For a moment he let himself marvel at the contrast between his mind, racing along at 150 mph, and the leisurely pace of the black SUV as they followed the meanders and gentle rapids of Rock Creek on Beach Drive. They were just thirty minutes from the seat of power of the most powerful nation on earth, and here they were immersed in a leafy forest, with giant rocks left behind by the glaciers strewn on the hillsides like prehistoric monuments. There’s not another place like this on earth, he thought. And he had no intention of giving it up.
He knew what he had to do. After all, he was a pro.
9
They met at 4:30 PM, after the House adjourned for the day, in a large conference room on the third floor of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. It was common practice for Members to use the DNC building for election purposes, since it was actually illegal for them to conduct campaign activities—even just simple phone calls—while they were on the grounds of the Capitol. The Republicans had a similar arrangement with the RNC on 1st Street SE, right across from the Metro, with the advantage that they could repair to the Capitol Hill Club for drinks once their business was done. No such luck at the DNC, whose rinky-dink café couldn’t compare. McKenzie had walked through the Rayburn House Office Building basement to Longworth, then surfaced on New Jersey Avenue and continued down toward D Street, SE, Joachim guarding his flank. It was only two blocks, but with the Washington, DC, humidity he was drenched by the time he arrived. He stopped in the men’s room and tried to mop himself dry with paper towels.
Good Lord, he thought when he entered the cramped conference room. Am I really paying all these people? They were as numerous as his congressional staff. And most of them were getting paid much more.
“Alright, people,” Jenn started out. “This thing is tightening, so we’ve all got to be on our toes.”
She’d been a good catch, McKenzie thought. Willie’s colleague from the union. If she hadn’t gone into politics, what would she be doing today? He realized for an instant he was stumped. He didn’t know anything else besides politics.
“Let me bring you all up to speed. This morning, a Super PAC supporting our opponent’s campaign began airing attack ads on WTOP, WMAL, and other DC-area radio, and tonight they are booked to go up on cable television as well. Here is the first one that aired this morning.”
She swiped her phone, turned on the speaker, and set it on the conference table so they could all hear.
“Twenty-five percent. That’s the amount Congressman Hugh McKenzie wants to grab from your paycheck. He plans to take it every week. Every two weeks. Every month.
Just think of that: twenty-five percent less in your pocket from every paycheck. And that’s in addition to all the other taxes they are taking.
He calls it Medicare-For-All. But you know the truth: It’s health care for none.
Nelson Aguilar knows you deserve to keep more of your hard-earned pay. Let’s send Congressman McKenzie home to his family. Vote for Nelson Aguilar on November 3rd. Paid for by Americans for the Dream.”
For a moment, they all sat in stunned silence as the emotional impact of the attack ad sank in. That was a low swipe, McKenzie thought. This guy was determined to play gutter politics. Or was it just politics? Whatever. He could play, too.
“Stan, I’d like you to fill us in on what you’ve found out about this Super PAC that’s running the ads,” Jenn said.
Stan Harris had been an investigative reporter for Newsweek, and then the Daily Beast, and was one of the best around. He worked as a consultant to this and to several other campaigns—Democrats, only—renting out the services of the investigative firm he and another former journalist had set up five years ago. Their job was to dig dirt on Republicans and cover up the holes.
“All we could do this morning was a public records search,” he said. “They incorporated just two weeks ago, offices with a Republican law firm on L Street. Straw man as Treasurer. But they’ve already filed their first forty-eight-hour notice. And it’s a biggy.”
“How big?” McKenzie asked.
“$1.2 million, Congressman. Apparently from just two donors.”
“Do we know their names?
“One of them, yes. At least, we have a pretty good feel for it. You know the Facebook billionaire up in Westminster, Midge Parker? She donated 500 grand to a 501c4 called People’s Choice about ten days ago. People’s Choice turned around and made a $500,000 donation to Americans for the Dream the next day.”
“What about the rest of the money,” McKenzie said. “The other 700 grand?”
“It came from a 501c4 called the National Republican Trust. They’ve been fundraising and donating to races all across the country, so it’s harder to see a direct tie-in.… We also have identified their media buyer,” he added.
Jenn stepped back in. “Kwanda?” she said. “Have you checked with our guys? Do they know them?”
Kwanda Armstrong was among the younger members of his team. Don’t let the afro fool you, McKenzie thought. She’d been a journalism major at Morgan State University, one of the historic African-American colleges in Maryland. Good school, actually. None of this new age nonsense, gender studies, phony history. She went on to earn a Master’s in communications from Georgetown. As communications director, she was one of the best.
“Oh yes,” she said. “CapitolNet, Inc. is big. They’ve been in the business for over two decades. They only do Republicans. And they’ve got leverage.”
“How so?” McKenzie asked.
“Here’s the bad news, Congressman,” Kwanda said. “They’ve bought up every available political spot in the DC market for the next ten days.”
“What? How can they do that?”
“Well the how isn’t all that difficult. Remember, they’ve got $1.2 million in cash. Right?”
“You mean, we’ve been shut out for the next ten days? Silenced? Sidelined?”
“That’s about it,” Kwanda said.
“You could always file a complaint with the FEC,” Jenn said.
“Right,” McKenzie said. “And by the time they got around to considering it, we’ll all be looking for jobs.”
This was a disaster, and it sent him reeling into a funk.
“Before you get all depressed,” Jenn said, trying to put on a light touch. “You need to listen to what Mark and Morton have got to say.”
“That tracking poll you asked me to do this morning?” Mark Margolis began. “Here are the results.”
He handed around twenty stapled copies of the poll, so everyone could follow the numbers. It included pages and pages of graphs and pie charts showing the main demographics supporting and opposing each candidate.
“The biggest takeaway, Congressman, is that your support is not eroding in any significant fashion,” Margolis said. “Take a look at the tracker on page three.”
They all turned to the bar chart and saw that McKenzie’s numbers, while they had eroded from a high 54 percent favorable in the spring, they were still close to 48 percent and hadn’t fallen in the past two weeks despite all the bad publicity.
“Even more significant,” Margolis said, “is the Trump favorable/unfavorable. His unfavorable in the district has gone up from fifty-eight percent to over sixty-two percent, with only twenty-eight percent holding a favorable or very favorable opinion of the president. That is your ticket to re-election, if I might say so, Congressman.”
McKenzie wasn’t quite so sure. Trump’s unfavorables had hovered around 50 percent right up until the night before the election in 2016, and yet look at what happened. He lost the nation-wide popular vote by three million, for sure, but by focusing his efforts on states he could swing with just a few thousand votes, it gave him that big margin of victory in the electoral college by night’s end. Luckily we have no electoral college in congressional races.
“Let me remind everybody about
the basic numbers here.”
That was Morton Nash, his campaign consultant. No, his highly paid campaign consultant, recommended by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DCCC. They were the ones who ultimately controlled the biggest purse strings, and they were all in the pocket of the Majority Leader, Gus Antly.
“Congressman, I know you are worried about demographics,” Nash began. “And it’s true, according to Mark’s data, the Hispanic vote is starting to soften up a bit. But don’t forget the basic voter registration numbers of the new district. Rounding the numbers, you’ve got fifty percent Dems, thirty percent Republicans, and twenty percent independents, whack-jobs, or no affiliation.
“Now, history shows us that in just about any election, you’re going lose ten percent of your own party. So subtract five percent for you, three percent for Aguilar. So he’s plus two on that metric.
“In the past six election cycles in this district, independents have broken sixty-forty for us. Let’s say it’s a bad year, because of redistricting, and they break fifty-fifty—although Mark’s numbers don’t show that. But for the sake of argument, that gives our opponent forty-two percent at the end of the night. And that’s his best case scenario. You beat him fifty-eight to forty-two. In any normal race that’s called a landslide, Congressman,” Nash concluded.
McKenzie knew the numbers. He had heard them many times before. And yet, somehow he didn’t find them reassuring.
“What about his impact on the Hispanic vote? They account for fully thirty-five percent of registered voters,” he said. “Mark?”
His pollster flipped through the pages of data and asked everyone to look at page sixteen.
“Hispanics register Democrat at a significantly higher rate than the general population,” he said. “The current stats show them at sixty-six percent Democrat, six percent Republican, and twenty-eight percent unaffiliated.”
“So what if we lost twenty percent of the Hispanic Democrats? What if we lost half of them?” McKenzie asked.
Morton Nash, the campaign consultant, took in a deep breath. “That wouldn’t be good,” he said finally. “But that’s not going to happen. Because you’ve got a secret weapon you haven’t even begun to exploit.”
McKenzie gave him a querulous look. A secret weapon, really? Aguilar’s got more money than I do, that’s pretty clear. At least for now.
“Congressman, you’ve got the frank.”
10
McKenzie couldn’t believe what he had just heard coming from the lips of a DCCC political consultant. At first, he just wanted to laugh. He was being urged to commit a felony and use his taxpayer-funded privilege of postage-free communications with his constituents to push a partisan advantage.
The frank—or more accurately, the Franking Privilege—was something all members could access. It gave them the ability of communicating at no cost with their constituents through direct mail, as long as what they communicated could legitimately be seen as official business not directly related to an election.
The Franking Privilege was first enacted by the Continental Congress in 1775 to allow members to keep constituents informed about matters of government. Instead of placing a stamp on the envelope, members placed their signature. That practice has continued to this day. Every time Congressman McKenzie sent a “newsletter” to his constituents, which was about once every two years, it was “stamped” with his signature and a special congressional commission reimbursed the Post Office for each piece of mail sent.
He rarely used it, and when he did, it was in election years.
But he had never used it so close to an actual election. If he recalled correctly, there was a ban on using the frank for any communication with constituents within ninety days of an election. They were well beyond that now.
“How do you propose getting around the ninety-day ban?” he asked Nash.
“Congressman, that’s much less of a problem than you think, especially in your case. I’ve already looked into this. You’ve only used the frank a half-dozen times since you were elected to Congress eight years ago. General practice allows you to use it three to four times a year. The last franked letter you sent out was in June—and it’s the only one you’ve sent this year. You can easily argue—and the Commission can’t really object—that you have been quite conservative in your use of this congressional privilege. You only need to use it twice in the next two weeks, as I see it. Three times, max. And we will carefully craft those communications to fit within the law, all the while they respond and crush the insidious lies your opponent is spreading through paid media. Then we’ll follow up with paid mailers and be back up on radio and TV.”
It was tempting, on the surface. But everything he had ever learned in law school was screaming at him to reject the proposal outright.
“The Ethics Committee is split evenly along party lines. They can’t possibly allow such a thing.”
Nash gave a little bow, pretending to take off his hat. “Thank you, Congressman. You have just made my point. The Ethics Committee is indeed bi-partisan, and it is split three to three. I think I can just about guarantee you that you will not lose a single one of the three Democrats on that committee should it ever come up for a vote.”
He didn’t like the smell of it. He was a lawyer, after all. Morton Nash was suggesting that the rule of law was contingent on the ability to enforce the law, not the principles of the law or its statutes. That was an invitation to corruption, a banana republic. Buy off the judges and you get off scot free.
“Since you seem skeptical, let me spell it out to you, Congressman. Your opponent releases an attack ad with lies about your record on Medicare-For-All. You respond with a newsletter to your constituents that reproduces portions of the Congressional Record that explicitly rebut what your opponent has said. In other words, you are setting the record straight—but not with your own words or editorializing, but with the words of the Congressional Record. That is explicitly what the franking statutes allow.”
McKenzie still didn’t like it, but he had to admit, it was tempting.
“Send me a memo from the DCCC general counsel’s office. I want to see the actual statutes and their reading of the statutes.”
Nash was ready for him. He opened his leather document case and took out a memo, printed on official letterhead of the DCCC, and tossed it across the table to him with a smirk.
“That’s why you pay me the big bucks, Congressman. I’m worth every dime.”
11
Nelson Aguilar was in his element. The fire marshal capacity of the Iglesia Cristo Está Vivo below the Wheaton mall was 1,200, and it was packed to the rafters. His campaign had rented the space for the rally, so there could be no phony accusation that Pastor Victor Hermosa was endorsing Aguilar from the pulpit, which would be a violation of the Johnson amendment and could lead to his church losing its non-profit status. The pastor was indeed on hand that night but as a member of the audience, not up on the stage with Aguilar. He made no public statement or endorsement. He didn’t have to.
The Crocodile had pulled off another coup and convinced the outgoing Comptroller of Maryland, a lifelong Democrat, to introduce Aguilar. Ken Adams knew all about the contempt the Comptroller felt for Congressman McKenzie, which dated from the days when the two men had served together in the Maryland state senate from neighboring districts. They hadn’t liked each other then, and they absolutely despised each other now. But until tonight both men had kept their feelings behind closed doors. Comptroller Sastry Karna had already announced he was retiring after two terms, and rumors abounded that he was amassing a war chest to run for the U.S. Senate as soon as a seat opened up. The Crocodile bet that Karna would be unable to pass up an opportunity to inflict a mortal wound on a potential competitor for that Senate seat, and he had been right.
“He’s laying it on pretty thick.” The Crocodile grinned.
/> “You knew he would,” Aguilar said.
They were waiting in the pastor’s dressing room behind the altar, which had been stripped of all religious ornaments for tonight’s rally except for the giant cross suspended from the ceiling. The Crocodile knew that Aguilar would be walking around on stage, interacting with the audience, so he had instructed the lighting crew to steer him back to center stage periodically and discreetly light up the cross over his head. Nothing too ostentatious. No crown of thorns. No halo. Just a subtle blessing from on high.
“My friends, these reckless policies Congressman McKenzie is proposing amount to nothing less than socialism,” Karna was saying. “I am a Democrat. You all know that. But I am not a socialist and I never will be,” he shouted out.
The crowd responded with an uproar, and then they began chanting, “Aguilar! Aguilar!”
Karna turned toward the dressing room, and the Crocodile gave a nod. It was time.
As he joined the Comptroller on the stage, Aguilar looked out over the audience, drinking in their wild applause. He found familiar faces and gave them the thumbs up. Annie Bryant was near the fire exit about midway up the hall. He gave her a special wave, and for an instant, locked his eyes on hers.
“My friends,” he began. “Just look at you. You are the faces of today’s America. You are not Democrats. You are not Republicans. You are Americans!” he said, and the crowd cheered.
“You are not Latino, you are not black, or Asian, or this hyphen or that. You are Americans! And we all rejoice in the American dream! You are living testimony that the dream lives on and will continue to live for as long as we prevent the socialists from destroying it, because God wants America to be free.”
Ken Adams drank in Aguilar’s words. He let them flow over him, surround him, despite every professional instinct to listen with a critical ear. He had never met a politician who had such a remarkable empathy for his audience. Aguilar sensed their mood. He could feel their enthusiasm and channel it to his purpose; and when it seemed he might lose control, he pulled in on the mast and rode them into shore. There was nothing he would change. There was no advice he could give. It was disconcerting! This was as close to perfect pitch as he had ever seen. If Aguilar couldn’t beat McKenzie, nobody could.
The Election Heist Page 4
