The Frankenstein Candidate (30 page)

“Dan wanted to fight for the homeless, the underprivileged, the unemployed, the poor, and the forgotten. Even on the darkest of days, there was something Dan kept as his first priority— peaceful protestation. His peace was hardly cowardice. He was the bulwark against those who wanted to turn their protests violent.”

Olivia’s voice was breaking, tears were glistening in her eyes. Larry was in the audience, loving it.
I’m sure the camera has her on close-up now
, he thought.

“When I met him, he had been out of work for three years. It was…simply astonishing how little anger and resentment Dan had at the system that had shut him down. I…” She was not able to continue with the rest of the eulogy.

“Dear Dan, may your soul rest in peace. You will never be forgotten by those who knew you.”

She stepped off the pedestal. She took her seat beside Larry and a security staffer. She noticed the hint of a smile on Larry’s face but fortunately didn’t catch the fact that he had a thumb turned up on his right hand.

Thankfully for Olivia, the networks didn’t catch the thumb either. The cameras stayed on while Dan’s sister continued the eulogies. Needless to say, the sister’s eulogy was cut out of the evening news.

To say that Olivia got a boost from the event was an understatement. The video became viral, and the race between Ganon and her, which stood at 50-30 in favor of Ganon, turned on its head; a week later, it was 50-40 to Olivia with 10 percent undecided. Sidney Ganon needed his own cry-on-national-television moment. People were sick of fake politicians, his aides kept telling him.

“You need to get more human,” they said, “just look at how Stein’s star is falling rapidly.”

Just three days from Super Wednesday, Sidney Ganon got his moment. Casey Rogers passed away. Ganon called a press conference as soon as he heard the news; he could not even wait for a funeral. The speech had been ready in his pocket everywhere he went.

Sidney welled up, but even Kirby and Reed did the same. Colin and Olivia, too, paid their respects, as did Logan, but without the melodrama. Sidney Ganon was not unique. The moment was lost.

Astonishingly, some opinion polls had Olivia winning some of the largest Super Wednesday states—California, Arizona, and Oregon—by a decisive margin. The West could be won. But the overall race was still wide open—opinion polls had become notoriously unreliable as people were rapidly changing their minds.

She finished her campaign in San Francisco. She was exhausted. Hotel room service seemed like the best option for supper.

Lying in bed, drained of every last drop of vitality, she fell asleep while she was still talking to Gary, barely able to kick her shoes off, her street clothes still on.

Gary kept gazing at her. Sapped, she looked like a beautiful child who had kept jumping around till she suddenly fell asleep, much like a toy that whirred around until its battery ran out. Treating her like a child, he undressed her. She moaned, half asleep. He opened her suitcase and found her pajamas. Somehow, he struggled them on to her, a part of her vaguely aware of his gentle tug even as her eyes preferred to stay closed.

The room service maid buzzed and went away after no one answered—even Gary was too frazzled for supper.

He went to shut his computer down. His last Twitter feed was from Dr. Jules Bing. Jules told him that the sixth commandment had been released only on the Net – the networks were no longer giving Frank Stein any airtime. It was something about a commandment of kinship. Jules was very excited by it. Gary wasn’t, at least not in his enfeebled state. He clicked the shutdown button. He crashed right next to Olivia, overcome by sleep.

By the time morning came, the pair had slept for eleven hours. The cell phones were off, the hotel operator instructed to not receive calls, and the curtains drawn tight to envelop them both in darkness.

They missed—and at the time, did not care about—the sixth commandment.

“We have freedom of religion and association,” Stein said. “If we are to have a true separation between church and state, we must remove the religious underpinnings of the institution of marriage from law. Religion can discriminate, he said, provided the law is not required to. In other words, if marriage is to be a legal institution, gays would have the right to marry in each and every state, and the US still had fifteen where they did not have such a right.”

Even voluntary polygamy was not to be considered illegal. The logic meant Stein was pro-choice of course, and it also meant that individual laboratories would regain complete freedom of choice with regard to stem cell cultivation, research, and development, which had been lost when the Young Administration reinstituted the Bush-era barriers. There is a natural kinship among human beings, Frank Stein claimed, but that kinship is destroyed when association is forced.

In the media, it was immediately denounced as racist, bigoted, and the most divisive of the six commandments heard to date.

“And he has the gall to call it the commandment of kinship of all things,” wrote one popular media blogger. Even Kayla, Stein’s biggest and perhaps only media backer, was taken aback. She kept quiet, however. Her friend Olivia was in the race of her life.

The media remained largely focused on the results of Super Wednesday. If Spain was still running, he would have been pleased—Stein was not going to take the gloss off their race by announcing another one of his pesky governance commandments on the day when serious results were due.

In the morning, Olivia and Gary were awakened by loud banging on the door. Gary jumped out of his skin. Olivia looked at the clock—it was nine a.m.

“Jesus,” she said, “our flight.”

Gary opened the door. Larry swooped in. A security man stood outside. Larry was beaming from ear to ear like a child in a candy shop. “We won. You won. You did it, Olivia, you did it.”

They were both wide-awake now.

“I am so sorry to barge in like this.” Larry seemed to have suddenly found his manners. “But we have the eastern states results in, and all the seven states declared are yours. Most are winner-take-all. Michigan is probably ours. Missouri is almost confirmed. The Dakotas and Oklahoma are on a knife-edge. Utah, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington…you are leading each by at least thirty points, and Alaska and Hawaii by five or six points.”

“Wow, that’s wonderful.” Olivia hugged Larry.

“Look,” Larry said, “I better get out of your way and let you get dressed. The media is camped outside the hotel. I will hold them off for another hour at least. Sheryl is working on a victory speech.”

“The flight!” Olivia gasped.

“I have rescheduled the two of you for later in the afternoon,” Larry said. “Hope you don’t mind, but the team would like a celebratory lunch at least.”

As Larry started to leave, Gary was about to close the door, when Larry turned around again.

“Olivia, you know our friends from the dark side. Looks like Logan may actually beat Kirby, can you believe it?”

It was a late miracle that had never been witnessed in political history. Olivia hadn’t just won Super Wednesday—she had crushed her only rival, Sidney Ganon, by something like 84 percent of the popular vote versus 16 percent for Ganon. The delegate count accentuated this difference. Of the 1,658 delegates and 415 super delegates up for grabs, she had won 1,490 and 373 respectively, albeit super delegates in theory were able to vote their instincts. Ganon had ended Super Tuesday a close third behind Spain and Rogers. He had 560 delegates in the bag and in theory another 130 super delegates. Ganon won another 168 delegates and secured another 42 super delegates on that fateful day, taking his tally to 900, but Olivia had 1,863, more than twice as many. There were also 1,470 undecided votes from the ones originally pledged to Spain or Rogers, split somewhat equally between them.

Olivia only needed 17 percent of the undecided 1,470 votes to get to the magic 2,117. The undecided had only waited to see how Super Wednesday panned out. Although Colin Spain had been recovering in hospital, it had not stopped him from being endlessly on the phone to his benefactors and backers, preserving what he could of not only vitally needed campaign funds but also votes pledged to him. He assumed nothing less than a senior role in an Olivia Allen administration, so certain he was now of an Olivia Allen presidency and of his medical recovery. With Colin Spain’s active backing, the contest was all but over.

The confirmation came soon enough. Five days after the results, on May 4, Sidney Ganon made a concession speech and withdrew his campaign; his camp had discovered that even the super delegates who had verbally pledged their support to him had openly withdrawn their promises, so astonishing was the Allen victory. The day he withdrew, Sidney’s advisers met with Larry Fox to float the idea of a Sidney Ganon vice presidency. An Allen-Ganon ticket, they said, would be virtually insurmountable. Olivia was not so convinced. She agreed with Larry, who suggested deferring the decision until well after the national convention, which was scheduled for Friday, May 15.

Avoiding the media onslaught, Olivia retreated into her analytical camp with Larry and a coterie of trusted advisers. Meanwhile, John Logan won the Republican nomination. As astonishing as Olivia’s victory was, Logan’s win was equally startling, albeit somewhat better predicted by the late polls. The Allen camp was divided over what the prime force behind Logan’s win was—the answer lay in either in extreme anathema to Washington or in the fact that Logan portrayed himself as a radical. It was a bit of both, according to Larry. Logan’s call to radicalism began to appeal as the economic situation in America turned dire, Larry said, but equally at effect was the fact that Kirby already belonged to the hated club—the people in power. Across the country, even among staunch Republicans and Democrats alike, people felt repugnance toward the status quo, Larry surmised, and it obviously affected the party in power more. As someone who had never been a senator, congressman or a governor, Logan had the appeal of being an outsider.