Ultimatum (32 page)

Heather was silent. She drew her knees up under her chin, hunched her shoulders, frowning in thought, holding her coffee mug in both hands.

“If I keep going with this, it’ll be what the Benton presidency ends up being about,” said Joe quietly. “That’s my fear.”

Heather nodded.

“Nothing else will matter.”

Heather looked up at him. “What else does matter, Joe? You ran against Gartner saying it was finally time for someone to stop telling lies, to admit we faced a problem and it was going to hurt but if we worked together we could get through it and come out the other side a better country. And the American people trusted you to do that, to tell them the truth, to deal with it, to lead them through it. And that hasn’t changed. It just turns out the lies have been a little bigger and the truth is a little harder.”

“A lot harder.”

“So does that mean suddenly
you
stop trying to deal with it? Because suddenly it’s too hard? To me, it seems like it’s the opposite. The harder the truth, the more important it is to grapple with it. If the situation is as bad as you say, if action is needed as urgently as you say, then ... I don’t know, personally, Joe, I’d rather see you try and fail than not try at all. I don’t give a damn about the Benton presidency. I give a damn about Amy and Greg and the kind of world their kids are going to grow up in.”

Joe gazed at her for a moment. Then he drew her to him.

“So you don’t think I’m an awful president?” he said eventually.

“I think you’ll get better.”

Joe drew back and looked at Heather in mock dismay. Heather smiled.

“You’ll have to make the case, Joe. You’re going to have do something, and you’re going to have to sell it to the American people.”

“I know.”

“When?”

Joe shrugged. “I hate even having to think about this. We’ve got the health summit this week. That’s what I want to be doing, Heather. Things that are going to make people’s lives better.”

“You can still do that, Joe. This isn’t stopping you.”

“Not yet. That’s the one thing we’ve got on our side, none of this is out in the open. We’ve still got control of the public agenda.”

~ * ~

Wednesday, March 23

East
Room, The White House

The president stood in front of the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington in the East Room, the oldest object in the White House. On his right were five of the key people from the health care sector who had taken part in the daylong summit on health that he had just chaired. On his other side stood the secretary of health, Mary Lawson, the surgeon general, Eric Boulier, Jodie Ames, and the chairs of the House and Senate health committees.

Adam Gehrig opened the press conference by reading a communiqué from the summit. It stated that the group was committed to reform and the participants would be putting in detailed responses to a series of measures that Secretary Lawson had proposed. Jacqueline Russel, president of the American Medical Association, and Bill Overton, representing the Association of Managed Funds, both of whom were in the group on the president’s right, had fought bitterly over the wording “commitment to reform.” They had wanted something like “willingness to explore reform” or “interest in continuing improvement in patient care” or something even more meaningless. So had the Republicans from Congress. Joe Benton had rammed the wording through. He was committed to reform. If they weren’t committed to reform, they were going to have to get out of his way.

In the past days, the furor over the loss of the Chinese business contracts had abated. Jodie was confident that today the journalists would be engaged in the issue at hand. As an inducement to get them to stick to the matter, she had offered the prospect of another presidential press conference within two weeks with a general scope. The first question, from the
Washington Post
correspondent, was right on the money, asking if the president could summarize the reforms that had been discussed during the day. The president certainly could. They were the reforms Joe Benton had been calling for all through his campaign: universal coverage obligation through managed funds supported by a levy on sales of tobacco, fast foods, motor vehicles and other major causes of morbidity and mortality; guaranteed access to pharmaceuticals through centralized purchasing at state level; development of competition through genuine transparency of fees and outcomes of physicians and health funds; and a program of targeted investment by federal government to provide hospitals and other infrastructure in key locations of need, in particular the Relocation states. “And I have to say,” concluded the president, “there was a remarkable degree of support around the table for each of these measures.”

He didn’t look at Jacqueline Russel as he said it. He didn’t need to in order to know the kind of look she must be giving him.

“That simple, huh?” said the
Washington Post
man.

The president smiled. He turned to someone else.

“Elly Meyer,
Journal of the American Medical Association.
Mr. President, don’t you think the reforms you’ve mentioned strike at the heart of patient autonomy and choice that has been the basis of our medical system for the past hundred years and more.”

“Ms. Meyer, our medical system has failed the American people of the past hundred years and more.” As if Jodie Ames hadn’t anticipated this question and given him a dozen sound-bite options. “It has failed our poor, it has failed our unemployed, it has failed our old, it has failed our young. Just about the only people it hasn’t failed are the people your publication represents. Let me give you some statistics.” He did. They were impressive. He knew it. As an American, they made him feel ashamed, and he said so. American physicians should be ashamed, and he said that as well. He didn’t see how anyone could argue for the status quo when faced with those numbers.

Elly Meyer didn’t have a follow-up.

“Next question. Pete,” he said, pointing to Pete Abernethy from Issues.com.

“Mr. President, why do you think this is going to work? Why do you think you’re going to succeed where so many of your predecessors have failed?”

“They didn’t fail, Pete, they gave up. Over and over, we’ve had good presidents come to this office with good intentions to reform our health care system and one after the other they’ve been beaten down by parochial interests. Well, I don’t think the American people are prepared to see that happen again. I’m not prepared to see it happen again.” Benton smiled. “A previous president once famously said he’ll be with you till the last dog dies. And that still wasn’t enough. Understand this. I’ll be with you not only until the last dog’s dead, but until he’s good and buried too.” There was laughter from the press. “And you know who’s going to be burying it? Me!” There was more laughter. Benton glanced at the group on his right, Jacqueline Russel and Bill Overton among them. “I think we all understand that now.” He looked around. He nodded toward one of the raised hands. “Matt?”

“Mr. President,” said Matt Ruddock, “can you outline the process going forward? You’ve had this summit today, and I wonder how that translates into something more than hot air.”

“This is a step on the path. It’s important to talk. It’s important to hear each other’s views and understand where we’re all coming from. That’s what we were doing here today. So as you’ve said yourself, it’s an important part of the process, and there’ll be more days like this. But the process moves on. Secretary Lawson will shortly release a detailed consultation timetable. This is something we are moving on and will continue to move on so we’ll have legislation on the Hill in the fall just as we’ve planned to.”

“Isn’t that an ambitious program, given everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks?”

“And what would that be?” replied Benton. There was a moment of silence. Then Benton smiled, and he raised his hands helplessly, and more laughter broke out among the journalists. For some reason, the mood in the press corps was good today, and Joe Benton felt it. “Is it an ambitious program? Hell yes. You want some cautious little incremental piecemeal thing, then the American people elected the wrong guy. They elected me to be ambitious. Because they’re ambitious, and so they should be. Is it ambitious? I hope so. You tell me if it isn’t.”

Ruddock grinned. “I will.”

“Okay. I’ll be listening.” The president looked to the other side of the room. “Phillip?”

“I love this idea of taxing fast food companies for the health costs of their product. But what happens if you’re successful, Mr. President? People stop eating fast food, where’s the tax money going to come from?”

“People stop eating fast food, Phillip, and they’ll be that much healthier that we won’t need it.”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of anti-business?”

It took all of about thirty seconds for Benton to deal with that one. A reporter from FoxBloomberg asked him why he thought he had the right to tell Americans how to live—what to eat, what to drink, how fast to drive—and he swatted that away just as easily. He was on a roll. He looked around the room again. He took another couple of questions. “I’ll take one more.” A dozen hands were in the air. His eyes stopped on a young woman whose hand had been raised since the beginning. He nodded at her.

“Michelle Kornhaus,
Toronto Herald
.”

“I’m glad to see our Canadian friends have sent someone along.”

“Is it true, Mr. President, that you have recently received a report showing that sea level rise over the next twenty years is likely to occur at least twice as fast as previously estimated and will require the evacuation of eighteen million people in the United States in addition to those already to be relocated, including the Florida Keys and the cities of Miami, Galveston, and the lower San Francisco Bay area?”

For an instant, Joe Benton’s mind was blank. He glanced at Jodie Ames. Jodie was staring back at him.

He turned back to the Canadian journalist.

He smiled. “That’s like asking a man whether it’s true he beat his wife.”

“I’m not asking whether you beat your wife, Mr. President. I’m asking whether you’ve received a report showing—”

“And I’m explaining there are some things, entirely false, you can give credence to just by denying them. Do I let my dog Bertie pee on the White House furniture? No.” There was a scattering of laughter. “By the way, I don’t have a dog called Bertie.” There was more laughter. “See how that works? Now I’ll take one more if someone has a serious question they want me to answer.”

He took another question on the health program and handled it briskly. “Okay, I want to thank you all, and I particularly thank everyone who participated in the summit today. We’re at the start of a long road, but it’s not going to be as long as some people think, and we’ll get to the end of it successfully.”

He turned, shook hands with the people who had been standing beside him as he spoke, and left, Jodie Ames came with him.

“That was excellent, sir.”

Benton nodded, not replying.

“And that ridiculous question from the
Toronto Herald,
I promise you, sir, I’ll find out just what the hell she thought she was doing. I thought you handled it very well.”

Joe Benton wasn’t so sure. He wished he hadn’t said that thing about the dog peeing. It had just come into his head. It was condescending and sounded as if he was trivializing the issue, and it was the kind of thing that would come back to haunt him. Someone would drag those words up one day. But the thing that really worried him was the look he had given Jodie. He could remember glancing at her. He didn’t think that would have looked good, a glance to the side like that. It had probably looked shifty. There had been three cameras in the room, and by now there’d be a thousand sites on the Net with the footage, including their own.

“Let’s see it,” he said when they got back to the Oval Office. He tossed the control to Connor Gale, who logged in to the White House site. “Skip to the end,” said the president impatiently.