Big Guns

by Steve Israel

33

  Wayne Bright’s finely calibrated political radar was on high alert. This was new terrain: a dimly lit, stuffy living room frozen somewhere in the 1990s. It featured tan leather couches, frayed Berber carpet, a large glass and mahogany coffee table, and a vintage television coiled to a blinking VCR. He sat on a broken recliner that kept reclining. Wayne struggled to sit upright, but the chair stubbornly pulled him to a half sprawl. Sunny McCarthy was eyeing him with the glint of a sadistic torturer about to commence waterboarding.

  Hardly a befitting position for the president of the Chicken Liberation United Committee, known as CLUC. Wayne was the mastermind behind a multimillion-dollar enterprise dedicated to the humane treatment of chickens, which, to many, seemed at least a rhetorical contradiction since chickens weren’t human. Still, Wayne was a maestro of mobilizing, money-raising, and marketing on fowl issues. It was Wayne’s brainchild to do that heart-wrenching Super Bowl commercial featuring the pigtailed little girl and her Easter present, an adorable baby chick she named Mr. Peepers (which she pronounced “Mithta Peepeth” as a result of an endearing and well-coached lisp). In the spot, little Mr. Peepers wandered off. He found himself crammed into an industrial poultry processing facility where he was pumped with arsenic, grotesquely fattened with hormones, then, to mournful piano notes, shackled upside down, stunned in an electrified bath, slashed at the neck, bled, defeathered, deboned, and delivered fresh to the grocer’s freezer. “Poor Mithta Peepeth,” the disconsolate girl sniffled straight at the camera, a tear falling from one eye. That halftime, there wasn’t a dry eye in America, as millions of chicken wing platters were slid far forward by sauce-stained fingers. The threat of a sequel—involving some little girl’s unwitting consumption of Mr. Peepers at a family dinner—compelled the National Poultry Processors Association to sign a pledge—a Magna Carta of sorts— on chicken rights.

  Now, from the discomfort of that reclining chair, Wayne scanned Lois’s living room. A dozen people occupied a couch, love seat, and some metal folding chairs brought in for the occasion. They’d trickled in from Washington in the past week. There was the finance director of the Chromosome-X PAC, the largest bundler of campaign donations to female candidates; the national president of the League of Arctic Voters; the pollster for the League of Liberals; the national political director of the United Pizza Delivery Workers Union International, AFL-CIO; and the aging alumni of the campaigns of various losing and left-leaning candidates for president of the United States, dating all the way back to McGovern.

  In the “politics makes strange bedfellows” department, this was Sunny’s liberal orgy. She’d thought of playing some of Lois’s old folk music to pump everyone’s adrenaline.

  These were the grassroots generals of the armies of idealism. The hard-bitten veterans of soft causes. Also, they were Sunny’s last resort. No one else would heed her call for reinforcements, or even return her e-mails. Sunny McCarthy, the conservatives’ Queen of K Street, was now banished. All the consultants and lobbyists that she’d favored, fed, and fattened had abandoned her. She should have known: in Washington, IOUs are the most deflationary currency on earth.

  Sunny was left with, well, what was Left. They’d relished her defection. Now they had an obligation to close their thinning but well-organized ranks around her. From saving the whales, saving the glaciers, saving the planet, saving the poor to saving poor Lois Liebowitz. Game on! Of course, these were the same operatives Sunny had mocked and disdained for most of her career, who, prior to sticking a fork in an almost-defeated opponent would pause to argue among themselves about the size of the fork, whether everyone had a fork, what the fork was made of, and whether there should be a fork research and development tax credit. All while a knife was being thrust in their backs.

  Now they had Lois’s life in their hands.

  Things looked bleak, which was their typical starting point. The pollster for the League of Liberals began his briefing with the usual overture: a long despairing moan. Then, “Liebowitz is twenty-four points down. I see no path to victory. It’s simply hopeless.”

  Music to their ears.

  Wayne Bright committed to having his media consultants produce some commercials not involving the eviscerating of chickens.

  The leader of Chromosome-X PAC pledged $500,000 for one week of television ads attacking Jack Steele.

  “I can have fifty of my members knocking on doors!” whooped the political director from the United Pizza Delivery Workers Union International.

  Phone banks were organized. Canvassers galvanized. Opposition researchers mobilized. Money raised.

  They celebrated with a nice Long Island chardonnay.

  *

  Only a few days later, Jack Steele sat comfortably in his plush media room, fingers around a glass of wine, salivating over a television cooking show of sorts. There was Megan Slattery, butterflying and bringing to a pink broil a Democratic congressman from California. The issue was immigration. Under Megan’s withering interrogation, the congressman now seemed ready to self-deport.

  Jack heard the jingling of the phone in another room. Then the tentative footsteps of Conchita. Or Rosita. Whoever.

  “Mr. Jack, it’s Mr. Carl.”

  Carl Schmidt was Steele’s campaign manager. He was calling from his temporary residence: the guest cottage at Villa di Acciaio.

  “Crap,” Carl began.

  Jack hated conversations that began with crap. Conversations that started with crap usually ended with Jack spending craploads of more money.

  Carl reported: “Liebowitz went up on TV. Dunno how she can afford it. But I’m not worried. Their money’ll dry up. They’ll go dark soon.”

  Then, through the magic of television, the ad appeared.

  There was an aerial image—captured by drone—of the luxuriant expanse of Villa di Acciaio: stone turrets, high gates, infinity pool, then the red-roofed guest cottage and slate walkway meandering around a koi pond.

  Jack smiled. Home sweet home. Right?

  The camera zoomed in on the guest cottage. The four-bedroom structure jutted into a ribbon of woods that marked the border between Jack and the billionaire next door. There was a massive earthen gash where Jack’s crew had bulldozed trees and buried a piping plover, a federally designated threatened species whose inconvenient choice of habitat should have blocked the project. A project, viewers learned, that lacked the requisite zoning variances and building permits and therefore skirted any increase in Jack’s tax assessment. Which was a violation of multiple subsections, sections, and entire chapters of the Asabogue Village Code. A document that Jack Steele would take an oath to enforce, so help him God.

  “Crap,” Jack Steele hiccuped.

  The narrator’s voice dripped with snark: “Hollywood actor Jack Steele. The only thing he hasn’t played is BY . . . THE . . . RULES!” Then, rapidly: “Paid for and authorized by Asabogue Neighbors for Fair Play.”

  There was a time when Jack’s plan for the guest cottage at Villa di Acciaio seemed reasonable. That was before he decided he needed extra space for four bedrooms and a koi pond; before a real estate survey showed a property line crimping said koi pond; before the nesting of that damned piping plover. “The real endangered species in this country are capitalists!” Jack bellowed to Ralph Kellogg one morning. “Can you fix this?” At which point Mr. Fixit eagerly wielded the tools of his trade. Necks were turned, palms greased, arms twisted, papers shuffled, eyes diverted, and a Caterpillar bulldozer did the rest. Piccolo Acciaio, as it was called, rose from the grave of an ignominiously buried piping plover.

  Who would know? Even the billionaire next door wouldn’t notice the loss of a few dozen wispy pines and one less family of piping plovers on Jack’s side of the tree line.

  Now everyone knew.

  And Jack Steele knew this: small towns like Asabogue weren’t consumed by the weighty issues of war and peace, pestilence and poverty. Big problems in small towns were more parochial: a storage shed one thin blade of grass ove
r the statutory setback; an illegal accessory structure; an overflowing trash can in flagrant violation of the directions clearly printed in the annual Village of Asabogue Trash Pickup & Recycling Calendar. These issues were quality of life . . . and death.

  Jack snapped, “Double our television buy.”

  *

  That night, for dinner, Sam Gergala enjoyed a cold-cut sandwich, a generous heaping of potato chips, a warm beer, and the savory taste of justice. He sat in front of his television, on an upholstered rocker that had been passed down through multiple generations of Gerga-las. His dinner plate teetered precariously on his lap as he clicked through channels, mesmerized by what he saw. The commercial was everywhere: the news channels, the old movie channels, the sitcom channels, the reality TV channels, the history channels, the sports channels. Whatever one chose to watch on television, they were forced to view the illegal guest cottage at Villa di Acciaio. That night, there were piping plover prayers across Asabogue.

  Sam chewed contentedly.

  *

  One week and hundreds of television commercials later, Sunny and the campaign pollster met in Lois’s kitchen. He was accustomed to spitting out data with speed and authority. He never had to do so with Vera Butane’s blueberry cobbler sloshing between his cheeks. Every statistic was accompanied by soft blue pellets of saliva from blue-stained lips. The news was good. And bad. Pollsters hedge their bets.

  The good news was that Jack Steele’s lead was nudging downward. Lois was now eighteen points behind.

  The bad news, the pollster despaired, was that there wasn’t enough time to close the gap. The election was seven weeks away.

  “Seven weeks,” Sunny scoffed. “That’s an eternity in politics.”

  *

  Lois Liebowitz generally disdained personal attacks in campaigns. Negative advertising corroded democracy and soiled governance. Lois preferred principled discourse: a virtuous exchange of high ideas.

  The new ad kicked Jack Steele right in the balls. Lois loved it.

  She sat in the living room, which was now a war room. Cell phones rang constantly. Consultants sprawled on couches and chairs, squinting at laptops. Wayne Bright was now comfortably ensconced in the broken recliner. Thick reams of voter files were piled on bookshelves. Sunny sat behind a cheap folding table in a corner, cradling phones and snapping orders. Her hair was twisted in a loose bun and she wore her new uniform: jeans and a bulky blue sweatshirt with ASABOGUE PARKS DEPT stenciled in yellow across her chest. Streams of volunteers picked up stacks of campaign literature. Their knuckles were raw from door-knocking, their ears like cauliflower from phone banking.

  Lois focused on the television.

  There was another aerial image of Villa di Acciaio. Then a voice: “Hollywood actor Jack Steele. He wants to be our mayor. But how can Jack Steele fight for Asabogue when he really lives here . . .”

  A new image, high above an ultra-modern beachfront home in Malibu, sleek and sharply angled.

  “And here . . .”

  A sprawling lodge in the Adirondacks Nestled between evergreen hills.

  “And here . . .”

  A pink stucco villa on the eighteenth hole in Bermuda, palm trees swaying.

  “And here . . .”

  Trump Tower, Manhattan, black glass and gold trim.

  “Jack Steele. How can he fight for your quality of life . . . when he’s not sure where he lives? Paid for by Asabogue Neighbors for Asabogue Values.”

  *

  By the middle of September, Lois had come to within twelve points of Jack Steele.

  Everything now hinged on the Asabogue League of Women Voters debate.

  It would be explosive.

  34

  Congress had returned to Capitol Hill from its August slumber. Roy Dirkey found himself slumped in a chair in the conference room of Republican Whip Fred Stinson. He should have been happy—ecstatic, even. The House Republican Leadership was fast-tracking a vote on AFFFA, and he’d been called to the Whip meeting to discuss rounding up the two hundred eighteen votes necessary for passage. In a Congress known for breaking all legislative records for doing nothing, Dirkey’s bill seemed to be hurtling to a vote.

  But Roy felt unsettled. Since the Muffin Massacre in Asabogue, Sunny had disappeared. No e-mails. No phone calls. No cackles. A vice president at Cogsworth International had stepped in for Sunny (tripped in was more like it). Bruce Cogsworth seemed cluelessly pleasant. No matter how many times Roy asked about Sunny, he’d giggle nervously and say, “Hey, what am I, chopped liver?”The night he returned to Washington, after completing the fund-raising circuit, Roy ditched his aide and went to Sunny’s condo in Penn Quarter. A desk attendant with the name HECTOR stitched into his cream blazer greeted Roy with an apathetic grunt. Roy could hear a Nationals game from a radio in a back room.

  “I’m here for Sunny McCarthy,” Roy said.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  Hector shrugged.

  Roy flipped on the charm switch. “Hey . . . Hector. Just between us, I’m a Member of Congress and I just gotta know where she is. It’s a national security deal, so don’t tell anyone. You can trust me, Hector. I have top secret clearance. Can you help me out, bud?” Hector smiled, then giggled, then, after an eruption of spasmodic laughs, wiped his flowing eyes and said, “Dude, if I had a buck for every congressman whose girlfriend dumped them and used that line, I wouldn’t be workin’ this desk. I’d be watchin’ the Nats in my penthouse upstairs! Jeez, maybe I’d own the team!”

  So here Roy was, flying blind. Or, flying with a novice pilot whose uncle just happened to own the airline, which seemed a risky proposition.

  The Whip’s office was imperiously decorated in red. Red walls, carpet, drapes, and red-striped chairs. Two chandeliers hung above both ends of a long conference table, glowing against the polished mahogany. Historic oil paintings from Stinson’s home state of Texas dominated the walls in garish gold-leaf frames. The largest was positioned prominently above Stinson’s chair at the head of the table: Robert Jenkins Onderdonk’s Fall of the Alamo. There was Davy Crockett, desperately swinging his flintlock like a club; dead and dying sprawled on the ground amid shrouds of gunsmoke. Roy knew that Fred Stinson was obsessed with the Alamo. He solemnly invoked its memory in every legislative battle, no matter how inconsequential. Once, when passing a resolution proclaiming National Sinus Tachycardia Awareness Week, Stinson barricaded himself in his office, sleeplessly working the phones until assured unanimous passage, proving that the legislative fort would not fall as long as Whip Fred Stinson guarded it.

  Stinson entered, his staff in tow. He was short and plump and barreled into rooms like one of those cartoon bombs with a lit fuse. He wore a rumpled suit tautly stretched around a protruding belly, and a wrinkled tie speckled with remnants of his last meal. A mop of black curls sat above a puffy, crimson face. His brown eyes had a militant glare, as if set for the next Alamo.

  But his arms! They were abnormally long arms built perfectly for a Whip—able to swing around his prey, pat their backs while probing their spines, and pull them in close. His title was Whip, but he was better known as “Knife,” for two reasons. First, there was that dagger he constantly held against Speaker Piermont’s back, waiting to be plunged at the first sign of weakness by Piermont, who simultaneously had a knife to Stinson’s jugular. The two men and their factions despised each other. The power struggle between them had reduced Congress to a gang rumble using Robert’s Rules of Order. Second, Stinson deftly used that knife to butter his colleagues with favors thick and sweet. The path to Members’ votes went straight through their egos with a sharp turn toward their campaign treasuries. In pursuit of those votes, Whip Stinson dispensed pork, privilege, and PAC checks. Stinson was a father confessor and political advisor. Therapist. Marriage counselor. Fund-raiser. Concierge.

  And what did he expect in return for this enduring solicitude? Undying loyalty on legislative matters large and small. He deployed h
is lieutenants across the House floor, armed with index cards and blue markers. They had officious titles: chief deputy whip, deputy assistant whip, chief deputy assistant regional whip. They’d nuzzle against a Member, inquiring about their position on a particular bill, mark their tally cards Yes, No, Lean Yes, Lean No, or Undecided. Then they’d scurry back to Stinson, where the cards were tabulated. If a congressman showed signs of straying on a vote, Stinson went on reconnaissance. He’d find the congressman on the House floor, unfold those long arms, and pull him in, subjecting them to an uncomfortable proximity and the effluvia of cheap aftershave and an earlier meal. Then he’d whisper, in a soft drawl, about how “we really need yaaaaaa’ll on this vote,” followed by syrupy praise and the inevitable historical references to “sticking together, just like my boys at the Aaaaalamo.” Who could resist? Those boys sacrificed their very lives for principle. This was just one vote that any politician with minimal proficiency could spin to advantage back home; one uncomfortable vote that could be soothed with, say, an appointment as an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, complete with cocktail party and decent seats to certain performances. And if the congressman still couldn’t toe the line, the line wasn’t completely severed. Stinson knew there’d be another battle, another bill ahead. In the gospel of the Whip, today’s rupture was tomorrow’s rapture. Stinson would release his prey from his grip with an affectionate pat on the back and a soft but clear message: you’ll be with us next time. There was always a next time.

  This time it was AFFFA. In a Congress with more than three hundred pro-gun Members, passing the bill should have been a cinch. But as the Whip liked to say: “Remember the Alamo!” No victory was guaranteed and nothing could be taken for granted in his unruly caucus. There was always that last-minute snag, a done deal about to be undone. Then, of course, there was the matter of commitment, which had a rather loose translation in his caucus. A promise to vote “yes” could mean anything up to and including “no.” “No” embraced a full range of possibilities, including “yes.”