The Frankenstein Candidate Page 12

  This time, the White House leaned on NBN to not use the Frankenstein chanting footage, but it was too late. A Frankensteiner had it filmed on his tiny camera, posted it on the Web, and the video soon went viral. The only thing that disappointed NBN was its inability to be the first to show it, but the compromise of bowing to the White House while securing the ratings anyway was brilliantly convenient. Anchors made a show of citing the violation of broadcast conditions by the man who recorded the event, but the police did not press charges.

  Meanwhile, Spain raised a record $27 million in one week following the New Hampshire win.

  On the run, Olivia had to rush out to buy a whole new set of formal dresses fit for the fundraising events: demure suits when they hosted union leaders, stunning gowns for the formal balls, and power suits for the lunches with the business leaders. Colin and Larry went for the business dollar. Spain was the candidate to back on the Democrat side, and the executives and the directors keen on saving their careers wanted government protection under the guise of patriotism. Spain had implicitly promised protection and so had Kirby. Kirby, too, was doing well in his fundraisers, extending the gap between him and Reed and Logan.

  When Olivia finally got home, she was exhausted. Gary wanted to go out to celebrate, but she managed to convince him to order in.

  In bed at eleven, Olivia once again could not get to sleep. At first, she thought it was the enormity of the whole occasion. Victor Howell, the Democrats’ most elder statesman, had given his green light to the announcement of her vice presidential candidacy. Tomorrow, she was going to be on the news everywhere.

  That’s when it struck her again. At first, it was just a dull pain in her forehead. She thought she was getting an anxiety attack. How she wished now that she had heeded Dr. Joshy’s advice, but then she thought there was something else. She had a funny feeling that Gary wanted to broach something with her but just wouldn’t or couldn’t because of the wall she had built around herself. She looked at Gary. He was fast asleep. She needed to sleep too. She popped a pill. On the campaign trail, she had practically popped one sleeping pill every night. She wondered how she was going to cope for the remaining ten months.

  The following morning, she slept in till eight.

  She had barely parted the bedroom curtain to let some light in when she noticed a camera and crew. Then, as the curtains parted some more, several cameras and crew—enough for at least four or five outlets—appeared in her field of vision. The announcement was already out.

  Nothing could have prepared Olivia for the onslaught that followed the announcement that she was Colin Spain’s running mate for the vice presidency. There were seventeen messages on her private cell phone, most calling for interviews. Her inbox had over three hundred e-mails. She had to do what Larry had suggested, which was to turn them all over to the campaign office for processing.

  The four of them met again that Saturday afternoon in DC. She wanted to say yes to Kayla Mizzi, but the other three were unanimous—no interviews until Colin and her had perfected the campaign message. She had heard enough of his speeches and was already in broad agreement with the strategy. Olivia was a voracious reader; she was already well versed in the intricacies of the U.S. economy and its foreign policy.

  When they left, avoiding the paparazzi meant she had to leave via the back door in Larry’s car and meet her designated driver several blocks away.

  Dr. Rohan Joshy was waiting for her in his office when she got there, a mixed bundle of nervous energy, excitement, and fear.

  “Congratulations, Vice President,” he said.

  She liked the way he could have the measure of almost anything and be able to poke fun at it.

  When the pleasantries were dealt with, she chose to recline on the couch, facing the pale blue ceiling.

  “Why did mom want you to succeed so much?”

  “I guess because she…because she was herself so…no, maybe because she was trained the same way…”

  “How does that make you feel…to be trained a certain way?”

  “What other way is there?”

  “Is there no other way?”

  “I guess not.”

  “What about the inner you?”

  “It never says much.”

  “Never?”

  “I just want to be normal sometimes…”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Just to go out and meet friends, have dinner…”

  “And?”

  “And not have to worry so much about the whole world.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Because there is so much wrong with this world. It needs to be fixed.”

  “Is that mom speaking?”

  “No, it’s me. That’s me, I’m sure.”

  “Absolutely?”

  “Absolutely sure, yes.”

  By the time she left, Olivia was not sure of anything at all. The minute she left Dr. Joshy’s rooms, the magnetic pull of the outside world ferociously ripped her out of the inner vortex that he had painstakingly pushed her into; it was as though its force easily countervailed his gentle pushes.

  Olivia’s cell phone seemed to beep several times the minute she turned it on. Someone on the road outside recognized her. She made a quick dash into the back of her car, beckoning the driver to move, scared that someone was following her. The gale force of her outer world had become a typhoon. All the gentle tugs of her inner vortex were just too easily overpowered and just as quickly forgotten.

  The following week, a new Olivia, sculpted to perfection, entered the world as confident, poised and articulate as ever but also measured, immaculate, and cautiously ambitious.

  Vanity Fair was the first to record an interview with her. Then it was Oprah Winfrey on her OWN channel. Bloomberg followed soon after, then NBC, the new NBN channel, CBS, ABC and Fox News. Never did her message detour from the orchestrated strategy, not even once did she err on facts, never did she miss an opportunity to praise Colin Spain, and never did she miss an opportunity to discredit Kirby or the GOP. Her knowledge of Turkmenistan was voluminous, and her understanding of the intricacies of the proposed Wall Street regulation was comparable to a top-ranked Wall Street attorney.

  She smiled at all the right moments; she knew the price of bread, the wholesale price of oil by the barrel, and the price of gasoline at the gas station. She knew what the federal budget deficit was a year ago and what it would be in five years.

  Katrina even had an acting teacher work on her emoting. Olivia loved it. Drama was the one thing she had never done before, even at school. Her acting classes allowed her to express inner emotions in the privacy of a teacher-student setting. There was method in Katrina’s madness. Olivia could bring a watery, almost imperceptible tear to her eye when the tough talk shifted to the possibility of higher unemployment and struggling middle class families. Then she would clear her throat and blame the current administration for its handling of the economy and proceed with a magnificently delivered treatise of economic policy, of “gentle intervention” and “good old fashioned stimulus” spending.

  They said the package that was Olivia Allen was perfected in campaign heaven.

  Here was an all-American mom who even the conservatives could not match, but here also was an immaculately confident, sharp-as-nails intellect with just the right touch of emotional empathy to make people feel like she was one of them—they just loved her.

  Her camp was more than pleased. Victor Howell was ecstatic. He blessed the Spain-Allen ticket. Her public approval rating was nearly 90 percent, which even for a honeymoon period was unheard of. In a matter of weeks, her popularity began to catch up and outshine Colin Spain’s; it was only then that Katrina Marshella suggested that she cease giving interviews and rejoin the strategy room.

  Quentin Kirby was desperate. He was thinking ahead and knew far better than to announce or confirm his vice presidential candidate this early in the race. He already knew what Kevin Heller and Spencer Blumenthal had rep
eated—that he could not win the final race with either Logan or Reed or any of the usual senatorial or congressmen candidates. He needed an X factor. “The public fancy of Olivia will wane,” Heller said. “Spain has played his ace card much too early in the race. We have time to investigate her deficiencies, get something to stick, magnify it, and let the media run its usual course,” he said confidently. “The faster they push someone up, the quicker you can make them fall.”

  Kevin Heller was adamant that Jackie Harding be kept in reserve until victory was not just in sight but past them, which meant waiting until the national party convention in May. Jackie Harding had experience in administration and the respect of heads of state around the world. She was not good-looking, but Kirby’s media people were confident that she could be made to look more statesman-like than Olivia. Nevertheless, Kirby had already secretly started Jackie on intensive mock media sessions, image discussions, and delivery discipline. Three nights a week, Kirby and Harding sat together for hours, studying copious notes prepared by staffers about presidential campaigns going all the way back to Bush senior versus Clinton in 1992, analyzing where little gaffes became major scandals. They studied the rhetorical speeches whereby the nuances of the English language could be exploited to say but not to define, to inspire but not to get bogged down in facts, to point fingers but leave an exit strategy in place.

  That was what the staffers always emphasized, the “exit strategy.” Going to war meant going to war, but “constructive engagement” and “multilateral pressure” meant a lot of different things to different people. Certain things were always sacrosanct: “the ingenuity of the American worker,” “family values,” God, the environment, “our soldiers,” faith, American values and “working moms and dads.”

  Spencer had given Kirby the list of things that could always be demonized: big oil, Wall Street, the “greedy,” bankers, big business, extremists, the big spenders, earmarks, China, Russia, the euro zone, Al Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists, North Korea, and Iran.

  Then there were the issues that played either way, Spencer told him, depending on which way the wind was blowing: gay marriage, immigration, Mexicans, bipartisan committees, the United Nations, size of government, free trade zones, and industrial growth.

  In all cases, you had to have an exit strategy. Heller was right, Kirby thought, the Democrats had played their ace irreversibly and too early in the race.

  20

  Why Were All the Exits Closed?

  The Monday of February 23, 2020 had come and gone without incident. Perhaps the Chinese were bluffing.

  On Wednesday, February 25, President Young addressed Congress on the issue. The efforts of his administration had been thwarted by the refusal of the Chinese to negotiate, he said. Congress remained adamant that the foreign ownership restrictions not be lifted.

  The “all or nothing” deal was turned down.

  Thursday, February 26, came and went, and the word on Wall Street was that the Chinese had backed out. It was a bluff, they said.

  Then the morning of Friday, February 27, arrived with an unexpected late-season snowfall and a major thunderstorm in New York City. It was as though a seasonal thunderstorm was the forerunner of a financial thunderstorm. Metro and bus services were disrupted. Traders coming late to work turned on their screens, a few with a sense of foreboding instilled by the sudden thunderstorm. For the moment, life was still normal as the U.S. dollar was buying five Yuan and sixty yen.

  The sell orders began around eleven a.m., gradually at first. By noon, the U.S. dollar was buying four Yuan and fifty yen.

  The St. Louis and New York branches of the Federal Reserve panicked and threw precious foreign exchange reserves away, trying to halt the slide of the U.S. dollar, but by then America’s own private funds and the central banks of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Japan had all joined the fray.

  The U.S. Federal Reserve then tried to halt all currency trading, but soon realized how futile it was given the number of large financial institutions that operated outside the Fed’s jurisdiction.

  By three p.m., the Fed chairman was on the phone exhorting all the banks under his jurisdiction to buy U.S. dollars. Several banks bought U.S. dollars with euros, Yuan, or Korean wons they simply did not own—in market parlance, they were shorting the other currencies to halt the U.S. dollar’s slide.

  When the carnage ended late into the night, the U.S. dollar was buying two Yuan and forty yen, and three of the largest five banks in the United States were nearly bankrupt unless the U.S. dollar regained at least half its losses.

  Late that night, the chiefs of the largest banks on Wall Street were in the boardroom of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, assessing the financial blitzkrieg.

  The chairman of the Fed, Dr. Bob Zimmerman, a fifty-one-year-old, bombastic, intelligent, Keynesian ideologue, had succeeded Ben Bernanke in 2014. President Obama had hand-picked him straight out of his teaching post at Harvard.

  Zimmerman often allowed extensive discourse to take place before he thundered his decision like a Supreme Court justice. Now Zimmerman saw an opportunity to exert even more control over Wall Street. Although the Street chiefs had long ceased to be cowboys in the decade that saw the most financial regulation ever enacted, the Street still had an aura of its own, and resentment at the Street was at such fever pitch that no one was going to object if the Fed exerted even more control.

  The problem, of course, was not just that the Street funded political campaigns. The Fed had engineered some awfully large mergers in the last decade among the largest member institutions, like Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, and JP Morgan. The newly engineered institutions, like the Sixth National Bank, colloquially called the Sixth, and the International Financial Group, better known as IFG, were truly too large to fail.

  For once, the meeting concluded without Bob Zimmerman thumping his fists. Zimmerman retreated into his private chamber with just the chiefs of IFG and Sixth and heard what he did not want to hear.

  IFG’s and Sixth’s traders had diligently pursued the Fed directive to buy U.S. dollars. In one evening, the banks had collectively wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, and as publicly listed organizations, they had no option but to disclose what they had done to the market the following day.

  This was bound to have an effect on IFG and Sixth’s shares, half of which were owned by the U.S. government, bought at price levels set during Sixth’s government-engineered merger three years before. Treasury had actively traded down some of its shares at minimal losses, but they knew there would be no such further opportunity.

  Secondly, when word came out, the banks’ position was going to get appreciably worse unless they locked out their losses overnight in the Asian markets, which now seemed the only prudent thing to do.

  Thirdly, the issue had hit without warning, and several commentators had already warned that FDIC funds were woefully insufficient for dealing with multiple bank failures. The FDIC could, in theory, borrow from Treasury, which would then have to issue even more bonds. Ultimately, the Fed itself had to go out and reassure depositors that their savings were safe as nervous depositors started to withdraw funds based on rumors.

  Fourthly, there was no knowing how all these measures were going to be dealt with in the market for Treasury bonds, none of which had been sold to any real investor outside the Federal Reserve and its member banks for several years.

  The time had come for Bob Zimmerman to call the president with his recommendations. He excused himself.

  Unbeknownst to Zimmerman, Treasury had long been concerned about the bond sale scenario, even without the Chinese crisis. The Treasury secretary had been waiting for weeks to get the president to sign off on an announcement to the public about belt-tightening measures that increased the official retirement age at which pensions could be granted and reduced eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid.

  At seven p.m. that night, the Treasury-prepared, President Young–appr
oved announcement went public. It merely stated, among other things, that the government was looking to raise the normal pension age from sixty-seven, scheduled to go into effect in the year 2027, to sixty-nine and the early retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four.

  That night, in an eerie replay of the French and Greek riots for precisely the same reason in 2011 and then again in 2014, riots broke out all over the United States, from Birmingham, Alabama, to Burlington in Vermont and all the way west to Portland, Oregon. Cars were overturned, fires were lit, and riot police fought off rioters that ranged from ex-convicts to high school students, from middle-aged blue-collar workers to feminists.

  By the time Saturday morning dawned, the news was littered with economic pundits predicting major gloom, rumors of bank failures, bailouts, and rescues. Pretty soon, the rioters had found a new energy reminiscent of the early French revolution. A march of red flag holders denouncing capitalism and blaming class wars became a reality on Sunday.

  Olivia continued her research privately. She knew that China still had trillions of American debt to sell and trillions of American assets to buy.

  Sitting in the comfy lounge room of Larry Fox’s Long Island residence, Larry Fox, Colin Spain, Katrina Marshella, and Olivia Allen tried to make sense of it all.

  Olivia badly wanted to spend more time with her family before hitting the road again. But the twenty-four states of Super Tuesday had a good spread of the red and the blue, the Midwest and the west, the south and the northeast, as did the Super Wednesday twenty-four. That meant considerable traveling and very little time at home for Olivia.

  “At least IFG, if not both IFG and Sixth National, will be needing loans,” Larry said. Larry had been connecting with Bob Zimmerman’s department, albeit no one, not even Colin Spain, knew his source. But Larry’s sources were always reliable—Colin knew they could be trusted.