The Speechwriter (9 page)

Between work and writing my mind was almost completely elsewhere. Unlike other men my age who ignore their families, though, I couldn't point to a hefty income to justify my absenteeism. Laura dealt with it, but sometimes we shouted at each other. Sometimes fights would arise about my work, but usually the cause was something else entirely, and I wouldn't know how it started or how to solve it.

That night I didn't go immediately home. I walked out the west wing door intending to meet some friends a few blocks from the State House for a drink. But instead of walking to the bar, I just stood there, looking at the sky. A breeze made the sweat on my back feel cool. I leaned against the wall. Just above my head was a bronze star marking the spot where one of Sherman's cannonballs had struck the building, ripping away a chunk of stone.

Stewart came out to smoke. “You have fun with the—what was it—the police academy groundbreaking?”

“Yeah.”

He lit a cigarette.

“You want to kill him, don't you?” he asked after a minute or two.

“Do you?”

“I've wanted to kill him many times,” he said in a calm, almost soporific voice. “He's a terrible person.”

“Is he? I mean, you really think he's a terrible person?”

“In a way, yeah. You can't get to where he is without being a terrible person. At this level, they're all self-aggrandizing bastards. You should go with us to NGA next time. Watch these guys and their staff. Petty, mean-spirited, vicious little tramps who would step on anyone if it made them look good in front of their boss. Now I grant you, some are better at hiding it than our boss, but in their dark little hearts they're all just as bad as he is.”

We stood watching the sun go down for two or three minutes. Through the trees it looked as if it were just above the river. Union troops had crossed that river many years before.

“Just think,” he said, the breeze driving the smoke sideways from his mouth. “If you can do this, you can do anything.”

“I keep hearing that.”

I wondered if that was just a platitude, or if it was true.

8

PRESS CONFERENCES

F
rom January to May, when the legislature did the bulk of its business, the governor would do a press event every fortnight or so, sometimes more often. Some of these were bill signings, but most happened just before the legislature did something he considered foolish. He would urge the legislators not to go through with it, they'd go through with it, and our office would put out a scathing press release or a scathing media statement or, if the governor felt strong enough about it, a scathing op-ed. We did a lot of scathing.

Most press events were boring, highly predictable. The governor could sense this, and sometimes he would do crazy things to compensate reporters for the boredom. Once, just as
a press conference outside a gas station was about to begin—the governor was denouncing a hike in the cigarette tax—he decided to move the whole thing inside. It was a preposterous thing to do: outside there was a lovely backdrop of gas pumps and a giant advertisement for cigarettes. Inside he had to stand in a narrow aisle crammed with candy bars and potato chips. One reporter had to ask questions from the next aisle, over a display of soft drinks. When the stories appeared the next day, the governor's head appeared just in front of a fluorescent poster declaring “3 MUSKETEERS 12-PACK ONLY $4.99.” There was always the threat of such weirdness at one of our press conferences. Maybe reporters liked that. They always seemed to show up, even if we told them almost nothing of what it was to be about.

It was the spring of 2008, and we had information the revelation of which interested state as well as national media. After 9/11 the U.S. Congress had passed a law requiring states to alter their driver's licenses to meet national criteria, in effect creating a national ID card, called Real ID. If a state did not comply by the deadline, its governor could apply for an extension, which (federal authorities implied) would be readily granted. Failure either to comply or to apply for an extension, however, would result in citizens of that state no longer being admitted to federal buildings or on airplanes that flew through federal airspace.

This was perfect material for the governor to mount a rebellion. He was never interested in Southernness or the Lost Cause, but he relished the idea of spurning federal authority. An attempt by federal bureaucrats to force states to revamp
their driver's licenses, then to make the states pay for it, all for the purpose of compiling a centralized database of personal identities: it seemed calculated to ignite his imagination. Best of all was the fact that the feds, in their communications with our office, didn't stress the consequences of noncompliance, leading us to believe they wouldn't actually do anything about it if we refused to comply.

If you worked for the governor for any length of time, even if you just knew a little about him, you knew he would refuse to apply for an extension of the Real ID deadline. Doing so would have compromised his brand. He wouldn't be criticized for complying with the law, except by libertarians. But if he complied, it would bother his conscience and, more important, he would look like any other politician.

Of course we waited until the day of the deadline to make the announcement. Aaron put off reporters with the usual verbiage about how “we're studying all the implications of the law” and “we'll come to a conclusion shortly.”

A week beforehand the smarter editorialists, the ones who already knew what the governor would do without waiting for a press conference announcing the decision, began to describe apocalyptic visions. They spoke of contingencies under the pretense that they could influence the decision: “If he refuses to ask Washington for an extension, the citizens of this state will suffer the consequences of his arrogance,” and so on.

About six months before this, the General Assembly had passed, with overwhelming majorities, a binding resolution refusing to comply with Real ID. That was when very few of the legislators knew what it was and it was generally
thought that neither Congress nor Homeland Security was serious about it. Federal initiatives like this get started all the time, but then they peter out, either because administrations change or because they're discovered to be unenforceable or too expensive. Or they're enforced and no one notices. Now that Homeland Security clearly intended to keep Real ID alive, legislators who'd voted for the resolution began pretending they hadn't or explaining that they didn't realize the feds, whom they continued to denounce, would keep us from boarding airplanes.

The press conference, in which we would release copies of a letter from the governor to the secretary of Homeland Security announcing that the state would not apply for an extension on compliance, was to take place in the rotunda of the State House. People began arriving about an hour beforehand, not journalists but the public as well. Some of them wore Confederate flag lapel pins. Some of them had dreadlocks and nose rings and enormous backpacks, as if they'd hiked from somewhere far away. There were families whose children carried Bibles, and there were four or five gay activists (or so I took them to be) carrying rainbow flags. Some of them brought signs saying “No Big Brother” and “Down with Fed ID” and “Don't Take the Chip.” A black man held up a sign saying “Screw the Feds”; one lady with long hair in a French braid carried a sign saying “Real ID = Mark of the Beast.” She was standing right beside the podium. Nat, who had an eye for these things, told another staffer to pretend to be a security handler and ask people if they wouldn't mind stepping away from the podium.

At last the governor began the long walk from the end of the State House's west wing to the podium at the center of the rotunda. Cameras flashed, and some of the rowdier onlookers shouted, “Give us some good news, Governor” and “Stand up to the bastards.” He approached the podium, cameras flashing even more rapidly. There was no one behind him.

“Aahh,” he began.

“Give us some hope, Governor!”

Everybody laughed.

“Aahh,” he said again. “Ah, the purpose of this press availability is to announce this administration's intention”—a brief pause—“not to file for an extension with regard to Real ID.”

Cheers erupted from the onlookers. The governor maintained an expression of gravity, but you could see he loved it.

He began again, and a man in a giant cowboy hat and a black leather jacket shouted, “Yeah, Gov, yeah!”

Everybody laughed, even the reporters. The governor smiled a little.

“Aaaahh.”

He went on to enumerate the six or eight reasons why we would not comply with this “costly, unfunded, and dangerous mandate.” Nobody looked bored. The print reporters scribbled on their pads for a full ten minutes. The onlookers nodded and said, “Yesssss.” When the governor stopped talking there were questions, some from the onlookers, which wasn't orthodox but he answered them. The reporters went on scribbling.

The reporter Donald Hatfield asked, “Governor, if the people who put you into office aren't allowed to board
passenger airplanes because their license isn't recognized by the federal government, are you willing to accept responsibility for that?”

“I don't think it'll come to that, Donald,” the governor said. “But I'd just say three things.” Saying there were three things was the governor's way of giving himself a second or two to think about the answer; sometimes there were two things, sometimes just one.

“First,” he said, “the question was whether I was prepared to go along with a $14 billion unfunded mandate so that the federal government can impose a centralized national ID system. I'm not prepared to saddle this state's taxpayers with that kind of burden for something they didn't ask for and, I believe, don't want.”

The onlookers cheered again.

The governor looked around to take another question.

“You said there were three things, sir,” Hatfield said. “What was the second?”

“Right, no. Yes.”

We waited.

“Wwww,” he said. “I mean—.”

Hatfield: “The first was about an unfunded mandate. And the second—.”

Nat mumbled to me, “Hatfield's such a jackass.”

“Right. Second, I was just going to point out that the legislature passed a law a few months ago saying we would not participate in the federal Real ID mandate. I had an obligation to uphold state law. It's as simple as that.”

Hatfield didn't ask for the third point. After the questions,
eight or ten reporters surrounded the governor. The cameras, some of them from national media, wanted face time with him.

Thus began a year when, despite the governor's weirdness and the vehemence with which he was hated by the legislature, you had the feeling that he was out in front. Working for the governor wasn't something anyone would look back on with fondness or regret that it ended. Many days were intolerable. But around this time you could at least take pleasure in the fact that you worked for a man with courage and imagination.

A few days later the secretary of Homeland Security replied to the governor's letter. He acknowledged the governor's position, regretted it, but made no reference to consequences.

9

VERBIAGE

T
he governor now trusted me to write his letters. I wrote a good many personal letters for him, most of them responses to letters from acquaintances or allies or critics, but some of them self-generated. With a little help from my list of his favorite words and phrases, his incommodious style now came to me naturally. Once he even told me that I had “cracked the code.” He meant it as a compliment, but I sometimes feared the habits would become unshakable; one day I'd start work on a book review and find myself writing “I'd simply say three things” or “It speaks to this larger notion of where do we go from here.”

The governor received hundreds of letters every week. Many of these were written by people who were angry at him
for some reason; others were requests for parole and pardon or for help in some appalling domestic situation. The Correspondence Office had ways of responding to all of these. But there were always a few letters Correspondence didn't know what to do with. Those fell to me. There were lots of invitations to weddings and oyster roasts and block parties. I would regret those, always in the governor's voice. But there were odd ones too. Somebody would write to ask his advice on getting into politics. Another would ask what he was doing about recycling, or why he didn't wear a wedding ring, or whether he thought the state of Israel had a right to exist. A great many letters asked how the governor would define the American Dream; some of these were from children and had probably been school assignments, but some of them seemed to be from ordinary people who just wanted to know, which was touching in a way. I developed an arsenal of responses to these and other questions. I had an “American Dream” response, a “How do I get into politics?” response, a “Won't you please run for president?” response, and many others. The trick was to use the maximum number of words with the maximum number of legitimate interpretations. Put that way, it sounds terrible, but there's no other way to do it. If a constituent writes to ask the governor the best way to get into politics, and you (in the governor's voice) write back using words like “I think you should run” or “Go for it,” you may soon hear about some nitwit running for county council claiming he's been endorsed by the governor. Or take the “Won't you please run for president?” letters, of which there were many around this time. In case the letter was made public, you couldn't have the governor
responding in a way that could be construed as an admission of an intent to run or of an interest in running, or as an admission of anything. At the same time, though, you wouldn't want to deny an intention to run for president because that would have been obviously dishonest and, as I thought, soon disprovable. In both these cases you'd want to give the letter writers at least two full paragraphs in response; otherwise it looked cold and dismissive. So you would elongate every sentence with superfluous phrases. “I believe” would become “I have every reason to believe,” and platitudinous observations would be prefaced by “What I'd say—and I am absolutely certain about this—is that . . .” The phrase “going forward” was very useful, as was “from where I stand.”

The governor once received a request for a letter congratulating a young man for gaining acceptance to a venerable boys' choir. What you'd want to say was “That's a remarkable honor for you, and I wish you the best of luck as you sharpen your talent.” But you needed more verbiage to fill out the paragraph, so you'd write, “That's an incredible honor for you, and I do wish you the best of luck as you sharpen the remarkable talent you so obviously possess in spades.” (The governor was always saying people had qualities “in spades,” and he liked to make sentences trail off into superfluous phrases.) One sentence gives you only six or seven extra words, but if you do this for five or six sentences in succession, you've turned a perfunctory note into a heartfelt letter on which some time was spent.

Everybody complains that politics separates words from their meanings, and this is part of the reason why. Words are useful, but often their meanings are not. Sometimes what you
want is feeling rather than meaning, warmth rather than content. And that takes verbiage. The trick for me was to use the governor's verbiage rather than the formulaic balderdash of contemporary politics. I faced the temptation every day. I'd find myself writing “kicking the can down the road” or “ushering in a new era of fiscal responsibility” and I'd quickly tap the delete key, feeling slightly ashamed. Sometimes, though, I just couldn't avoid it. It fell to me to write the governor's official letter celebrating Emergency Medical Services Awareness Week, to be read at an annual gathering of ambulance drivers, lifeguards, and so on. I wondered what he could say to these people that wouldn't sound totally thoughtless, but nothing came to mind. They weren't soldiers, or even police officers, so that body of rhetoric (honor, duty, country) was mostly unavailable. I started to explain my dilemma to Nat. “So here's a question,” I said. “Do Emergency Medical Services personnel—.”

“Lay their lives on the line every day?” he said, without looking up. “Absolutely.”

That winter remains in my mind as one great blizzard of verbiage. It started with the insolvency of the Employment and Workforce Commission. The Commission had been running through funds budgeted for unemployment benefits at an alarming rate, and nobody had noticed that it was about to run out completely. The Commission blamed the legislature, the legislature blamed the Commission, and the governor blamed the legislature and the Commission, but especially the Commission.

The Commission, it turned out, would have to apply for
federal money to avoid a shortfall, and for the application to be legal the governor would have to sign it. It was a perfect set-up for him. He refused to sign the application unless the Commission agreed to his demands, one of which was an independent audit. The Commission delayed. The deadline approached; if it were to pass, the Commission would be unable to issue unemployment checks.

There was great outrage from the people known for great outrage. Everybody (well, everybody in the state's media—but it felt like everybody everywhere) was talking about “playing chicken.” The governor was “playing chicken” with the Employment and Workforce Commission; there was a “game of chicken” going on between the state's chief executive and its workforce agency. The governor was also said to be “holding the unemployed hostage” in his vainglorious attempt to get what he wanted from a government agency; sometimes he was said to be “holding the unemployed hostage to his libertarian ideology” or “holding a state agency hostage for political gain.”
The State
actually combined these two images in one of its editorials: “You do not play chicken with the lives of 77,000 laid-off citizens, holding them hostage for your own political purposes.” No, I supposed, you do not.

He wouldn't give in. Outraged op-eds and letters to the editor proliferated, all about hostage-taking and chicken-­playing. As the apocalypse approached, it became pretty clear that the commissioners were on the defensive; all they had to do was agree to an audit, but for some reason they wouldn't. The governor did a series of interviews explaining his position. In each one he said that the Commission hadn't reformed
itself despite the fact that abuses of the unemployment benefits system had become notorious all over the state. People were calling our office all the time to tell us about abuses. Someone told Aaron about a guy who'd been fired for urinating in his employer's meat locker but who had nonetheless been eligible for unemployment benefits. The governor liked that one. In the interviews he would almost always mention a guy who'd “urinated in a meat locker.” At first I wondered about the wisdom of this—I would wince each time he said it—but it seemed effective. The line was instanced in many an editorial, and soon that puddle of pee joined the chickens and the hostages.

There was a good deal of panic too among the public. People drawing unemployment benefits were led to believe those checks would stop coming, although it seems to me there was never much chance of that happening. The governor sensed, correctly, that the commissioners weren't going to take the fight all the way; they were in it for their six-figure salaries for doing nothing, the expenses-paid trips, the important-looking license tags; they had no interest in getting blamed for poor people going without their unemployment pittance. They were sufficiently intelligent to envision the nightly television reports of single mothers crying because they had nowhere else to turn and laid-off store clerks and mechanics saying they were trying to find work but it wasn't easy. The commissioners knew the governor wouldn't get all the blame.

The panic was real. Any time there was a story about it in the news, especially on television news, the phones would start ringing and not let up for forty-five minutes to an hour.
Bridget, the receptionist, would transfer most of them to Constituent Services. But often all the lines were busy and she would talk callers through their problems herself. Bridget was a small, roundish woman, black, with a giant marked-up King James Bible always open on her desk. She loved to talk about personal crises, her own or the other person's, it didn't matter, and walking past the front desk you'd sometimes hear her telling a caller, “Jesus is gon' bring you through this.” “Honey,” she'd be saying, “He knows about your problems. He knows, and He cares. And honey, He don't make no mistakes. He gon' bring you through. Have you ever made it through something you didn't think you was gon' make it through? Was He there the whole time, did He bring you through? M-hm. Thass right. He did. And He will again, honey. You got to believe that. You remember Joseph? Did Gott leave Joseph in that dungeon? No He ditt not, no He ditt not. He brought him out, He brought him
up
is what He did. Put him second in command under Pharaoh. And He gon' bring you through this too, baby.”

Bridget didn't get a great deal of respect from our office; mostly, it was felt, she just sat in that chair and talked on the phone. But many of the callers she spoke to were agitated, people who called because they blamed the governor for whatever worried them. By the time they hung up, things were going to be all right. I suspect Bridget was one of the governor's most effective political assets.

Just before the deadline, the Commission submitted to an outside audit, the governor signed for the federal loans, and the unemployment checks kept coming.

Calls kept coming too, but this time they were supportive. Constituent Services kept a tally. Before the Commission caved, the calls ran 4 or 5 to 1 against us; afterward they ran 4 or 5 to 1 in our favor. I don't remember if there was a final tally, but that's the way it usually was with constituent reaction. Angry people came before; admirers came after. It happened that way again the following summer, only this time the stakes were much higher.