by Jim Geraghty
“Mrs. Bloom, since the day you walked through our door, you wanted to be fully engaged in the battle of public communication. Now, you have your wish,” Humphrey said, almost teasing. “Drop everything else you’re doing and begin coming up with an action plan to … mitigate all this.”
There was a knock at the office and Wilkins popped his head in with a distinctly uneasy look.
“I see our fact-finding mission has garnered our traditionally disastrous results,” sighed Humphrey.
Wilkins closed the door behind him and spoke in a hushed, terrified tone.
“Humphrey … we screwed up.”
“How bad?”
“Think of the Hindenburg … crashing into the Titanic … as it sails to Pompeii … with Ford Pintos sent to rescue the wounded.”
“Calm down and tell me everything you’ve learned.”
“I didn’t write anything down, as you instructed—okay, I wrote it on my hands.”
“Good. The last thing we need are any … unflattering memos or other paperwork to be requested by Congress or FOIAed.”
“Everything that has ever bothered me about this place joined forces just as this cheatgrass wave was coming up from Mexico. The complacency, the miscommunication or lack of communication, the lack of urgency, the pervasive belief that somebody else out there was taking care of the problem, the human cholesterol of incompetent staff that were too much trouble to fire, everyone waiting for approval from everyone else before taking actions, the endless meetings, the postponed meetings, the rescheduled meetings, the missed meetings, the memos that went unread, the e-mails that were ‘skimmed’—I swear to God, the next time I need to tell people something, I’m posting it above the urinals and on the bathroom stall doors.”
“So you’re saying our staff missed red flags,” Humphrey said uneasily.
“It was a friggin’ Turkish army parade, Adam!” Wilkins was furious. “Every farmer in California was finding these things and reporting them! They didn’t get noticed because there was a backlog of old reports piling up! When people did start passing the reports up the chain, everybody acted like it was just another day at the office, instead of the … the … the Pearl Harbor of weeds!”
Humphrey stood for a moment, trying to grasp the enormity of the foul-up now detailed in marker ink up and down his assistant’s forearms.
“Wash your hands,” Humphrey said.
The following week meant a lot of trips up to Capitol Hill for Humphrey, attempting to placate the increasingly upset voices in Congress. Quite a few members of California’s delegation from agricultural districts, usually warm and friendly and eager to vote for more spending, were suddenly nasty and harsh and full of criticism.
The only bright part of the week for Humphrey was running into Congressman Nick Bader again, and another opportunity to antagonize his Reagan-era foe. But even this regularly recurring confrontation proceeded a bit differently than usual.
Humphrey spotted Bader emerging from a fundraiser at the Capitol Hill Club.
“Congressman!” Humphrey greeted him with transparently fake enthusiasm. “I suppose I should call you by that title every chance I get, since I hear the polls in Pennsylvania indicate you’re hanging by a thread. You must feel so reassured with that Santorum figure, trailing by double digits and leading the charge for you atop your party’s ticket!”
“Shows what an inside-the-Beltway type like you knows,” Bader growled. “We’ve got a legendary NFL Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steeler on the top of the ticket.”34
“I’m sure that means so much to your district full of Philadelphia fans.”
“I’ll take my problems over yours, Humphrey,” Bader sparred. “If I lose my seat, I know why: a war that’s going on too long, exhaustion with the president, a bunch of numbskulls in my party playing footsie with Abramoff and strangling their mistresses.”
“As a member of the party of family values, it offends you to see a colleague strangling a woman that isn’t his wife, doesn’t it?”
“Laugh all ya want, Humphrey, just remember you and your whole agency have no friends in either party anymore,” Bader warned. “You guys are the latest poster boys for incompetent government. The CIA, FEMA, every doofus in the Departments of Commerce and Labor, the sneaker-sniffers at TSA—they’re all sighing relief right now, knowing that the walking definition of wasteful government is the Agency of Invasive Species that ignored the weed that ate California wine country.”
For once, Adam Humphrey found himself groping for a snappy comeback.
NOVEMBER 2006
U.S. National Debt: $8.63 trillion
Congressman Nicholas Bader, Republican of Philadelphia’s outer suburbs, shouldn’t have survived the Democratic Tsunami of 2006, but somehow he hung on by about one percentage point.
Bader called in to a well-connected political junkie/talking head, a guy who always went into every election night with a thick binder of data that dissected that year’s electorate in extravagant detail. Two years earlier, he had confidently projected an Ohio win for Bush well before the polls had closed, citing a personally executed exit poll by phone of the key swing streets within the key swing communities of the key swing counties in that most important of swing states. When Ned Simmons of James Street in the Eastmoor neighborhood of Columbus, a former voter for Perot, Clinton, and Gore, said that he was voting for Bush because of the way the president handled the issue of terrorism, this junkie felt confident calling Ohio for Bush, even though the polls were open for another three hours. (He predicted all states correctly except one, Wisconsin, a miss he attributed to the strange fact that seven thousand more ballots were cast in Milwaukee than the number of people recorded as voting.)
“Congratulations, Congressman.”
“Thanks. Now I get to see if I’m the last of the Mohicans. How bad is it?”
“Well, they just called another race in the Midwest,” the bespectacled guru answered. “By my rankings, the Democrats just knocked off the … the fifty-fourth most vulnerable House Republican.”
Bader swore, and swore, and swore. And then he swore some more.
Morale in the office of the Agency of Invasive Species was mixed the morning after Election Day 2006. The vast majority of the staff was only too happy to kiss Republican congressional majorities good-bye, although they had encountered less and less trouble with the appropriations process each year. And while the Democrats were undoubtedly open to spending more on the Department of Agriculture as a whole (and in most departments), the cheatgrass crisis—“Weedgate,” as it was called in some corners of the Internet—hadn’t really gone away, and California Democrats seemed particularly irate in their criticism of the agency. The news cycle of the election season had provided plenty of distractions away from Humphrey and the AIS—macaca!—but there was a pervasive gloom that worse days were ahead.
Bader’s unexpected skin-of-his-teeth victory was just one more disappointment to stick in the agency’s collective craw.
“We almost got rid of him!” cried Wilkins. “So close! If we had just flipped about a thousand votes!”
“I’m afraid we will have Nicholas Bader to kick around for another two years,” sighed Humphrey.
One of the day’s key moments came in the afternoon, when a cheerful group of House Democrats held a press conference to lay out their agenda in the year to come.
Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi and a succession of Democrats announced their intentions to investigate the Bush administration on the handling of the Iraq War, the FEMA response to Katrina, the firing of U.S. Attorneys, the ties to Jack Abramoff, and a “callous and tight-fisted” approach to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, making it far too difficult for ordinary Americans to get home loans.
“Finally, we believe that this administration has ill-served the American people by allowing a crisis in our agricultural community to spread unabated,” Pelosi said, her eyes wide and her cheekbones taut with concern and outrage. “Tens of millions of farmers—I’
m sorry, tens of thousands of farmers, and millions of American consumers, are still asking how it could happen. How could something as small and simple as a weed cause such economic and social distress? And where was the federal agency assigned with tracking this threat? How could the Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species fail in its mission so thoroughly?”
“I have spoken to Senate Majority Leader-elect Reid, and in January, Democrats in both chambers will vote to establish a bipartisan National Cheatgrass Disaster Commission, to investigate how this crisis occurred and who should be held accountable.”
Within the offices of the Agency of Invasive Species, everything just stopped for a moment.
Everyone looked at each other, trying to process that their failure to respond to the cheatgrass crisis would now be the subject of a special bipartisan commission, with all that process had come to include: televised hearings, showboating commissioners, competitive leaking, and the intense, unrelenting hunt for scapegoats. Resignations demanded. Instant celebrity status.
“We’re screwed,” Wilkins whispered.
* * *
33 No, I’m not making this up. The state agency’s acronym really is CRISIS.
34 Former Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann was the Republican nominee for governor in 2006.
12
JANUARY 2007
U.S. National Debt: $8.7 trillion
Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $263.5 million
Agency of Invasive Species Administrative Director Adam Humphrey deployed the time-honored “It will distract us from our duties!” excuse to every Democrat on Capitol Hill, to no avail. With surprising speed, the House and Senate passed legislation establishing the National Cheatgrass Disaster Commission, and awaited the leaders of each party and the White House to nominate members.
After watching the final vote on C-SPAN in Humphrey’s office—Lisa was starting to refer to it as “The Bunker”—Wilkins plopped down in his seat and rubbed his temples.
“They are going to crucify us,” Wilkins whimpered.
“They will do no such thing,” Humphrey insisted.
“Do you read the news, Adam? We waterboard people now! Crucifixion is, like, a half step away!”
The first four appointees to the commission surprised most of Washington, as the political world thought all of them had passed away ages earlier. The quartet, all long retired, had been selected for their stature, respect on both sides of the aisle, long-standing ties to the agricultural community, and everyone’s well-placed faith that there was absolutely no way any of them would make waves. They made David Gergen look edgy.
Senate Republicans had appointed former Kansas senator Dorothy Abernathy and former Alabama lieutenant governor Roy Beane. Senate Democrats had appointed former California agriculture commissioner Calvin Robinson and retired Oklahoma State professor Dee Dixon. The youngest among them was Dixon at seventy-one; Beane clocked in at a spry eighty-four years of age; Abernathy and Robinson were currently residing in assisted-living communities.
“Lieutenant Governor and retired general Beane,” Wilkins read off the wire service story just posted online. “Was he in the army?” he asked.
“Yes, the Confederate one,” replied Humphrey.
The editorial page of the Washington Post delicately praised the quartet as “relics of a bygone era of bipartisan cooperation”; The Economist indelicately used the term “unearthed mummies” in their summary. With four of the seven slots taken up by near-late figures in the agricultural policy community, the commission’s tone and direction would rest heavily on the names of the three remaining commissioners. One commissioner had yet to be selected by House Republican leadership, one by House Democrats, and the commission’s chairman was to be appointed by the president, with Reid and Pelosi required to sign off.
Since his defeat in the midterms, Ted Carrington had been a changed man. He was shocked that his constituents had tossed him out in the 2006 landslide, insisting on election night that there had to be some sort of mistake. He was nothing like the Republican colleagues he had often publicly dismissed as Neanderthals, the George Allens, the Rick Santorums, the Lincoln Chafees.
His postelection interviews revealed a long-repressed rage and bitterness; one was headlined THE CONGRESSMAN FROM MERLOT TURNS VINEGARY.
Carrington once tolerated Nick Bader’s strange obsession with a little-known federal agency fighting weed infestations. Now, with the passion of the converted, he began to preach the gospel of the incompetent, arrogant, out-of-touch bureaucrats of Washington, none worse than the shiftless layabouts at the Agency of Invasive Species. He greeted the formation of the National Cheatgrass Disaster Commission as near-miraculous; he proclaimed it would finally correct the record. The ruined crops, the lost wages, the economic aftershocks, the Four Buck Chuck—none of it was his fault. He had been nobly performing his public service, all along, when the useless idiots at AIS messed it all up.
Of course, Carrington had the slight fear that allies of the agency might try to pin the blame elsewhere. And so he suddenly campaigned for the job of commission member with far greater urgency, diligence, and determination than he ever put into any of his congressional races.
Bader found himself on the phone with John Boehner, the new House minority leader, desperately trying to put the most furious, newly minted critic of the Agency of Invasive Species on the special panel that would give it the public policy equivalent of a colonoscopy.
Carrington began hanging around Bader’s congressional office for no particular reason, and Bader was wondering if there was a delicate way to get the U.S. Capitol Police to remove a former member. Carrington kept trying to peek in Bader’s office door every time someone entered or departed.
“Boehner, you gotta put Carrington on the cheatgrass commission. He knows the stuff, he’s connected with all the communities impacted by it, he’s looking for a way to contribute, and by the time he’s done, nobody will be blaming the president for this.”
Boehner’s response was not audible to those not on the line, but the tone sounded hesitant.
“John … I mean it, if you don’t give him something to do and get him out of my hair, I may just have to shoot him. You know I’m rated an A+ by the NRA.”
Wilkins did not knock before entering Humphrey’s office.
“Boehner’s putting Ted Carrington on the commission!” He was interrupting Humphrey and Lisa, who had been spending inordinate amounts of time together lately, desperately trying to construct a communications strategy to weather the category five media storm headed their way.
The pair’s conversation instantly stopped. They had heard Carrington’s name mentioned, but dismissed it as a long shot. From all appearances, John Boehner had a lot more problems to deal with than the cheatgrass commission. Wilkins tossed his BlackBerry to Humphrey.
Lisa looked pale. “Have you seen the way he’s been tearing into us since he lost his seat? He’ll turn that commission into the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Carrington … I didn’t expect that,” mumbled Humphrey, reading the BlackBerry.
Wilkins couldn’t help himself. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
“I thought Carrington had campaigned for the job too transparently to ever be picked,” Lisa said. “Bader must have gotten to Boehner.”
Humphrey waived his hand. “How it happened is moot. Right now, we need to reach Hargis and any of our remaining friends in the House. We need to get a message to Pelosi. She needs to appoint a … balancing voice on the committee.
“Who did you have in mind?” Wilkins asked.
“Ha!”
Javier Puga had been waiting for a call like this for more than two years.
Puga had been a successful trial lawyer in Orlando, Florida, and was elected to Congress in 1998 on a platform of staunch opposition to congressional investigation of presidential sex acts. The Florida Democratic Party and DCCC were unnerved when he unexpectedly won the distri
ct’s primary; as a candidate, he had only one tone, self-righteous indignation, and tended to blurt out anything that came into his mind. But he had money, was reasonably smart, and had a greasy charisma that worked on television. He easily won the swing district, carried along by the Democratic wave that year.
Puga approached Congress the way he had pursued his work in his personal injury practice, putting in the bare minimum of effort on the necessary paperwork and throwing himself into performing to any audience that would listen. Before long, he was spending more time on cable news networks than some actual show hosts, once getting into a loud argument with Sen. Chuck Schumer while the two were both trying to do live remote interviews in close proximity outside the Capitol Building.
Congressman Puga was among those most furious over the disputed 2000 election and recount, and he spent much of 2002 insisting Governor Jeb Bush would be defeated. Despite that erroneous prediction, he spent much of the next cycle assuring the Kerry campaign that Florida was in the bag. Meanwhile, his advisers were warning him that his district was growing tired of his relentless partisan fury. Shortly before a contentious resignation, one bald, glowering strategist bellowed, “Your mouth is writing checks that your district’s Cook Partisan Voting Index Score can’t cash!”
Bush won the state by five percentage points. Additionally, Puga’s outer suburban district decided it had tired of his politics of perpetual rage, as well as stunts like calling for a congressional investigation of allegations that the president had served a plastic turkey during a visit with the troops in Iraq. (“I think this is potential grounds for impeachment, Keith,” he had told the camera with a straight face.)
Puga returned to Florida, reopened his law practice, and waited for the local Democratic Party to beg him to run to win his old seat back. The state party officials seemed strangely unenthusiastic when he called, and those lunch meetings with the county party chairs kept getting postponed. He passed the time by blogging for The Huffington Post, doing the occasional television interview, and writing an angry polemic that didn’t sell.
