The Frankenstein Candidate Page 18

  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 One candidate was dying in hospital, and the other had withdrawn.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each delegate to vote their conscience in the case where the candidate they had pledged to otherwise vote for had withdrawn.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.

  “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 no
t 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.

  34

  Super Wednesday and the Commandment of Kinship

  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?”

  35

  Ready or Not, Here She Comes

  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 alik
e, 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.

  Larry said “They tried to say Quentin had little to do with the current economic debacle, but they also pushed his experience as a plus in the same breath. Logan has been smart since his gaffe on the immigrants; that played out like he wanted the Mexicans to die on the streets, but since then he abhorred specificity and just railed against the status quo. It has worked. He should not be able to go from May to November with radical solutions as a headline message without enumerating solutions to identified problems…we want to make sure of that.”

  “The other radical is also gaining ground again. He was at a low of around twelve points in a three-way race, but has got back to a more respectable eighteen.” It was Dennis Ettinger, Larry’s point man on polls, messages, and the national mood. “Obviously, some people actually believe his carbonista speech…Tea Party types mainly.”

  “Frank Stein?” Olivia had all but erased him out of her conscious awareness during her three-week, intensive, twenty-four state marathon.

  ‘Yes, him,” Ettinger said. “He is still around. Very much so, I’m afraid. Despite Kirby’s and Logan’s attempts to buy him off. And that could play right into our hands come November.”