Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  To Alabama, spin was another word for lying. It was a polite word for it, which made it a dangerous one, and that was the problem. Somewhere along the line some clever political operative had used the euphemism spin to describe the lies that consultants told about their clients who had just puked on their shoes in debates. My guy didn’t really confuse Bosnia with Italy. And, if you skip that one part, he really kicked ass tonight. And somewhere along the line, reporters had become so inured to the dishonesty, or dazzled by its sheer gall, they started putting the whoppers these consultants told in their stories—and putting the liars live on the air. And then somewhere along the line, someone on television had started using the word spin to mean something good. It wasn’t lying anymore. It was the art of exaggeration. And little by little, lying was no longer something we decried. It became something we admired.

  But language mattered, Alabama thought, and so did its abuse. Someone had to care what words meant, or they didn’t mean anything.

  He hoped he wasn’t getting old and grumpy.

  A few campaign operatives were already in the spin room, and reporters gathered around them like moths. The aides were trying to set “predebate expectations” for their candidates. “What we want to do tonight . . .” And “Watch for Maria to draw sharp distinctions between her and Omar Fulwood on . . .” And “All governor Scott needs to accomplish tonight is to mark once again . . .”

  In the calculus of primary campaigns, it’s hard to win a debate with more than two candidates onstage. It’d be harder, still, in this “bipartisan” configuration, where people running in two different primaries would be onstage with each other. But candidates can get their shots in against a targeted rival. And if their team sets reporters’ expectations low and narrow enough, their operatives could always claim their side had done what it had come to do.

  Alabama saw Steve Unruh, the former history professor who had helped Jackson Lee become president twelve years ago, standing alone watching the room. Unruh, now in his sixties, ran the biggest super PAC in the country, the American Future Fund, which was backing Lee’s niece, Jennifer.

  He wore a familiar scowl of concentration, as if he were seeing things others could not perceive. Alabama wondered if the famous frown tonight masked something less than a Zen master’s grand plan.

  Unruh was under immense pressure. He had raised an extraordinary sum to back Jennifer Lee, more than four hundred million dollars for the primaries alone, a war chest so large it was supposed to make the Jenn Lee nomination inevitable.

  Yet the money was quickly disappearing in a haze of third-place finishes. If Unruh couldn’t make good on his bet, his donors would abandon him. Worse, his life’s vision of a Republican national majority for a generation, something to rival the Democrats’ legacy from 1932 to 1968, might be doomed. Unruh dreamed of a GOP that was fiscally restrained, militarily muscular, and socially and racially tolerant. But voters were proving too angry, lobbyists too strong, and the government too dysfunctional to be reformed. Elections kept swapping power between the parties every four or eight years, oscillating the country’s politics back and forth, the force of the pendulum swing growing more intense with each election as people grew more disappointed with each outcome. It felt like something was going to break.

  Alabama headed into the theater and found his reserved seat. He preferred to see the event from the hall—unlike most reporters, who watched on television in the spin room—so he could observe the body language of the candidates off camera, and watch the reactions of their staff and families.

  Not everyone was seated yet.

  In a corner, he saw Bobby Means, the political strategist for Dick Bakke, talking animatedly on a cell phone. Alabama could not hear what Means was saying. Had he been able to, he would have heard Means berating Gil Sedaka, Wendy Upton’s chief of staff.

  “Stop giving me shit and calling it chocolate, Gil. Clock’s ticking. So tell her we need a goddamn answer. By tomorrow.”

  “Give me another day,” Sedaka was saying from back in Washington.

  “Fuck you,” Means said.

  “You don’t want to rush this, Bobby” Sedaka pushed back. “Nor do we. If it’s a good marriage, it’s worth another day to think about. Or two.”

  “I gotta go,” Means said. “But if I don’t hear from you tomorrow, this goes away. I’m not shitting you, Gil.”

  “Give me two days,” Sedaka said.

  Means hung up.

  Alabama heard nothing, but he was intrigued by the angry pantomime.

  THEN BNS ANCHORMAN JACK ANTHEM and Timbala Kuamba, director of community engagement at Y’all Post, were walking out onstage, asking the crowd to take their seats.

  Alabama could see the candidates gathered in the wings offstage, standing in an uneasy line, in the order of their podiums.

  A large red light pointing outward at the audience went on at the base of the stage, a signal that the broadcast had begun—online and on cable—and that the audience should be quiet.

  “Welcome tonight to the first-ever bipartisan presidential primary debate,” Anthem said. “I’m Jack Anthem of BNS, and tonight we make history.”

  There were eight debaters. The top-four vote getters in the first Republican contests: Jeff Scott, Dick Bakke, Jenn Lee, and Tony Soto. And the top-four vote getters in the Democratic: Maria Pena, David Traynor, Omar Fulwood, and Cole Murphy.

  Fifteen minutes in, Kuamba asked the candidates to react to a particularly divisive issue, one that had started among activists on the GOP’s far right but had gained unlikely sympathy on the far left of the Democratic Party, as well.

  “What do you say to people who are part of the so-called Shut It Down movement, who argue Congress has become so dysfunctional we should have a new constitutional convention to reorganize the House and Senate and rethink our elections?”

  Kuamba checked her notes. “Governor Soto, this question is directed first to you.”

  “Timbala, I appreciate the frustration people feel. I feel it, too.”

  Soto was always suave and pleasant. He had the look of the most handsome smart kid in high school.

  “But I think it’s a mistake to give in to fear and anger. I believe America’s best days are ahead of us. My father came to this country from Cuba, my mother from Mexico, and they dreamed of a life in America in the 1970s when many people said, oh, that dream is over. Well, they kept dreaming. And their dreams came true. I share their dreams—and those of millions of American parents and children. If we can free people from taxes and bad regulations, modernize our immigration laws, we can do more than continue that American dream. We can expand it for the twenty-first century.”

  Alabama recognized the words and the music. They were Ronald Reagan’s, remixed.

  And Soto, graceful, appealing, and handsome, performed them with real emotion and a catch in his throat.

  But they seemed out of time, Alabama thought, a pop tune from forty years ago. The audience knew the lines. But, even to those who had once sung along, they felt dated, like streaming a once-beloved movie that, seeing it now, you stopped watching before it was over.

  “Governor Scott, what do you think of the Shut It Down movement?” Kuamba asked.

  The governor of Michigan had always been careful before in his answers about this group, which had hints, at least on the edges, of armed insurrection. He smiled, almost shyly, but what a smile. “Well, the people behind this movement are right, Timbala,” Scott said. “Congress isn’t working. And, apologies to my opponents who work in Washington, but you are part of the problem. You’ve proven you’re not the solution. I think a constitutional convention is worth thinking about. As Thomas Jefferson, said, ‘a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’”

  The man was pandering to a scary fringe, Alabama thought. The Shut It Down movement was insane and dangerous. But its supporters all were likely to vote in the primaries. And Scott was pushing his support for them further than he had before.

&nbs
p; Some Scott supporters in the audience were cheering, despite instructions for silence.

  “Senator Bakke?” Kuamba said.

  Dick Bakke seemed taken aback by Scott’s answer. The Michigan governor had never endorsed a constitutional convention before. Doing so opened a new Pandora’s box and pushed Bakke further than he might want to go. Alabama thought he could sense the gears turning, recalibrating, in Bakke’s mind. Then: “We do need to listen, Timbala. More than that, we need to hear.” Bakke was trying to appropriate Scott’s answer in his own, one of the catechisms of debate tactics: if you are going to piss on someone’s answer, first make sure you endorse it just enough that you don’t alienate the audience that liked it. “And yes, I’m in Washington. So I know why Congress doesn’t work. No one’s made that case in the Senate more strongly than I have. I’m proud of the sentiments that animate the Shut It Down movement. I believe those sentiments exist in part because of criticisms I and a few others have raised about how things need to change.”

  Then a hard stare at Scott and a pivot. “But to the young governor of Michigan, I say, be careful what you wish for, young man. There is a huge difference between reform and insurrection. Some members of this group have suggested violence. That cannot be encouraged.”

  There were limits apparently on how far Bakke, a sitting senator and former Supreme Court clerk, would go.

  “You quoted Jefferson, Mr. Scott; you might not know that President Lincoln was also an admirer of Jefferson. Lincoln had this to say about a similar time of unrest in U.S. history: ‘Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.’”

  Bakke supporters stamped their feet and whistled. Then Bakke, encouraged, went too far. “I’m just going to say it, and say it plain. Governor Scott, you are a dangerous man. You lack the temperament and the experience to lead this country. You are a despot in the making! A vote for you would undermine our democracy.”

  “How dare you!” Scott said.

  Jack Anthem was banging a gavel. “Gentlemen, please!”

  “You’re a damn coward, little Dickie!” Scott could be heard saying over the din.

  They broke to commercial.

  The order of speakers had been drawn by lot. The room still stirring, two Democrats came next, but the questions about the Shut It Down movement were not done. The answer by Maria Pena, the candidate furthest to the left politically, was in substance, Alabama thought, not that far from Scott’s, if also less concrete.

  “Shut It Down, no. We can’t be without a Congress. But it makes sense to think fresh for the twenty-first century. How would the Founders plan a national legislature in the digital age? How could we not consider the prospect?”

  She kept her answers short and direct—perfectly sized to be clipped on Y’all Post. David Traynor was now glaring at Pena, as Bakke had at Scott. They were competing for different wings of the Democratic vote. But Traynor recognized in Pena the candidate with the most innate talent. It was she, not the moderate Cole Murphy, with whom Traynor was becoming most concerned. He wasn’t fighting Murphy for the center. He was fighting Pena for the party itself.

  “I know I’m not supposed to talk to Maria directly,” Traynor began. “And we’ve already seen a breach of the rules.” He gave a restrained glance at Bakke and Scott. “But look, Maria, I break stuff for a living. That’s what I did for twenty years. Reinvent the economy by building digital businesses. And, Governor, the Founders were extraordinary people in an extraordinary moment. I may have only been in politics a couple years. But I’ve learned this much already: the folks on this stage are not the Founding Fathers. And I don’t pretend to be. The problem we’ve got in politics isn’t that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and George Washington came up with a lousy system or didn’t imagine the Internet. And the people outside this arena yelling ‘Shut it down’ aren’t going to be coming up with something better. If you believe they will, I’ve got some old DVD players to sell you.”

  The audience laughed, and not just Traynor’s people. Then the billionaire looked straight into the camera. “The problem we’ve got in Washington is the way the elites and billionaires and the parties have started to rig the system the Founders created. It’s not a deep state like some people will tell you. But it sure is entrenched power. We need to fix that. But don’t screw around with the Constitution, because we got ourselves all worked up. Let’s keep our damn hands off the Constitution.”

  “You’re right, David,” Pena interjected. “Billionaires like you are exactly the problem.”

  The debate went on another hour, but the anger of these past few minutes seemed to have acted like a ray gun on the rest of the proceedings. And Jennifer Lee, Omar Fulwood, Cole Murphy, and Tony Soto seemed to fade into the background as time passed. Alabama considered Fulwood and Murphy the more interesting Democrats, and he admired the vision Lee tried to articulate about conservatism. But they could not contend in the format.

  Mostly, Alabama felt unnerved. While the candidates had been debating for months, this encounter was supposed to be different, more important thanks to its timing and perhaps better because of the arrangement. Alabama had been skeptical. But what transpired left even him a little shaken. Debates had that ability, even after seeing scores of them. This evening felt debasing to him.

  Debates were often extolled as a more authentic way of learning about leadership than the consultant-made ads or cartoon tweets that dominated the media now. It was presumed candidates would rise to the prospect of standing side by side and answering questions. But the events had become another form of entertainment—and this one had proven the worst yet. The cable channels had become addicted to the ratings and revenues the evenings generated, the more tricked-up the format the better. Reality television skills had become a new proxy for leadership. And Alabama, who had spent a career in television, feared where that was taking the country.

  It was an oversimplification, he thought, to blame voter anger. The whole political apparatus was culpable. But there was something uglier, some deeper anger, being exposed, like a family that no longer could abide itself. The public was dissatisfied with the country—not just politics. They were beginning to doubt whether America worked as an experiment. They were angry about their lives. They were angry about the people who disagreed with them. The whole notion of governing by letting everyone vote seemed broken. The answer wasn’t to shut it down. But for the life of him, Alabama didn’t have an answer.

  As he wandered through the press room, watching the spin doctors operate, he spotted Steve Unruh standing by himself. The political strategist, who dreamed of a new era of enlightened, compassionate neoconservativism, had a different expression on his face than Alabama had seen earlier. The frown was gone, replaced by something else. It wasn’t fear. More a look of shocked recognition, as if Unruh understood something he hadn’t realized before. It was the same suspicion Alabama had sensed. That something in the country had shifted, and the nation wasn’t taking a detour in its long journey as a democracy. Instead maybe it was headed down an entirely new road. Unruh recognized it now. Alabama saw it in his eyes. In the era of networked connectivity, foreign manipulation of social media, corporations without borders, and a global economy, maybe eighteenth-century notions of democracy had run their course. The proposition hadn’t occurred to Alabama seriously before tonight. It did now.

  Twenty

  Washington, D.C.

  Peter Rena and Randi Brooks had not seen the debate.

  They were busy with Wendy Upton and Gil Sedaka at Rena’s town house—trying to shock the senator into understanding just how threatened she was and to discover what secrets she might be hiding.

  Upton sat on the sofa in Rena’s living room dressed in blue jeans and well-worn boots, her hair down in a ponytail. She looked smaller than usual, and more vulnerable. But she didn’t look afraid.

  Not as much as Rena wanted her to.

  Sedaka,
on the sofa next to her, appeared more unsettled.

  Brooks and Rena sat on chairs arranged to face them, along with Ang Liu, whom they’d asked to come to take notes and to see how hard you sometimes had to push a client.

  They were here for what they called their intervention, the moment when they leaned on a client harder than the client ever imagined possible. For every client hides something. Sometimes even from themselves.

  Rena started:

  “We’re at the end of the second day, Wendy.” Just first name, no honorific, no respect for the office. “We’ve done a biography of you.” He explained how they had someone in Tucson looking into her early life, her friends, her sister. They were probing her military and political careers. It was important she know how thorough the invasion of her life would be.

  “Tonight we need you to be more candid than you have been up to now.” His voice was detached and a little threatening. “We need to go deeper to find out what you have done in your life that could be used against you.”

  Upton looked back at him impassively.

  Rena and Brooks had heard people lie about most things. They had seen people try to hide affairs, drug addictions, sexual identities, even children out of wedlock. They had seen people try to hide habits that had spun out of control, like eating addictions or gambling. They had watched people virtually drive from their mind some terrible act so out of character the person had stopped believing it actually happened to them. They had heard all kinds of rationalizations.