next, with seemingly little concern paid to who they were or what they stood for. “Hard work is the yeast that raises the dough,” she would say, addressing everyone as if she were talking to one of her sixteen grandkids. It probably was
the multitude of offspring that armed her with a knack for hearing what people said under their breath. “The governor sure does have molasses in his britches today,” she said, concurring.

“Yeah,” Jacob replied, enjoying another one of her classic sayings, and then quickly corrected himself. “I mean, yes, ma'am.” Something about older Southern people made him acutely aware of his habitually poor English. He picked himself up from the couch, deciding to take action.

He peered into the office, trying not to lose his cool. “Governor, we really have to leave.” They were late again for the morning briefing, which would undoubtedly make them late for the rest of the day. Aubrey had already texted Jacob twice, not-so-subtly explaining how “unhappy” she would be if they were late to the Habitat for Humanity event. It was his least-favorite phrase of hers. “Jacob,” she'd say with a big break after “Ja-” and a loud emphasis on the “-cob,” like she was auditioning for Meryl Streep's role in
The Devil Wears Prada
, “I will be ra-ther unnn-happy if he is a minute late to myyyy event today.” He had heard it so many times he could detect the passive-aggressive emphasis on each syllable even in an email or text. Her insistence on getting the schedule every morning was one of Jacob's big lost battles. She would comb through it, picking apart every detail, and would often call for an explanation of why something had been put on or why something else had been left off.

On some level Jacob appreciated her intensity, and lord knew they needed her on the trail. He just wished she didn't always have to be so mean about it. Inexplicably, to anyone who knew her well, she was beloved everywhere in the country, aside from the campaign, of course. Her smiles and hair flips were enough to win them at least five to ten points in the polls, and having her stump could always pull them out of whatever hole they were in at the moment. She was happy to do it too. Sometimes it seemed she liked campaigning more than Landon did.

And she was definitely more ambitious about winning. Aubrey had been measuring the White House for curtains for years now. The inside joke on the last campaign was that the presidential candidate threw the election because he knew Aubrey carried a pocket knife that she wasn't afraid to use to make Landon president especially if he were
next in line. Her ambition, though, in Jacob's view, was flawed in its stubbornness. She didn't only want them to win, she wanted them to win her way, and when they weren't doing it her way, heads would roll. Jacob had mastered the art of keeping her happy and the perhaps more difficult art of making her seem happy to the rest of the world.

“I'm on it,” he had responded via email. “Like white on rice today!” He said it as he typed, trying to push a strained smile through the airwaves.

White on rice that insists on being purple
, he thought as he leaned on Taylor's door and waved his hands in a speed-it-up motion. They actually needed about an hour more in their morning to make it to the event on time and there really wasn't anything he could cut from the schedule. His plan was to pull his boss from every room ten minutes early and to do that, he needed to start pulling him twenty minutes early now. The governor looked over, annoyed at being hustled along. But he obligingly hung up.

“Sorry, sir. We just have to go.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Taylor lightened up. “I've heard I'm on a tight schedule today.”

Jacob smiled, realizing the governor had probably heard about the event twice as many times as he had. Some days Aubrey's nagging would put Taylor in an awful mood, a fact that would never be alluded to in front of him by anyone except Jacob. At first Jacob never said a word, keeping his subtle eye-rolls, as all staffers did, strictly behind Taylor's back. Half of his career had been spent putting out fires she started, and he had gotten used to it. A few years back, though, he'd had a particularly rough go of it. It was in the middle of the last campaign, and Aubrey was aggravated that Jacob had taken over her daily schedule, which until that point had been the job of Mary Elizabeth, Aubrey's just-out-of-college, naïve assistant. With great regularity, Aubrey hired, and fired, assistants young enough to tolerate being ordered around, but who would not make a single decision—including when to take a bathroom break—without express approval and direction from their boss. Rather than talk to Jacob, she jumped unannounced onto the weekly staff call, which included about thirty-five campaign workers in six different offices.

When the call turned to Aubrey's schedule, Jacob began to walk everyone through the stops she would be making. They included “retail meet-and-greets,” where she would shake hands with people coming and going from stores. In grand Aubrey fashion, she piped up, without warning, when they got to the main stop of the day.

“Now, why the fuck would I stand outside a Target all day? Do any of you know how fucking cold it is in Iowa in October?!” she screamed into her speakerphone. Jacob, shocked to hear her on the call at all and trying to control the outburst, immediately fell on his sword.