The Frankenstein Candidate (29 page)

“Ambition is excited, isn’t she?” he said.
Interesting—he had never raised her in-the-head parents with her so directly before. Perhaps he felt it was time
.

“It’s not necessarily the right time.”

“Explain that to her.”

“The country suffers enormously. There are more unemployed and more poor than ever before, yet those with connections in high office are doing just fine, thank you very much. Big banks like IFG and Sixth are unofficially bankrupt, but some senior executives get paid seventy-five million in golden parachutes. Seventy-five million dollars? That could feed the whole nation of Botswana.

“Casey Rogers is almost dead from an assassination attempt. Colin Spain was entrapped into having an affair and now he has had a heart attack. Who will be next? I can’t risk Georgia and Natasha. The president is dying of cancer, the economy is shot to pieces, and Victor thinks that is a great opportunity. Gary had an affair, has admitted to it. Then someone tried to kill him or warn him…and he thinks I was behind it. Obviously, I wasn’t. So no, it’s not the right time.

“Jacques could have got killed in a riot. Perhaps I may have been too. The man who saved us is now dead. My aide sent a text from the hospital just before I walked in. Dan is no more. Oh my god, Dan, all he was ever trying to do was to curb the street violence. Four months ago, I celebrated Thanksgiving with Gary’s folks, and life was as near perfect as it could have been.”

“Was it really?”

“Relatively speaking, yes.”

“Are you confident Gary will hang around?”

“No.”

“Are you confident that he will stay if you don’t run, if you resign from your job as a senator?”

“No.”

“Are you confident you can make a difference to all the suffering that is out there?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you go for it?”

“This time, I even feel like I deserve it…sometimes.”

“Sometimes you won’t. But that feeling will stay whether you run or not.”

“Is that imposter syndrome, incurable?”

“No. But it could take time. Perhaps a long time…but not necessarily.”

Olivia realized she needed to be true to herself. She went home to talk it over again with Gary. He was patient and understanding, supportive of her decision. He had a new idea—that he should hit the trail, working on her campaign himself in whatever capacity possible. He was happy to do whatever was required in the campaign office. She was thrilled. It meant that he would be kept away from the other woman. Perhaps she was going to get everything she bargained for and more after all.

She rang Victor. He was ecstatic. He called her over to Colin’s old campaign office. Within hours, an army of advisors, security experts, political analysts, campaign strategists, and public relations personnel had congregated into the small space. Victor was there as well. Larry Fox arrived in the evening, looking surprisingly refreshed given what everyone had been through.

“I am so sorry, Olivia, I should have seen that coming,” he said. He noticed Gary Allen in the office. Larry felt relieved; the last thing he wanted was for Olivia to have a strain in her marriage on top of the lethal forces swirling around her.

Larry’s plan was simple.

The idea was to maximize the sheer number of voters reached personally. To cover twenty-four states in about three weeks was impossible. She had to do more television, and if they had learned anything positive from the unorthodox Stein campaign it was: more television, more Facebook, more Twitter, more YouTube.

“Very few newspaper interviews, no small town-hall meetings, no gatherings of business leaders or even union leaders or any special interest faction,” Larry advised, “unless you can control the written word.” Larry opined that she had to be living on camera, maximizing exposure so that every word said had ninety thousand witnesses—otherwise, there were to be no meetings or interviews. She had a lovely and endearing face and a pleasant personality, and that worked better than printed interviews, unflattering photographs, and comments taken out of context.

It worked. Olivia, for all her insecurities, was by far the most personable of all the candidates currently on the road. Quentin Kirby had taken it for granted that he would win the Republican nomination, and it showed. Frank Stein was guilty of professorial misconduct, which meant he was too intellectual, too direct, and impersonal. Sidney Ganon was a loose cannon, and it was apparent. Reed was nervous at the best of times, and Logan was, excluding Stein, the most radical of the conventional candidates. Olivia was the most human.

Just before Spain imploded, some polls had him leading the Democratic trio. Once he imploded, everything changed. Rogers, even as he was very ill, shot to the lead, more from a sympathy vote than anything else. Once the scandal was no longer today’s news, Ganon had the lead. When Rogers fell into a coma, the Ganon camp had no qualms about discreetly leaking their “deal” to the media—if any of them were to win the nomination, the other would be appointed as a vice presidential running mate. When asked, Ganon would not deny it, protecting his sick friend’s ability to change it, knowing full well that the poor comatose man was unlikely to recover, let alone actually be well enough to contest the election. By the time Olivia re-entered the fray, Ganon was leading 60-40 over Spain. Then Spain announced his heart attack and withdrawal at the same time, and by then it was pretty much Ganon 100, everyone else 0; there was just simply no other candidate around.

Spain’s campaign had been the richest, the best funded. It had an unspent ninety million dollars in its kitty and the lion’s share of delegates in the bag.

As soon as Olivia announced her candidacy, Spain pledged his full support to her. Before Colin even finished his speech, Ganon and his camp were on the phone, working every delegate about how a vote for Allen was not a vote for Spain. By the time Olivia got to them, each had been spoken to. Ganon was also working the phone and doing face-to-face meetings with delegates who were pledged to Rogers. His point was well made: voters in twenty-six states had already cast their votes, and he, Sidney Ganon, was the only one left standing out of three candidates. One candidate was dying in hospital, and the other had withdrawn. The dying candidate had pledged his support to Sidney. Sidney’s plea was that Spain’s delegates be ignored for the convention and that Rogers’ delegates be handed over to him on a platter. Practically, that would have made his lead unassailable.

Victor Howell knew this in advance. He let Olivia and Larry concentrate on the twenty-four states that remained while he worked the party elders and the insiders for the only deal he could see as reasonable—for each delegate to vote their conscience in the case where the candidate they had pledged to otherwise vote for had withdrawn. But the party rules did not allow candidates to vote their conscience, so Ganon worked hard at implementing the highest-person-standing rule, meaning that the delegates be required to vote for the next highest vote winner in their state. Employing that rule would have effectively given him all the delegates of all the twenty-six states that had already voted.

It was decision time for the Democratic Party. They had seen Olivia’s rising popularity. They had seen her campaign. They had seen the crowds she drew in the week before Super Tuesday. They had seen the media love her. Most importantly, they had seen the polls that suggested that an Allen versus Kirby election was more in their favor than a Ganon versus Kirby election. They wanted a contest. So they deferred their decision about how the Super Tuesday, Iowa, and New Hampshire delegates were to vote until after the Super Wednesday results were in, except that Ganon was allowed to keep any delegates he had already won. Even if delegates pledged to Spain and Rogers were up for grabs after Super Wednesday, it basically meant that Olivia had to win seriously big on Super Wednesday to have any chance at all of securing the nomination. She had at least showed her face in every state when she campaigned for Spain, but delegates were unlikely to vote for a candidate who never really campaigned as a presidential candidate in their state. In three weeks flat, she had to capture the imagination of the American public, the media, and the last twenty-four states in particular such that she looked unbeatable against Kirby. Victor had started to work the super-delegates as well, but no one was willing to commit early in what was already the most tumultuous campaign of their lifetimes.

They say that most campaigns experience a decisive moment, where either everyone galvanizes behind the candidate or all is lost in a moment of weakness. Olivia’s moment was about to arrive.

Her twenty-one days of travel were so tightly packed that a single hour’s delay in traffic or a single plane landing or departure held up because of early autumn fog meant relinquishing the opportunity to visit a crucial town or city. Sleep, aside from on planes, was a near impossibility. Yet she had to look good and rested.

Destined for Tennessee after wrapping up the east coast, Olivia threw a bombshell. She wanted a half-day in DC. It had to be April 19, she said.

Larry was flabbergasted.

“This is the only day we have for Tennessee. We are already missing both the Dakotas. We have to have eight days for Oregon, California, and Arizona. If you don’t go on the nineteenth, we basically miss Tennessee as well. DC is the last place you want to be right now.”

“DC is the only place I want to be.”

“Whatever for?”

“Dan Curtis’ funeral.”

“Who?”

“Dan Curtis. He used to be an employee at—”

“Olivia! This is not an event that will even be covered. He was just a lowly employee at—”

“No, Larry. He was the most courageous person I have ever met. I will go there.”

“Oh, I remember. Didn’t you meet him only once?”

“Twice, actually. Just make the arrangements, please.”

Her camp was dumbstruck. Including security staff, her entourage was large, and it just was not feasible to move everyone around. Larry decided that only the security staff and himself would accompany Olivia, and the rest were to carry on directly to Arizona to set up office there. Someone suggested leaking the event to the media and getting live coverage. It wasn’t a bad idea, Larry thought.

“Find out all about Dan Curtis,” he said to the publicity people when Olivia was not around. “Get all the coverage you can—let the family know, get their consent, offer whatever is required for their consent, we want her doing an eulogy if possible and we want the coverage…every minute of it.”

He thought he would slip in a well-prepared eulogy on the plane to DC. Olivia was surprised, but knew Larry saw it as a political opportunity. Olivia agreed to do it, but only because she saw it differently—she saw a hero who had never been recognized; one of the papers merely mentioned that a “rioter who was a bureaucrat” had died in the Orange Street riots. Olivia wanted to change that. The best she could do now was to leave Dan a legacy he deserved—the man who saved lives and changed rioters into peaceful protesters.

Standing over an open coffin she dared not look into, Olivia delivered a eulogy that was as heartfelt as it was stirring.

“I met Dan only twice. On the first occasion, I never got his name. You would be right to wonder what I am doing here. But Dan saved my life the first time I saw him.

“He and I were complete strangers. Yet there he was, unflustered by a loaded gun at his head while another man had a baseball bat raised to strike at my head, only to be stopped by Dan’s strong hand. Then I found out that Dan did this on a regular basis. In the three years Dan spent on the streets, he directly saved eight lives. Perhaps he saved countless more by preventing street violence.