The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear

by Stuart Stevens

  Two blocks from the Superdome, I passed a huddle of sleeping bodies in front of the Catholic storefront mission. Five years ago there had been three homeless centers in New Orleans; now there were more than twenty, some as small as the home of a nun who had opened her doors. The mayor had wanted to close the Canal Street and French Quarter missions down before the convention to clean the streets of the homeless who congregated on the nearby sidewalks and parking lots, turned out of the centers during the day and waiting for them to reopen at dusk. But a New York Times reporter had gotten wind of it and done a story that forced the Republican National Committee to contribute to various homeless charities. A vet who had been homeless but managed to get back on his feet was speaking on the second night of the convention. We had wanted a single mother, but Armstrong George’s people had balked, and a vet was the compromise. It was amazing what you could fight over at a convention.

  Outside the Superdome, gray NOPD buses were pulling up, discharging sleepy-looking uniformed cops. They were assembling in squads, waiting for their sergeants to brief them. Even with my all-access pass it took fifteen minutes to work my way inside the Dome. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—a second cordon of security was being erected inside the already-tight security. This was a disaster. For months I’d studied the layout of the convention floor, poring over diagrams with Eddie, looking for every way to maximize our chances in a floor fight. We knew exactly how many feet it was from our command trailer to every delegation’s spot on the floor. We knew which aisles were most likely to be crowded and had alternative routes mapped: if center aisle C was blocked with a floor demonstration, the fastest way to the Maine delegation was around the CBS trailer, past the visitors’ locker room, through the floor to the left of the stage, and down side aisle F-6 to F-7. Approximate time of travel: four and a half minutes. One of Eddie’s hotshot digital team had made us an app we could use to time exactly how long it would take to get from any point in the convention hall to another, given the current crowd conditions. It was the sort of thing that campaigns did to convince themselves they had an edge. Sometimes it was even true.

  Blindfold me and I still could have moved around without a problem on the convention floor. And always, in every diagram, planning session, mock-up, and app, there was one security perimeter with the new bomb-scan devices at each door, twenty-two security stations in all. Now there would be a second interior security border, a smaller, concentric circle through which everyone would be funneled. I quickly worked the numbers: 2,472 delegates, 2,400 alternates with floor passes, 2,100 journalists, 3,000 staff, another 2,000 or so assorted families and friends, odd hangers-on, contributors. All of these people herded through two security levels. It was going to be a train wreck.

  The worst thing about the added security was the inevitable feeling of paranoia it would create with the delegates. More security, more guards with guns: this was hardly an environment that helped a do-good healer like Hilda Smith. To believe in Hilda you had to be convinced that the country needed a president to appeal to our Better Angels. That was her pitch, when you really came down to it. She was hope against fear. Armstrong George was the fear candidate, and right now, watching the most intense security in the history of presidential conventions going up on the floor of the Superdome, you had to believe that fear was looking a hell of a lot better than hope.

  I stepped out of the tunnel onto the convention floor. Dozens of workers were still erecting the high-definition television screens behind the stage. I felt like an athlete walking onto the empty Super Bowl field hours before the game began. It was the kind of vainglorious image that I liked—star athlete, hero. Even a gunslinger headed toward high noon was okay. Anything but a beat-up political hack who was trying to drag a wounded candidate over the line. Out on the convention floor, sleepy workers were just starting to set up chairs. I closed my eyes and pictured the scene: state chairmen screaming into iPhones, the desperate promises, the deals, the lies, the threats. All that emotion jammed into seventy-two hours. It would be brutal and wonderful, and, with a little luck, I would show the world that J. D. Callahan was back—so I could get out.

  Chapter Three

  WE WERE HALFWAY THROUGH the six thirty a.m. senior staff meeting when Ginny walked into the war room holding an envelope. As usual, Kim Grunfeld, the media consultant I’d inherited when I took over the campaign, was yelling at somebody. This time it was Tommy Singh, who was one of the gentlest people you’d ever find in a nasty business like politics. He had the demeanor of a math professor, which is what he had been before he realized he could get rich playing with numbers for politicians.

  “That is the most unholy stupid idea I have ever heard,” Kim sneered. She did this well.

  “Why?” Tommy said in the same soft voice he always used. Everybody considered him a genius when it came to numbers. He might have been born in India, but he could rattle off even the most obscure election returns in parts of the United States that had probably only been mapped by air.

  A hush fell over the room when everyone noticed Ginny standing by the door. The reaction was typically self-important and pompous. A non-war-room-group person had entered the room! How dare she! As if we were nuclear scientists discussing classified technology instead of a bunch of tired and frustrated political operatives in a bland meeting room at a fancy hotel. The higher you go in politics, the more time you spend in these kinds of hotel rooms, the catered food as limp and exhausted as you feel, the coffee as burnt as you’ve been for months. It’s like running away to join the circus and discovering that it’s really run by Google nerds who sit in cubicles. But we always call them “war rooms” to feel more powerful. If you made it seem exclusive and important, people would die to be granted admission.

  “Ginny,” I said, nodding and managing a smile, trying to pretend that everything was perfectly normal, that what passed for Hilda Smith’s brain trust wasn’t staring at her like she had just landed in a spaceship and burst out singing Armstrong George’s praises.

  “Everything okay?” I asked. From the way she was glaring at me, it was clear that Ginny saw this as some kind of test I was failing. This seemed to happen regularly to me with women. Sandra said I veered radically from oblivious to clinging, without a stop for companionship. I’m sure she was right. Either I was so caught up in my own little world, which meant some goddamn campaign death struggle, or I had nothing to do but focus on her and think way too hard about how lucky I was to be the boyfriend of this famous, very hot journalist. Pathetic, really. But Ginny and I had a good time together, more or less. It was a campaign and we were having sex, but it hadn’t really been that strange kind of campaign sex that made you wish you hadn’t had sex as soon as you did.

  Ginny looked like she might hit me. “Here,” was all she said, thrusting an envelope into my hand. “I hate you,” she mouthed silently, and turned on her heel.

  “See ya, Ginny,” Dick Shenkoph mumbled as she reached the door. She turned and winked at Shenkoph, who, as always, was dressed in a rumpled black suit that looked slept in. He blushed, an odd sight on his sagging seventy-something-year-old face.

  No one said anything for a long moment after Ginny left, waiting for me to explain. Everyone in the room was wondering, What in God’s name is in that envelope? So was I, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, and picked up where we had been when Ginny walked in.

  “You don’t like Tommy’s idea, Kim?” I asked Kim.

  “What?” she grumbled, trying to focus. Kim Grunfeld was only thirty-one or so but already had bags under her eyes. Her mother, a congresswoman from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was a walking advertisement for cosmetic surgery, with one of those faces that looked like it had melted under a too-hot sun. Kim had grown up in the family business, and the business was politics. Nationally her mother was known as a crazy-left Democrat of the sort a family trust fund helps develop. No one in Congress really liked her. She was self-important and self-involved, a bore even to her ow
n true believers. But to those out there who didn’t have to deal with her, she was a great champion of the left with a narrow but intense following across the country. Her father was an advertising exec who had been at various times the head of most of the big Madison Avenue agencies. One late night on a campaign bus coming back from shooting Hilda on a rainy day in Ohio, Kim had told me, “What you have to understand is that my mom is the nice one in the family.” I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. She had become a Republican out of family rebellion, an instinct I found all too understandable.

  Tommy didn’t wait for her to get worked up again. “Why is this not a good idea? This bombing is a defining moment whether we want it or not. We must poll to gauge our reaction.”

  “I’m all for polling, you know,” Dick Shenkoph mumbled, and a few people chuckled. Shenkoph had been a major pollster a decade ago, until he was caught cooking numbers in a Texas governor’s race. Instead of completing full samples of six hundred calls for weekly polls, Shenkoph had his company make only sixty or so calls and then “weighted” the numbers, extrapolating the results that would have resulted if he had made the full six hundred calls. But he was charging, of course, as if he were making all the calls. When his client discovered what was going on, Shenkoph defended himself by asserting that however he came up with the numbers, they were right on the money, which was a hell of a lot more than you could say for a lot of pollsters. The governor, a self-made millionaire, was not a stupid man. He kept Shenkoph as his pollster and strategist until he won, then waited a week and had his campaign manager announce to the world that they had just discovered this grievous fraud and demanded a full refund on all polling. The lawsuit that followed had driven Shenkoph into bankruptcy. The assistant campaign manager on that campaign had been a young hotshot—me.

  “But I hate to think,” I barked, “what kind of holy shit would come down on our heads if one of our brothers in the media found out we were in the field the morning after this bombing trying to figure out how the hell the vice president should respond. Let me go out on a limb here, guys: I think we ought to be against it.”

  “No, but really, Tommy,” Kim cut in, “if your poll showed that maybe we should come out in support of more terrorist bombing, I’d love to make a spot about it.” She turned away in disgust and lit an unfiltered Camel. Only Shenkoph and she smoked. And Camels? They were still legal?

  “Kim,” Tommy said in the same logical voice, “I am sure, given your track record in other campaigns, that you would do precisely that.”

  “Goddamn it!” She was half out of her chair in an instant. “I’ve won more races—”

  “It is a matter of nuance I am speaking of,” Tommy continued, unfazed. “The wording. The precise language of our response.” He held out his hands like a teacher reduced to proving simple theorems to children. “This is what is critical and this is what a poll could assist us in formulating.”

  I shook my head. This was a bad idea. The last thing we needed was a nasty story about how we were so unsure how to respond to the bombing that we needed to poll. And the truth was that in all likelihood, Hilda Smith was going to say whatever she wanted to say, regardless of what we told her to.

  “Let’s move on,” I said.

  Eddie stood up and passed around sheets of paper to the seven people in the room. “We have heard from a half-dozen delegates that they are leaving town. We may be able to turn some of those around or it may get worse. These are bios on the alternate delegates who will replace anyone who leaves.”

  “What about George delegates leaving?” Kim asked. We all looked at her and then she shook her head. “Yeah, right. They’re dying for this fight. They’ll probably have alternates already riding horses into town. Ride to the sound of the guns. Our people are scared. I hate that.”

  Eddie continued. “Attached is a list of the alternates and key influence points we ran on each using our own circle-of-influence logarithms. As you know, each alternate, like most delegates, is not legally bound to support the vice president and can switch allegiance to any candidate. That includes candidates not in the race.”

  “So these sumbitches can really vote for whomever the hell they want?” Dick Shenkoph asked. “Even if they were elected as Hilda Smith alternate delegates, they can flip on us and go to that bastard George?”

  “Pretty much. But there are technicalities in some state laws that we might be able to contest,” Eddie responded.

  Every state party had its own rules for electing delegates, approved by the national party. It was a complicated, confusing mess. We had a staff of eight election law specialist lawyers who did nothing but focus on what it took to get Hilda Smith on the ballot—not an easy process—and tracked the frequently changing rules for each state’s primary or caucus. It was an absurd way to pick the nominee of the party, but no one seemed to know any way to scrap the system and start over. It was like a rumbling giant airplane that had started out with a World War II frame—say, a B-17—and been constantly altered and modified to an unrecognizable state.

  “Oh great,” Shenkoph said. “We’re going to sue our own delegates to vote for our ass?”

  “They have to stick with us unless they want to die a slow and painful death,” Kim Grunfeld said.

  “We could threaten them with having sex with you,” Shenkoph said.

  “Cute.”

  “Half are women,” Eddie said.

  “All the better,” Kim said, without looking up. It was a subject of fascination to Shenkopf whether Kim was gay or straight. No one else seemed to care, but he had brought it up on more than one occasion. She knew it and loved to taunt him with whatever fantasies he might have. She walked over to the long table, which was filled with coffee and awful-looking pastries. She poured herself a cup of coffee and walked back toward her chair. As she passed Shenkoph, she poured most of the hot coffee into his lap.

  “Jesus Christ!” Shenkoph jumped to his feet.

  “Stephen Stills?” Kim read, ignoring Shenkoph. “Somebody likes Stephen Stills.” She looked up at Eddie. “He’s still alive?”

  In the bathroom, we could hear Shenkoph splashing water on the front of his rumpled suit, cursing in a low, steady stream. I looked at Lisa. We both tried not to laugh.

  “Mr. Ted Jawinski is a great fan of Crosby, Stills and Nash. He has been to over a dozen concerts.”

  “How do you know that?” Lisa asked.

  Eddie looked pained, like he had been asked how he knew that gravity really existed. “He writes about it on Facebook all the time. And he buys all their albums on Amazon.”

  “You have Amazon data?” I asked. This I didn’t know. “Is that legal?” Eddie shrugged. I let it drop. At this point, if Eddie had bought sex tapes from ex-boyfriends to use, I was all for it. That’s how campaigns work. You start out trying to win in the right way and end up trying to survive in the worst way.

  “This is creepy,” Kim said, a note of admiration in her voice.

  “You ought to see what Eddie has on you, Kim,” I cracked, and everyone laughed. Except Kim.

  I loved Eddie Basha. He was from the Mississippi Delta, a second-generation American of Lebanese extraction. He had the management skills of a COO of a major corporation and the soul of a very efficient assassin. I’d brought him in at the beginning, starting with that Wednesday in New Hampshire. We had worked together in over a dozen gubernatorial and congressional races and never lost. He was my good luck charm. We had met years ago in a special election to replace a congressman in north Mississippi who had resigned after cops caught him with his old high school girlfriend, both half naked, in a lovers’ lane parking spot outside of Pontotoc, Mississippi. Instead of trying to tough it out and beg for forgiveness, the congressman announced that he was resigning, divorcing his wife, and moving in with his old girlfriend. I always sort of admired that honesty. He was forty-two years old, took a look at his life, didn’t like it, and changed it. Now he was a high school football coach in North
Florida, and I hoped he was happy.

  But that had opened up a congressional special election in a district that had been Republican and was likely to stay that way. I did what I did a lot of in those days: I went candidate hunting rather than waiting for somebody to call me. There were a couple of sort of wealthy candidates already in the race who had hired big-name consultants, which I certainly wasn’t. There were a couple of state representatives and one small-town mayor. But I had an idea—a sort of crazy idea, but I figured it was worth a shot.

  I flew down from D.C. to Memphis, rented a car, and drove to Oxford, Mississippi. It was summer and even hotter than D.C. but still felt fresher. I drove onto the Ole Miss campus, parked in front of the football stadium, and found my guy running stadiums. I’d read that he did this every day at noon, even in the hottest part of the summer. The stadium was unlocked but empty. Except for my guy, sweating like a bastard and running up and down the steps. He moved with the grace that had made him an All-American at Ole Miss, just over six feet, with huge hands that pistoned by his legs as if they were pulling an invisible rope up the stadium steps. I had watched him play in this stadium many times, heard his name chanted over and over. The night he’d shattered his leg when a three-hundred-pound tackle landed on him just the wrong way, they said you could hear the bone crack into the seats. That had ended his pro career, and brought him into the Marines. Even with a leg that would never be perfect, he flew through basic and was sent to Afghanistan. That was after most of the fighting, but five months in he caught two bullets from an Afghani wearing the right uniform but eager to kill Americans. That was two years ago, and he was back at Ole Miss now, an assistant coach, working on a graduate degree in business.