Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  McGrath was looking at Brooks. “Scott appeals to this group. So does Bakke. They channel that anger. But Upton is popular with these folks, too, because she fought the government when she was a teenager and won, and she’s ex-military. And her magic is she doesn’t play angry.”

  McGrath stopped.

  “Here’s the thing about your girl, Wendy. She pulls from every one of these damn circles. She’s the common denominator—a missing piece of the puzzle for each candidate. Truth is, she’d help a candidate in either party. If I graphed the Democrats for you, you’d see something similar.”

  Rena and Brooks stared blankly back at McGrath. They’d not mentioned Upton being approached by David Traynor. And they had no intention of doing so.

  There was a small circle near the middle called “Alienated/Disengaged.”

  “The 10 percent who are just pissed off in general. But they vote. And they swing—usually against whatever party has the White House. So this time I figure they’ll go GOP.”

  McGrath stepped away from the glass wall.

  “I thought you were going to name our blackmailer for us,” Rena said. He was losing patience with McGrath’s circles and graphs.

  “Weren’t you listening, Peter? I just did.” McGrath grinned. “Dick Bakke, Jeff Scott, Jennifer Lee, and Tony Soto are your top suspects. Probably not them personally, though you never know. But maybe some crazy cabal, or some rich asshole, who supports them.”

  McGrath started pacing. “And add Janice Gaylord to that list, since she doesn’t want Upton joining anyone’s ticket. She wants to be vice president herself. And she’s mean as an angry mule.”

  Janice Gaylord, a billionaire Texas cosmetics magnate, was the other woman in the GOP primaries besides Jennifer Lee. She was deeply religious and was trying to inspire women voters, just like Lee. But she wasn’t getting much traction. Which meant she was basically running now in the hope of being picked for the second spot on someone else’s ticket. That made Upton a threat to her. And she was reputed to be mean enough and rich enough and ambitious enough to blackmail Upton all by herself.

  “You just named the top five Republicans in the race,” Rena grumbled. “That doesn’t narrow things much.”

  “Yeah, well, hey now. When you look at this,” McGrath said, “you two need to understand something about campaigns today. They’re different than even ten years ago, when you were directly involved, Randi. Some of these candidates are just vessels. The parties are weaker than ever. The real power today is money—not the parties, or voters, or even any one candidate. It’s the PACs. And the donors behind them. And the biggest money is dark. No one knows entirely where it’s coming from. A lot of these PACs are 501(c)(4) organizations, your so-called donor-advised funds. They don’t have to report where their money comes from. But you know this.”

  McGrath’s leprechaun whimsy had vanished.

  “You know, when I worked in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, after the fall, this Russian oligarch told me, ‘You’re not really rich unless you own your own army and have your own political party.’ I thought the guy was kind of ludicrous and disgusting.”

  McGrath grimaced.

  “Well, in the United States today, the rich spend as much money on private security as we do as a nation on police. And there are about fifteen billionaires who are basically trying to buy the parties and control who becomes president. The amount of money they’ve put into super PACs and campaigns dwarfs all other funding sources. That’s the game now—big donors and dark money. Outside contributions approached $1.7 billion in the last presidential campaign—half again what it was four years before. And it’s in both parties, don’t kid yourself.”

  McGrath’s face was flushed. “The owner of the Chicago fucking Cubs dropped twenty million dollars in a final month on ads in the last cycle to try to stop Jim Nash. More than Reagan spent total his first time out. These people aren’t kingmakers. They want to make the rules, too, and make sure the king they have bought plays by them.”

  McGrath glanced at his drawing on the wall. “Right now, they’re split. Some are betting on Bakke, like the Grantland brothers. Some on Soto. Trotter Cardoff and the Fund for Freedom are behind him. They think Tony can win and would be obedient. A lot of money is on Jennifer Lee. Jeff Scott has got some heavy people behind him. And Janice Gaylord used to pay dark money. Now she’s financing her own campaign.”

  McGrath had begun sweating. “Would any of them threaten Upton?” he asked.

  The question, however, was rhetorical. McGrath’s answer clearly was yes.

  He was bouncing on his toes now in front of his graph of the conservative landscape in America. The exhaustion in his voice gone, he was full of energy.

  “And don’t forget the people who run PACs, too. Not the billionaires, but the ones who bundle their money, the political operatives who run these PACs, are under enormous pressure to deliver. If you’ve raised three hundred million dollars and promised to elect a president in return, you’re pretty much dead if you can’t make good. Those guys could easily go crazy.”

  McGrath sat down behind his desk, beads of sweat on his forehead. “So I’d say your suspect list is anyone backing any of those five campaigns. Bakke, Scott, Lee, Soto, or Gaylord. Look at the money. And the bundlers in the PACs who’ve made promises to get it.”

  Only those candidates with no chance of winning were missing from McGrath’s list, which at this point was three marginal candidates, Senator Homer Stiles, a friendless man from Montana, Governor Stan Drinkard of Louisiana, and Curtis Gains, a Florida congressman.

  “You guys have taken on a pretty bad job,” McGrath joked.

  Brooks wasn’t laughing. “What about Democrats?” she asked.

  “What about them? You imagine one of them is thinking that far ahead to be worrying about Upton?”

  If a Democrat knew David Traynor was considering joining forces with her they might, Rena thought. They also might want to threaten Upton if they thought she would join a ticket with Dick Bakke. But they weren’t telling McGrath who had made offers to Upton.

  “I would be thinking about her,” Brooks said.

  “In my humble experience, most Democrats aren’t as smart as you, Randi,” McGrath said. “But if you want my take on them, we’ll have to do it in another meeting. I’m late.”

  On the sidewalk outside, Brooks asked, “Do you trust him, Peter? Or did we just let the whole effing world know what the hell we’re doing?”

  “I think I do,” Rena said. “But I’m not sure it matters.” His voice was strange. “We may not be able to find out who’s doing this and keep it a secret.”

  “If it gets out, haven’t we failed?”

  The question seemed to stop Rena.

  “At least we got the most expensive political consultant in the country to work for us for a dollar.”

  Twelve

  West End

  Rena wanted to go home, even for an hour or two—for a run and a shower. Then he’d join the others exhuming Wendy Upton’s life.

  The truth was that he felt an unexpected wave of sadness washing over him. The prospect of the campaign becoming this vicious depressed him. He wasn’t fascinated by the mechanics of politics.

  Not the way his partner was.

  Even if she did tell him again and again he was a natural at the game.

  The country seemed to Rena locked in a repeating argument that kept looping back on itself. Each new public event triggered the same accusations of ill motives and ignorance about the other side. And each new cycle eroded the previous version, the debate getting nastier and smaller.

  Conservatives despised liberals for their softness, their political correctness, for apologizing for America, for their addiction to government and their demands for economic and social redistribution. Liberals despised conservatives because they imagined their economic attitudes were short-sighted and social and moral beliefs were intolerant, racist, or ignorant. In America, Rena thought, we
no longer respected the validity of each other’s positions or even our right to have them. Angry and afraid, people were seeking solace in tribal identities that only made problems worse.

  Rather than offering to fix this repeating loop of distrust, it seemed most of the people running for president were trying to exploit it.

  With the threat to Upton, someone was also trying to use blackmail to bend the race even more.

  Rena wanted to go for a run and clear his head.

  He found himself in his den, however, looking at old books. He picked out a time-worn copy of journalist Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960, the book that first pulled back the curtain of presidential campaigns and created the “behind the scenes” style of journalism that dominated the way we now looked at politics—and helped make it look like cynical theater.

  In the beginning, however, White had marveled at the miracle of American elections, not seen them as manipulative.

  “The general vote is an expression of national will, the only substitute for violence and blood. Its verdict is to be defended as one defends civilization itself,” read one passage Rena had underlined years ago.

  If that were true, wasn’t the process to be defended “as one defends civilization”? So the verdict has integrity? What place was there for the kind of threats being leveled against Upton?

  “Only one other major nation in modern history has ever tried to elect its leader directly by mass, free, popular vote,” White wrote seventy years ago. “This was the Weimer Republic of Germany, which modeled its unitary vote for national leader on American practice. Out of its experiment with the system it got Hitler. Americans have had Lincoln, Wilson and two Roosevelts.”

  Were we the same country now? Or were we so worried our glory was behind us, like Germany or Italy, that we would grasp for its return by abandoning the democratic principles that made us Americans in the first place? He had always assumed Jim Nash would be succeeded by someone in the other party. That now looked like it would be Bakke or Scott.

  Then Rena ran—a fierce and urgent six miles. Halfway along, his mind drifted back to the names on McGrath’s board. Each had motive to destroy Upton. Who on the list also had the stomach for it? Rena tried to think through them one by one.

  Bakke certainly was not above threatening people. Yet why would the man who yesterday asked Upton to join him today threaten her to stay out of the race? If Bakke’s scrubbers found something damaging about Upton, it made more sense to withdraw the offer and keep the secret for later—in case she ran with someone else.

  How likely to threaten Upton were McGrath’s other suspects? Jeff Scott, the Michigan governor, whose campaign was surging, had plenty of arrogance to match his charisma. But Rena doubted he was this reckless. Scott was winning. This involved more risk than he needed to take.

  Jennifer Lee, the Georgia governor, seemed even less the type. Yet Rena agreed with McGrath that some of the powerful people behind her might be capable of anything.

  He had no doubt about the other woman on McGrath’s list, Janice Gaylord. The conservative business magnate had no chance of winning the White House. But she did hope for a spot on the GOP ticket as vice president. And Upton potentially stood in her way.

  What about Tony Soto, the senator from Nevada, whose image was softer and more compassionate than some of the others? Rena wasn’t sure. It was hard to know if Soto was sincere about anything.

  McGrath had ignored the Democrats. But Rena could think of at least three camps that would want to block Upton. Progressives Maria Pena and Omar Fulwood argued Democrats had to be much tougher on the GOP and move further left. That meant they were both motivated to want a hard-line GOP ticket to run against. They’d want to block a Bakke-Upton ticket. And the other centrist in the race—the ex-cop and ex-soldier Cole Murphy—despised David Traynor. If he had found out about Traynor’s overture to Upton, that would be a motive.

  As Rena was getting out of the shower after his run, the phone rang. His friend the reporter Matt Alabama.

  A decade earlier Alabama seemed to have adopted Rena as a kind of younger brother, after Rena had been pushed out of the military and become a Senate aide. He saw in Rena, Alabama had once said, a younger version of himself. What did that mean? “Underneath all the Special Forces machismo and cop savvy, you’re a romantic idealist.” You mean I foolishly expect the world to be a better place than it really is, Rena said. Yes, Alabama had told him. And there aren’t enough of us.

  Alabama liked to call at the end of the day to chat, something Rena now did with only one other person, Vic Madison in California.

  “Hear what happened today with Dick Bakke?”

  Rena hadn’t seen any news today. He froze at the thought the Bakke offer to Upton had leaked somehow. “No.”

  “Someone threw a brick at him. And I was having lunch with the honorable gentleman at the time. Nearly killed me instead of him.”

  “The day after the arrests at the Pena rally last night?” Rena asked. He was thinking like a cop.

  “Peter, something’s going on out there,” Alabama said. “Something ugly. And different than anything I’ve seen before.”

  Rena knew Alabama had covered presidential races for close to thirty years.

  “This campaign is about fear,” Alabama said. “Not about making the country better. And that is new.”

  “Fear about what?”

  He could hear Alabama sigh.

  “It think it’s fear there’s not enough in the country to go around. That the country doesn’t work anymore. Not like it did. And that it can’t be fixed.”

  Rena heard something in Alabama’s voice. Was it a hint that maybe he thought the fears were justified? That Alabama was afraid, too?

  “This kind of anger used to be the message of protest campaigns,” Alabama was saying. “Now it’s everyone. And it’s working.”

  Rena said nothing.

  “Pena and Fulwood say the system is rigged for the rich. Scott, Bakke, and Gaylord say it’s rigged to help the poor who don’t deserve it. But they’re all arguing someone is stealing what isn’t theirs.”

  Two questions began to form in Rena’s mind.

  One was the same Alabama had asked Bakke right before the brick had been thrown: If you were a Bakke supporter and wanted to start a fight at a Maria Pena rally, would you really show up wearing a Bakke T-shirt?

  The other was: Who would then throw a brick at Richard Bakke? If he could answer those, he might know who was threatening Wendy Upton.

  * * *

  Outside, at the end of Rena’s block, two men sat in the front seat of a Malibu sedan. They were both wearing headphones, and a computer screen perched on the console between them gave off a soft glow that half lit the bottom of their faces. One man wore a baseball cap without a logo, the other a gray knit cap. When Rena hung up the phone, the man in the knit cap took off his headphones.

  “How long do we stay?”

  “You gotta go somewhere?” the man in the baseball cap chirped back. “Until the fucker leaves his house. Then we follow him. So settle in.”

  Day Three

  Wednesday

  February 26

  Thirteen

  Rena, Brooks & Associates

  Washington, D.C.

  The next morning it fell to Ellen Wiley, the chief digital sleuth, to begin outlining the tragic and redemptive story of Wendy Upton’s lost childhood.

  The team was gathered in the attic after a long night inside Upton’s life.

  “We have two tasks now,” Randi Brooks had told them before Wiley began. “Identify those moments when Wendy might have made a choice or a mistake someone could use against her. And look for people who might see her as an enemy—even someone she might barely know.”

  They had spent all night on the flash bio, every investigator in the firm taking a different part of Upton’s life and sending their parts to Wiley. She had woven them into a profile that went beyond facts, that touched on c
haracter and motive. People within the firm called these profiles “Wileys.”

  Sometime around midnight they had been aided by the arrival of “the book.” That was the biography Upton’s own team of opposition researchers had put together as part of her last Senate race, a year and a half ago. Flipping through it in the middle of the night, Rena and Brooks had quickly identified it as a “first pass” effort, something put together from public records, probably by young associates at a law firm hired by her political consultant. It was a “paper trail” book, done quickly, and if it came up clean, you might do nothing more, depending on your budget, your opponent’s, and how tight your race was. The key to any oppo book was that it had to be at least as good as the one your opponent had on you.

  Upton had never faced any serious challenge in her races. So no one had ever gone much past what was available online. Going deeper would have required hiring private investigators to rattle around in her life, talking to people and looking for trouble. But that, apparently, was exactly what someone had done now.

  Whoever was threatening Upton.

  Rena had one comfort as he listened. Walt Smolonsky from their team had flown to Arizona last night. This morning, he could start looking not only at Upton’s life. He also could start looking to see who else might be in Arizona doing the same thing. And if they were lucky, maybe he could find out who they worked for.

  “THE WENDY UPTON STORY really begins with the death of her parents,” Ellen Wiley began, glancing at notes she had made.

  It was the legend that had launched Upton’s political career, Wiley said. The story of the heroic orphan who forged her life out of hardscrabble tragedy.

  Upton was born in 1967. Her parents divorced when she was four, and her mother remarried a schoolteacher, a man named Wade Upton, who adopted Wendy. A few years later, Wade lost his job in a wave of school cutbacks, and the Uptons took over running a little tavern and convenience store Wade had inherited from his parents.