Talk (5 page)

Through what was left of my kamikaze haze, I reminded Phil that Sarah Palin had quit halfway into her term whereas Summers was saying he would fulfill his, just not run for another so he could focus on the economy instead of campaigning.

“Today's not a day for your persnickety bullshit, Powers. Better you instead spend your time putting on your game face. Our whole business is in fuckin' free fall.”

In the world of talk radio, Phil was worried that this was the day the music—well, talk—died. So much of the nation's talk material, my material, was based on kicking the crap out of Summers' presidency. He wasn't sure there'd ever be another Summers. He also predicted trouble for cable TV.

“Fox is fucked,” he railed into his phone. “No amount of leg shots of those lipsticked blond bimbos can make up for what they had going with Summers. And those commie bastards at MSNBC aren't much better. Time for them to find a new butt boy.”

I took that as pretty much an admission from Phil that the whole media world had become a circus, even though he'd never admit it. For some time now, the media outlets on the left—having seen the big business generated by conservative perspectives on the right—had been employing a similar model. I could almost stake my career on the fact that there was some lefty Phil clone who had whispered in Keith Olbermann's ear when he was kicking the shit out of George W. Bush with all of his “special comments” in the last few years of W's term. Hey, the guy might have fucked up by taking us into Iraq, but since when do we say that a president should be prosecuted as a war criminal? In the same way the right was now lockstep and predictable, so too was the left. Each had their own media outlets and pundits who in turn had a stranglehold over politicians. In fact, not only did I suspect there was a left-wing Phil out there, it wouldn't have surprised me if it was
Phil himself. He was all business, and in our many conversations he had never once pretended to have any real concern for the country, much less for its chief executive. Now, however, he was intently focused on the implications of the president's decision on the talk radio world. For me, he had a plan.

“Stan…” he was breathless now. I thought I heard him gasp for air. “You're the only one in the country for whom there could be a silver lining.”

That line would be my hair of the dog. Phil Dean now had my undivided attention.

“My advice is that you immediately go on the warpath against Bob Tobias. He's got a real shot to win the Democratic nomination with Summers out. He's perfectly positioned to jump in quickly and grab the mantle. And you're perfectly positioned too—to be his chief nemesis. Own that turf.”

My head was still spinning so much from Summers' LBJ move that I hadn't even had a chance to think about who would replace him as his party's nominee. On the Republican side, the race had already been going on for months, with the five candidates sparring in a flurry of early debates. But Phil Dean had just changed my focus. Bob Tobias had just been re-elected as governor of Florida, despite the unpopularity of his party nationally. He was a moderate guy who had survived due to a combination of constituent service and avoidance of the political extremes. Responding quickly to coastal storms and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had really earned him stripes with residents along the coast. It's didn't hurt that he was a football hero in a state where pigskin was king.

“Think about it Stan. He's the young, handsome governor of a swing state who defied the odds in a GOP year. When this hangover ends, both parties are gonna figure out that he's the man.”

Fuckin' Phil was right. Sitting in that adobe shack in Taos, probably stuffing his 400-lb frame with Tex-Mex between calls, he had a more keen insight into the politics that were about to unfold than I did, and according to him, I was sitting at ground zero.

“Focus on that wife of his,” he frothed.

“Susan Miller? Floridians love her, Phil.”

Susan Miller was Bob Tobias' other half. She was a homegrown beauty he'd met in college who'd proven to be his greatest political asset. She was smart and assertive, but not in a way that was threatening to men. She had previously been one of the state's top-notch lobbyists. Often I'd heard people say they'd rather have her running Florida than him. But to Phil, she was a talk radio prop.

“She's a suntanned Hillary for Chrissakes! Get to it, Stan.”

Phil clicked off, no doubt to go give marching orders in some other radio market. There was no way he could have known it, but he'd finally hit a wall with me. I could spout off all the conservative bluster he'd want, but there were personal reasons why attacking Susan Miller, Florida's first lady, was out of the question. I drove home to get sick and grab a nap.

President Summers' late withdrawal rendered the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary meaningless for the Democrats. If South Carolina could print new ballots in time to accommodate the quickly emerging Democratic field, it would be the first real contest. But it was more likely that Florida would have that distinction.

It was a different story on the GOP side of the aisle. The Republican field had been set for nearly two years, but now the calculus was about to change. Previously it had been about who was best suited to defeat a liberal, sitting president. Now it was about who would be the strongest against whoever ultimately emerged from the sudden chaos among the Democrats where the outcome of that contest was unpredictable.

Vying for the Republican nod were two governors, one senator, one businessman and one retired military man. Margaret “Molly” Haskel, the conservative, stunning-looking, silver-tonged governor of Texas, had been the frontrunner for nearly 18 months. Of course, nobody ever used her surname.
To her hardcore fans, she was “Molly Hatchet,” on account of the fact that there was no state program in Texas that she had not hacked away at or cut entirely during her two terms in office. That record had helped Haskel placate the base in more than a dozen debates during the last several months, and she was benefiting from an intra-party skirmish amongst three conservative candidates who were running even further to the right and splitting the fringe vote.

The other state CEO competing for the job was Wynne James from Colorado. Governor James was my kind of Republican. He'd balanced Colorado's books without needing a hatchet. And he'd overseen the state's implementation of the legalization of marijuana in a businesslike fashion without theatrics. James not only embraced same-sex marriage, he'd actually officiated the union of one of his cabinet members to a long-term partner. He was both a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian, which caused him to be viewed with suspicion and some derision by the evangelical forces within the party. His open support for abortion and gay rights—two positions that, I believed, actually reflected true conservatism since they meant less government involvement in people's personal lives—made him a pariah in many quarters. But he didn't seem to care and had refused to bend to the political winds of a very conservative primary process. Thus far he'd refused to court crazy, and it had cost him amongst the party's most passionate. If Governors Haskel and James had squared off in the GOP that presided after Reagan first took office, James would have cleaned her clock. But instead he was trailing in the polls and many doubted he'd get out of single digits in any state but his own. He was the last vestige of a party that had once had as its standard bearers the likes of Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole. But this was not his father's GOP.

The remaining three Republican candidates used James for cannon fodder as they tried to out-gun Haskel from the right, a feat not easily accomplished. Senator Laurent Redfield of Georgia was a Tea Party purist. He professed to never having voted for a tax increase during a career that spanned 10 years in the Georgia legislature and two terms in the U.S. Senate. He opposed abortion in all instances, including rape and incest, and had called evolution “lies from the pit of hell” during a debate, which was typical of the way he courted conservatives. That sort of thing played well in primary season but was a death knell in a general election.

Colonel George Figuera was a Marine who had distinguished himself in Iraq and received the Navy Cross, the nation's second highest award behind the Medal of Honor. Figuera was a one-issue candidate, running on a platform of strengthening national defense. He talked nonstop about the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan—both of which he had opposed. Figuera argued that the U.S. should have maintained control of both countries, and Iraq's oil, a position that might have garnered him more support had fracking not begun to convince Americans that the days of energy dependence on Muslims were coming to a close. When Governor James quipped in an early debate that “Colonel Figuera never saw a U.S. base he didn't want to expand,” he was hissed at by the audience, and Figuera took it as a compliment. Handsome and charismatic, Figuera showed no signs of generating broad support, but the reaction he was drawing from military-minded Republicans was strong. As James had learned the hard way, any whiff of criticism of Figuera ran the risk of being branded un-American. Ever since then, the other candidates had been loath to criticize the Colonel. They left him alone on debate stages like an island unto himself.

The final Republican candidate was no less a character than the other four: William Lewis had never run for any office before seeking the presidency. He was a billionaire who'd made his money in private equity and who enjoyed 100 percent name ID across the nation. Sadly for him
that
nation was the United Kingdom, where he owned one of the English Premier League's football clubs, and not the United States. While American kids were taking to soccer, I couldn't see any evidence that American voters were ready to elect a WASPy team owner, much less of a foreign franchise. Lewis was a free-market purist who was quick to drop Karl Marx's name when rhapsodizing about a “Washington out of control.” The base loved that line. But he never volunteered any thoughts outside of this comfort zone. The debates had been the only times when Lewis said a peep about foreign policy, or Figuera was forced to comment on domestic policy matters.

But then Figuera stunned observers by narrowly winning the Iowa Caucus, although few thought he'd sustain the momentum. Iowa had a history of picking losers who were ideologues. The morning after the Iowa Caucus, I commented on air that it reminded me of Rick Santorum winning in 2012. If the GOP were smart, they'd reconfigure the primary process to dilute the influence of its fringe, because they kept nominating candidates who didn't have a prayer in a general election. Before Iowa, everyone in the party had pretty much assumed Figuera was headed nowhere. Now, post Iowa, others were rethinking his prospects, but it hadn't changed my view. Shy of a Muskie breakdown in New Hampshire, I figured Margaret Haskel was it. As I predicted, she rebounded by winning there.

The Democratic race wasn't as linear, to say the least. The only opposition President Summers had faced in the Iowa Caucus had come from Mississippi Congressman Ezekiel Evers.
A civil rights leader and Baptist preacher, he had opposed a sitting president in his own party for what he said was an abandonment of the civil rights agenda. How and where Summers had done that, I wasn't exactly clear. Neither, apparently, were Iowa Caucus voters, because Evers didn't get out of single digits. Now, Summers said that he would release all of his delegates from Iowa and New Hampshire without making an endorsement. In keeping with Granite State tradition, there were two-dozen candidates on the New Hampshire ballot, but only President Summers and Congressman Evers were established politicians. Moving forward, South Carolina's ballot still had only Summers and Evers printed on it. But by Florida, it looked like the field would be crowded.

Against a backdrop of candidate announcements and hurried fundraising, the DNC immediately set about negotiating a system of standards by which the states next in line to vote would amend their filing procedures and deadlines to accommodate a field that was not yet established. Despite the fact that some states had had early filing deadlines in November and December of the previous year, the state legislatures were working in concert to pass emergency measures to change this. In a few cases, governors and state election commissions were able to make changes without direct legislative action. But in states where reducing the number of signatures was deemed necessary to facilitate the timely printing of emergency ballots, there was no way to prevent a plethora of unknowns from gaining access to the ballots and getting their names in the mix. The free-for-all that ensued was good for the party insofar as it generated non-stop interest in the election—but it ran the risk of making the abbreviated nomination process a bit like
American Idol
. The situation also promised a bit more than the usual election day chaos where campaign supporters
flanked the polling stations and used signs and stickers to try and ensure that their candidates' names stood out on suddenly crowded ballots.