Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Llewellyn Burke was a man who believed in the institutions of American government, and even more in the subtle norms that underlay them—in compromise, collaboration, and respecting the validity of the other side’s right to disagree with you. Burke’s true power in Washington lay largely behind the scenes. He was part of the hidden city, a network of people who comprised what remained of a bipartisan political center, a place, however diminished, where compromise and solutions could still be found. And Burke was one of the last figures in the city trusted by people on all sides.

  The race for the presidency, however, was threatening to further dim whatever light was cast by the political center. Two of the three leading contenders for the Democratic nomination dismissed what one of them called the “incoherence of political compromise.” The leading contenders for the GOP ticket were also radicals—ultraconservatives who despised the idea of a political center even more than the Democrats.

  Those two men were Richard Bakke, the senator who’d made the offer to Upton, and Jeff Scott.

  Bakke, the leader of the GOP radicals in the Senate, had also been Rena and Brooks’s antagonist during the investigation into the African incident last year. He had no love for Lew Burke.

  Yet Scott represented the bigger threat to Rena’s mentor. Not only was he taking over control of the party in their home state, he also represented a new and more polished radical Republicanism than Bakke’s. Both men espoused anti-immigration policies, wanted to tear down institutional barriers to change, called for remaking the courts, and touted economic nationalism. But while Bakke was a harsh personality, Scott was a quiet midwesterner, handsome, charismatic, a decorated war veteran, and a full generation younger than most leaders in his party.

  In purely political terms, however, Scott was probably even more extreme than his rival. He threw around talk about “a national emergency of values and institutions” and the country “at the abyss.” He embraced the language of other populists globally, terms like deep state, fake news, and failing media. He also added science and the academy into the mix, talking about “left-wing professors” and “radical science.” He often described his opponents as “enemies of the people” and talked about “patriots and anti-patriots” and “American and un-American.”

  But he seemed to do it all with a wink, casually, almost jokingly. Perhaps he didn’t mean it.

  But he did mean it, Rena thought. In Michigan, Scott had already begun dismantling much of the state’s institutional and political establishment to amass unprecedented power and weaken his critics.

  Yet somehow Scott made it seem as if he were being pulled into action almost against his will, at the last minute, as things fell into chaos—please, Jeff, we need you to save the town, the state, the whole country—like a reluctant but iconic American movie hero, played by Clint Eastwood or Gary Cooper. The truth was that Scott’s people often quietly hastened the predicament that needed solving.

  And in the last three weeks, against all predictions, he had emerged as the leading Republican contender for president.

  Free elections are like MRIs into the body politic, a quadrennial moment when we tour the country, sending messages of hope and anger, and see how people state by state respond. The census every decade may count how many people live in the country. Our long, relentless campaigns tell us what is in their hearts.

  Watching Burke, Rena saw something he’d never seen before in his friend: fear of what the campaign was revealing. Fear of the American people.

  Rena was watching his friend, listening to Upton, and to the river, and though he didn’t know it, what he saw was wounding him, too.

  Brooks, meanwhile, was losing patience with Upton. “You don’t know who is coming after you? Or what they might have?”

  Upton shook her head, and Brooks turned to Sedaka: “Who do you think is threatening Wendy?”

  “I have my theories, but I’m not ready to offer them yet,” Sedaka said.

  The man didn’t appear enthused about the two fixers being here. Or maybe it was Upton putting herself under Burke’s protection he didn’t like. Whatever it was, Rena and Brooks would have to speak to him away from the senator.

  Rena’s partner was way ahead of him.

  “Well, you’re both going to have to do a helluva lot better than this if you want our help,” she said, her voice rising over the sound of the river. “And I will tell you this now. If you want to find out who’s doing this to you, we will have to turn your life inside out. You’re gonna have to trust us more than you trust your closest friends. And you’re going to have to tell us more than you may have ever told anyone else about your life.”

  She made herself look larger and turned to Sedaka. “And you have to get comfortable with this or get out of the way.”

  She turned back to Upton.

  “Senator, we barely know each other. But if you want this, you cannot have any secrets from us. And we will have to do this very quickly. A couple of days. So you have to decide right now.”

  She put a sympathetic hand over Upton’s across the patio table. “Do you want our help?”

  Upton took a deep breath. And for the first time in front of them revealed something about herself:

  “I came from nothing. My sister and I didn’t even have parents after I was sixteen. I built my life myself. I won’t be intimidated or bullied, especially for something that never happened. I couldn’t live with myself if I did. It would mean I am not the person I believe myself to be. That other people rely on me to be.”

  Then she gave Brooks a piercing look and said: “What would you do?”

  Randi smiled. She liked this woman.

  And Upton said: “So how do we get started?”

  Seven

  Tucson

  1983

  Why couldn’t Emily concentrate?

  They were sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment above the tavern and the small grocery store their parents owned, and Wendy was helping her sister, Emily, with her math. Emily was barely trying. She would get the numbers mixed up in her mind. She never seemed to pay attention for very long. She was so easily distracted. She even mixed up her letters when she read sometimes, getting them in the wrong order.

  Emily was ten already and in the fifth grade. That meant they were learning fractions. Fractions, decimals, and percentages. Which you had to do constantly to make change downstairs in Mom and Dad’s store. So Emily should have been good at fractions long ago. She still struggled with her multiplication tables, too, which she should have mastered last year, in fourth grade. It seemed like Emily wasn’t trying.

  Emily wasn’t dumb. Wendy knew that. She just didn’t concentrate. She got distracted; she didn’t seem to try.

  “I’m tired and I’m bored,” Emily said, her voice slithering into a full whine when she got to the second half of the sentence.

  “You think I’m not?” Wendy shot back. “You think I’m excited to be doing your fifth-grade math when I have my own homework to do?”

  Wendy wanted it to sound harsh. And a little mean. She wanted to shock Emily, and shame her. But she recognized her mistake the moment the words had come out. They had the opposite effect from what she wanted. Then she felt badly for hurting Emily’s feelings. It was easy to hurt her little sister with words, even though Emily pretended not to care.

  Now Emily was mad.

  “Well, I’m not making you do my homework with me,” Emily said.

  No, Mom and Dad are, Wendy thought. “You’re good with school and especially math. Better than me,” her mom would say. Better than I, Wendy would think.

  But Wendy worked with Emily on a lot more than math. Their parents owned the bar and restaurant downstairs with its little half-assed grocery store on the side. Together they were Shiny’s Tavern and Grocery.

  With the words BAR, FOOD, GROCERIES in neon light, in that order, on the sign just below the name.

  Mom ran the grocery, Dad the tavern, with Mom doing the books for both. T
he two girls, Emily and Wendy, worked the shop on the weekends and often more than that. Wendy was sixteen, old enough to waitress in the bar, as long as she didn’t serve liquor. But she learned to talk—to anyone and everyone. She also learned to watch and listen—as men complained and told their stories and revealed even more of themselves in their lies. She learned about people from the stories in that bar, about their hopes and dreams and what drove them and disappointed them. She could hear the story of Arizona, too, she thought, in the families who came to eat. And sometimes, when the men in the bar went to the bathroom, she would see what a Jack and Coke tasted like, or a Canadian and Seven, or an old-fashioned. Just a sip, and no one seemed to notice.

  When she got to be fourteen, two years ago, her stepfather, Wade, had taught her how to make pretty much every drink there was. Or at least any drink the hard-cores in downtown Tucson might want in a place called Shiny’s in 1981.

  Emilio, the cook, had taught her how to do short order. Her mother had taught her how to run the grocery. That’s why you are so good at math, her mom would say. You’ve already been using it for near on a decade. I’ll teach you how to keep the books soon.

  There was a knock on the door. And three men came in without waiting for an answer. That would always be part of Wendy’s memory. Bob, the substitute barman, just came right in, having coming up with the others from downstairs, three sets of heavy shoes on the steps. People were always coming up from downstairs, into the two-bedroom kitchenette apartment. Usually they knocked lightly. Tonight, it had been a hard knock, and they hadn’t waited for an answer before they entered.

  Behind Bob, Wendy saw two policemen. A tall one who was white and was getting fat and who reminded Wendy of the former U of A football player who was a regular at the bar downstairs, who liked the barstool nearest the bathroom and told old stories about his varsity days. Behind the big cop there was a younger one, a Mexican American whose hair was almost completely shaved and whose tiny mustache was so faint it looked like a dirt smudge. They wore grim expressions, and Bob walked into the room with pain so deep in his eyes, Wendy knew everything at once.

  “Girls, I have to tell you something,” he said. Now his whole face was in pain. “Come to me.” He put his thick hands around their backs and pulled them into his arms. He smelled of cigarette smoke and stale liquor. “Something has happened. Something terrible.”

  Eight

  Dallas, Texas

  Before he got out of the rental car and headed into the glossy swagger of Texas pride and ambition awaiting him inside, Matt Alabama took a moment.

  He hadn’t seen the footage of the fight last night between supporters of Maria Pena and the man in the Dick Bakke T-shirt. Before ambling into Biernat’s steak house to interview Richard Bakke, he wanted to see what had happened.

  The senior national correspondent for the ABN television network, Alabama had covered seven previous presidential campaigns; this would be his last. For his valedictory moment, ABN had asked him to go on the road, visit each major candidate’s campaign, and place them in some historical perspective. Or at least a TV version of historical perspective.

  Alabama kept the rented Ford running so the heat stayed on. He plucked his iPad from his bag on the passenger seat next to him and began searching for the video. The longest piece was from the BNS cable network, narrated by a pretty young brunette anchor. Most of BNS’s female anchors were brunette, while the conservative cable networks’ were blondes. When had hair color become ideological?

  “The incident occurred in Houston at a rally for New Mexico governor Maria Pena,” the brunette read. The best footage of the fight itself came from a cell phone, shot by a bystander. A man in a black T-shirt with BAKKE IS RIGHT written on it was shouting at a man and a woman. The woman pushed the man in the T-shirt. Then the two guys appeared to grab each other, and the man in the Bakke T-shirt seemed to be flung to the ground. Then the image began to shake and the footage ended.

  “The Bakke supporter,” the anchor narrated, “told police he was pushed into a tower that held up a bank of loudspeakers. The loudspeaker tower toppled over. Four people were hospitalized. Three people involved in the altercation were arrested.”

  The few seconds of actual fighting were replayed again, the image magnified and blurrier from being shown in slow motion. There were shorter bits of video shot from other angles and apparently other cell phones. There were some still images.

  “The three people taken into custody are expected to be released on their own recognizance,” the anchor woman said. “This is one of the stories we’ll be following for you.”

  Alabama watched two more TV packages and read a few newspaper pieces. In his experience, violence and arrests weren’t unheard of at political events. They were rare, however. And something this time felt different to Alabama. There was something going on out there in the campaign, something he hadn’t seen or felt before in all the races he had covered. Something ugly.

  Candidates usually talked about uniting people. Except for the fringe guys, the ones who never rose above a primary base of 30 percent. Not anymore. Division had become the animating principle in American politics—not just for protest candidates but for almost everyone. Us vs. them. It was there in the call-and-response chants featured at virtually every event.

  At Pena rallies they chanted, “We are the ninety-nine percent,” a reference to the idea that the establishment in both parties catered to the most affluent 1 percent that financed their campaigns.

  At Bakke’s events they chanted, “Take back America.” Take it back from whom? People of color? Jews? Immigrants? The real menace, Alabama thought, was that the threat was so obvious to the audience it needn’t be named.

  At rallies for Jeff Scott, the new rising GOP star, Alabama had heard shouts of “Shut it down.” That was the mantra of the fringe group that wanted to suspend Congress and hold a new constitutional convention to reconfigure the government. They were showing up at rallies and getting coverage from major news media outlets, a tactic designed to propel their marginal ideas into the mainstream. And his gullible press colleagues, Alabama thought, were falling for it.

  He tossed his bag into the trunk, checked his jacket for a notebook and pen, and headed into Biernat’s. The place, which was named for the owner and pronounced béarnaise, like the sauce, was one of the power lunch and dinner spots in Dallas. Like Rick in Casablanca, Al Biernat was apolitical. Yellow dog liberals, blue dog moderates, and red meat conservatives converged here with equal enthusiasm. And the most desired locations were to be at one of the famous “Dallas Nine,” the nine leather booths that flanked the big-windowed southern wall.

  Richard Bakke was in booth five, sitting with Texas senator Aggie Tucker. The two men were best friends in the Senate, which was especially important this week. The Texas primary was next Tuesday, and “Craggy Aggie” was the most popular collector of votes anyone had seen in a generation in the giant, over-confident, solipsistic Lone Star nation-state of Texas.

  “The media has arrived at last,” Bakke drawled. “Now we can finally order a T-bone, and lunch will be on ABN. A matter of the network’s high ethics.”

  Alabama tried to match Bakke’s reptile smile as he slid in next to Senator Tucker. He wanted to face Bakke. They were just talking on background, off camera. Alabama had learned over the years it was essential to see these people offstage as much as possible. It was the only way to really fathom the characters they played onstage.

  “Don’t be sarcastic about ethics, Senator,” Alabama said. “If you become president, you’ll be glad we have them.”

  “I’d be glad if you had ’em covering me in the Senate,” Bakke said.

  “I’m gagging on the bullshit already, Dick. Can we bring the volume down?”

  A sly smile from Bakke and then a nod.

  “Ah, my children,” Tucker purred. “I’m pleased you’re finally getting along.”

  OUTSIDE, a kid with a backpack approached Biernat’s on fo
ot. By the windows, he had been told. They would be by the windows on the south wall. His phone had a compass, and it told him which side of the restaurant was south. He could see the windows now. Tall things, floor to ceiling, with fancy ironwork in them. They were beautiful, he had to say. All he had to do was see which was the one where the bald head of Dick Bakke was sitting.

  ALABAMA WAS TRYING to lighten the mood. “You ready to be bipartisan tomorrow night?”

  That was why they were all here. Tomorrow evening Bakke and seven other candidates would participate in what was being called “The Bipartisan Debate.” Multiple Democrats and Republicans would share the stage, though still running in separate primaries. The idea, dreamed up by the host cable channel and the cohosting digital platform company, was to help bring the country together. That’s what they said at least.

  “I’m always ready to be bipartisan,” Bakke declared. “I just don’t find the radical liberal Democrats want to meet me halfway.”

  “I’m not taking notes, Senator. So relax. If the Democrats have gotten more liberal, it’s because the Republicans got a lot more conservative first. Or do you want to debate that, too?”

  Bakke eyed Alabama. The reptile smile was replaced by a more thoughtful frown. “And I thank God we did,” Bakke said. “I have spent my life trying to pull my party back to its roots. Trying to expunge the accommodationists who blurred the distinctions between liberals and conservatives. The so-called responsible center. Look, I get that the solution to one crisis usually creates the problems that become the next. But our country has been in trouble for sixty years. The liberal hegemony from Roosevelt to Johnson nearly ruined us. It’s just that people are only now seeing it. History has a way of creeping up on you.”

  It was a variation of the speech Bakke would be giving in a couple of hours, and the message he had been refining for the last decade and a half.