The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear

by Stuart Stevens

  But, of course, most candidates lied. They lied, if only by omission. They’d forgotten about that speeding ticket, that one-night stand, the time the checking account ran dry. There was always something out there that they hadn’t told you. Sometimes you never found out what it was; other times it blew up on you like that bomb outside Pat O’Brien’s. The late-night phone call and the words, those dreaded words: “There’s something I should have told you.” God, I hated that phrase.

  “The president picked Hilda,” Lisa insisted. “He should realize that she’s his best hope to carry on his legacy.” She couldn’t accept that everyone didn’t see Hilda Smith the way she did, that the whole world wasn’t in love with her. That was one of her greatest weaknesses as a campaign manager: her inability to understand why some people didn’t like, or even hated, the woman she worshipped.

  “Jesus, Lisa, I’m not saying the guy doesn’t have good taste.”

  Nobody laughed. Not even a smile, really. It was time to go.

  “We’ll draft a statement,” I said, standing.

  “This can help us,” Hilda said with a sudden fierceness.

  “I’m listening,” I said, sitting back down.

  “How many times have we said that Armstrong George represents something terribly ugly and cruel in this country? And a horrible tragedy like this bombing could really make people step back and ask themselves what is happening to us.”

  “Absolutely,” Lisa agreed instantly. “The same way that there was a backlash against the overkill after 9/11. All the taking away of civil liberties.”

  I started to remind them that George W. Bush was reelected and any backlash happened more than a decade after 9/11, when everyone was feeling safer. And it was the current absence of feeling safe that was driving Armstrong George toward the White House. But I knew it was this side of Hilda Smith, call it a fervent reasonableness, that had drawn Lisa to her years ago. One night after we had won New Hampshire and done better than expected on Super Tuesday, Lisa and I had ended up in a bar alone, drinking too much. She’d told me that Hilda had looked like a star that day she first saw her speak, her blond hair dusted with snow, standing there in her husband’s trench coat, borrowed when the sunny morning had suddenly turned into a snow squall. “Government can’t do everything,” she had said, “but we must do a better job of educating our citizenry, or the new century is sure to dawn on the declining days of our great country.” Pretty heady stuff for a state rep race.

  “That’s our play,” I agreed. “But something like this just makes a lot of people want the toughest sheriff west of the Pecos to come in and kick ass,” I said, and when Lisa and Quentin Smith both glared at me, I didn’t stop. “People are scared to death out there. Their terrified, racist eyes see all these little yellow and brown people taking what jobs are left, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that there is something reassuring about—”

  “A thug like Armstrong George,” the vice president finished.

  “On a dark night, having some jackbooted thug on your side can make you feel pretty good.” I tried to smile. “Remember, the innocent have nothing to fear.”

  “Let’s go to bed,” Quentin Smith said, standing. He reached for his wife, holding out his hand.

  When I was at the door, I glanced back and saw the three of them watching me, waiting for me to leave, like I was the hired help who had overstayed. It was a fact of life. They loved you for saving them and hated you for needing to be saved.

  One more reason I had to get out of this business. And all I needed was a handful of delegates—then Hilda would win, and I would be a moderately Famous Person with my own political show franchise. Then I could just talk about all the people who did what I used to do. Bliss.

  —

  As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I could feel something different. I was halfway to the elevator when it struck me: in the twenty minutes I had been inside with the vice president, extra Secret Service agents had been posted. Instead of the usual detail of two agents in front of the suite door and another by the elevator (entrance to the floor was controlled by passkey), there were now eight.

  They were all faces I recognized. The agents liked me because I never gave them a hard time and always respected their needs. When Kim Grunfeld, our dragon lady of a media consultant, had tried to boss them around during the filming of a commercial, I had made sure I came down on their side and told Kim to either quit acting like she was a real film director or take a walk. As I was getting on the elevator, I saw that two of the guards had swiveled their Uzi submachine guns from their normal rear-sling position, where the machine guns rode in the small of their back, to the front, just under the flaps of their coats.

  My daily senior staff meeting was scheduled to convene in the war room at six thirty, which was in just a couple of hours. Moving a campaign to a convention was never easy. Our regular headquarters were in Montpelier, Vermont, the smallest capital city in the country. This was partly because it was cheap but mostly to stress Hilda’s definition as a non-D.C. candidate. Our offices were just down the street—one of the two main streets in town—from the statehouse where Hilda started her political career. No reporters, other than the locals who had known the vice president forever, just “dropped by” because they were in the neighborhood, and donors hated to trek to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Quaint coffee shops, a couple of great independent bookstores, and no reporters or donors. In the history of world civilization, no good had ever come from having donors hanging around a campaign headquarters. But at the convention, suddenly the entire political world surrounded us, reporters and donors everywhere. Throw in Bourbon Street, and it was easy to see a campaign totally losing focus, like a football team at a bowl game with players skipping curfew. To fight distractions, Eddie and I had decided to keep the same schedule in New Orleans that we did back in Montpelier. People bitched and complained, but that only proved us right.

  I got on the elevator to ride down one floor to my room, but when the elevator stopped I didn’t get off, and let the doors close, riding down to the lobby. A few delegates were milling around with drinks, looking dazed but still arguing. Everybody was arguing in New Orleans. And drinking. In the small lobby of the Windsor Court, I counted more than a dozen uniformed NOPD cops, what looked to be three or four NOPD detectives in plain clothes, and a full contingent of Secret Service. A huddle of technicians in Secret Service jumpsuits were installing metal detectors and new bomb-sniffing scanners at the main entrance to the hotel. Almost a thousand delegates and press were going to wake up inside a “secure area.” I wondered if this was happening at every delegate hotel in town or just here at the Windsor Court because of the vice president. Whatever: none of it was good for us. Hilda Smith was the candidate of hope versus fear, and it sure looked like fear was winning.

  Luck is no small part of both life and politics, and I had done enough campaigns to know we were lucky to even be in this race. Nine times out of ten, after an economic meltdown the party out of power should be able to waltz into the White House. But the Gods of Politics had smiled on us one spring morning when the diary of the wife of the presumptive Democratic nominee, Pennsylvania governor Doug Banka, exploded into print. It was crazy.

  Banka was in his second term as governor, an Iraq War vet from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had been reelected with huge margins. He’d been elected with the help of his wife’s money, which came from the Silicon Valley world. She was a Stanford-educated engineer who had moved from Apple to Google to a venture capital start-up and made a fortune along the way. Banka had met her when he was working with a private-public aid group, Vets Recovery, and was on a fundraising trip to San Francisco. They dated transcontinentally for a year and then married in Erie. Banka ran for Congress and then made a big jump to governor after two terms. Pennsylvania loves to reelect governors, and he ran up the score, racking up numbers in the conservative part of the state like no Democrat in modern history.

  While we were fight
ing Armstrong George hand to hand from New Hampshire all the way to New Orleans, Doug Banka was cruising to easy victories in the Dem primary. He became the first to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, and after that it was pretty much all over. Once he had the nomination sewed up, Banka started attacking Armstrong George. I hated that he wasn’t attacking us. Every time Banka hit George, the guy went up with Republicans who figured if the other side was hitting our guy, he had to be pretty good. Had Banka put together a sustained attack on television and digital, he would have eventually damaged George with Republicans. At a certain point, negative information adds up, even if it’s coming from the anti-Christ. But Banka didn’t lay the heavy wood on him, just took shots at George’s plan to build a wall the full length of the border and banged him day after day on the New Bill of Rights. Armstrong George’s people loved him for all those things; it was like accusing a supermodel of being thin. That was the point.

  Every poll had Banka up five to eight points over both Hilda Smith and Armstrong George. Until the Gawker Bomb hit. It came on April 19, at five a.m. EST, which gave it sort of a classy Pearl Harbor “hell at dawn” touch. I was just trying to wake up and drag myself out of bed in another hotel in Ohio, where we were slogging through the last primary, when my phone lit up like one of those flashers they give you at Fuddruckers to let you know when your crappy food is ready. Within five minutes, I had over a hundred calls, my voice mail full and throwing up. “What the hell?” I was fumbling with the cheap coffeemaker when Eddie Basha burst through my door.

  “You hear?” he asked.

  I was standing there in gym shorts, after my usual four hours of sleep, feeling like death before coffee. Eddie was dressed in a nicely pressed shirt and tie, looking like he had won the lottery. “How the hell did you open the door?” I asked.

  He held up a key. “Advance has passkeys to all the rooms,” he said. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “Christ.” I had a rush of panic, thinking of when Ginny and I had been having mad campaign sex in other hotels. “The advance guys always have keys to every room?” I asked. Why didn’t I know that?

  “Her diary,” Eddie said. “Focus. Gawker got her diary.”

  The coffee sputtered that it was ready. I was really not good at this early-morning chaos without coffee.

  “Eddie,” I said, feeling better after the first few sips of the coffee. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He picked up the remote and turned on the television. “Watch,” he said.

  And we did. Sitting next to my top guy and drinking the bad coffee, I heard the breathless story that Gawker had obtained the diary of Amanda Collins, the wife of Doug Banka, and it contained “explosive details of their intimate lives.”

  “Good, so good,” Eddie said gleefully, and for once the reality of the story lived up to the billing. For the next two weeks, Gawker strung out the juicy details of threesomes with Amanda’s college roommate, “sexcations” in Thailand, “lost weekends” in Vegas. Banka refused to comment on any of the details. About a week into the drip-drip of details as Gawker teased it out, Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times that the diary read like some Cosmo fantasy and she doubted that any of it had really happened. That kicked off an Internet treasure hunt for articles and stories that resembled the scenes that the first lady of Pennsylvania had described. Rumor had it that she was so offended by Dowd’s accusation that she wanted to hold a press conference and reassure America that, in fact, this stuff really had taken place.

  We won Ohio but no one seemed to notice, the whole political world transfixed by the meltdown of Mr. and Mrs. Banka. Editorials and what passed for “Democratic Wise Voices”—these were rare in both parties—urged Banka to withdraw and throw his delegates to the second-place finisher, Senator Richards of Rhode Island. The problem was that Richards was such a boring “White Man of Wealth and Privilege” that no one had been particularly excited about him when he ran; the idea of turning over the nomination to the guy seemed to generate an amount of enthusiasm slightly lower than you might feel at having to kiss your aunt. The concept of honorable resignation in America had never been especially popular, and since Bill Clinton had proved that hanging on was the key to success, many seemed secretly to admire Banka’s stubborn refusal to cave.

  Usually the party in power has their convention last, but this time the Republicans had chosen to go first and early, sort of a Hail Mary pass in hopes of setting a narrative that could force the Democrats on the defensive at their own convention. “Setting a narrative” is the kind of phrase political consultants and journalists love to toss around when they really mean “rat-fuck.” The hope was that the Republicans would spend the convention attacking the Democratic nominee and making him respond when it came time for his convention. But politics has a way of working out—or not working out—like none of us pros predict. The good news was that the Dem nominee had plenty to do just dealing with his own self-inflicted attacks. The bad news was that we were in worse shape. If Hilda didn’t win the nomination, odds were that Doug Banka could live-stream having sex with monkeys and still win four hundred electoral votes against Armstrong George.

  —

  So we were in New Orleans with a chance, and sometimes a chance was all you could ask for in politics. Outside the Windsor Court, the predawn moment should have felt freshly minted and tinged with promise. But the air tasted stale and nasty, like a locker room with too many bodies and lousy toilets. By the time I reached the gates of the hotel’s circular courtyard, I was dripping with sweat. I walked down Canal toward the Superdome. I told myself I didn’t have a destination, that I was just out to clear my head, but of course that was a lie. Canal Street was a history of the booms and busts that had racked New Orleans. At one end, by the Windsor Court, there was that huge mausoleum of a failed casino perched on the Mississippi River like an abandoned temple of a forgotten religion. A dozen or more times, gambling had been slated to save New Orleans, but a combination of greed, graft, and inertia had always killed it before it could take hold. Locals took a sick pride in the failure of gambling in New Orleans, like the city was too proud of its heritage as a sex, drinking, and music Mecca to allow itself to be transformed into just another imitation of Las Vegas. So what if it cost the city billions in lost dollars? It had been over a hundred years since New Orleans was rich, and that was just fine by everybody. We were New Orleans. We didn’t need anything as crass as money.

  The few times the city had flirted with affluence, it had quickly rejected the notion, like a teenager turning down fancy French food for a hot dog. Oh, to be sure, there had been the brief petrochemical booms and the flood of post–Hurricane Katrina money, but this was greeted as a cause as much for dismay as for joy, a reaction that cut across social lines. Uptown society was terrified of the impact of any new money on their caste systems of Mardi Gras balls and debutante parties. In the Quarter, everybody from the gay community to the bar owners had panicked after real estate prices spiked a few years after Katrina, when federal dollars had rained on the city like a July thunderstorm. After the Crash, there was almost a sick relief that nobody wanted to buy real estate, and the good citizens of New Orleans were relieved of the need to talk about how much somebody’s house had sold for and could instead focus on drinking, sex, crime, and the New Orleans Saints as the normal topics of conversation.

  The old Werlein’s Music Store was on my left, on the north side of Canal, closed now but once a place where Uptown families shopped for Steinways alongside blues musicians looking for the perfect harmonica. Then for a while it had been a restaurant, but that had closed. I’d bought my first Fender Stratocaster here; my brother Paul had driven me to the store and lent me the money for the down payment. He always had a lot of cash in those days, Paul did, money stuck in his pocket at Touchdown Club luncheons from grateful alumni. And then there was the cash that sports agents slipped him, hoping to represent Paul Callahan, LSU great, when he turned pro. Only Paul never made it to the
pros, sidetracked by a hotshot young DA who was determined to break up gambling and didn’t think it was altogether a bad thing to get some headlines when he netted the great Paul Callahan for making big bets with bookies. Paul didn’t even try to fight the charge but spent every penny he had and could borrow to prove he had never bet against LSU. That helped with the public, but he still was convicted: a felony conviction, a year in jail, suspended.

  Ten years later, when the governor officially pardoned him, there had been so much serious corruption in the post-Katrina cleanup that Paul’s sins seemed almost quaint. He’d been required to do a stint of public service, which turned into him going around the state to schools to tell his story. Then he coached high school football, reaching a state championship with a New Orleans team pieced together after Katrina. Talk about rehabilitation. He was damned near a folk hero, and now he was running for public service commissioner. He’d been calling me since we got to town, and I should have called him back; but there were a lot of things I should have done.

  There was a string of pawnshops and jewelry stores on the west end of Canal, each covered in steel bars and alarms, a Doberman or German shepherd asleep on the floor. Pawnshops had exploded after the Crash, and so had the number of people trying to rob them. It was the same with the jewelry stores. With the Crash came a deep, almost mystic need to buy—or steal—gold and silver. In New Orleans alone, four jewelry shop owners had been murdered in the last six months. Now young Uptown couples shopped for wedding rings with the help of a jeweler wearing a 9mm in a holster, a shotgun never far from reach. You were crazy to expect help from the NOPD, which was as bankrupt as the entire city, a department so rife with corruption that it was routine to put a twenty-dollar bill behind your license when you were stopped for speeding. And for a thousand dollars, it wasn’t hard to find a cop who would be happy to settle any problems you might be having by drilling a 9mm slug into the troublemaker. The Crash had brought deflation of all sorts, even for hit men.