The Power(53)

They go into the long commercial break with nothing left to lose. Morrison escorts the candidate to the bathroom and helps him to a little nose powder. He goes through the talking points and says, ‘You’re doing great, sir, really great, but you know … aggression’s no bad thing.’

The candidate says, ‘Now, now, I can’t come across as angry,’ and Morrison grabs him right there in the stall, grabs him by the arm, and says, ‘Sir, do you want that woman to give you a pasting tonight? Think of your dad and what he’d want to see. Stand up for what he believed in, for the America he wanted to build. Think, sir, of how he would have handled this.’

Daniel Dandon’s father – who was a business bruiser with a borderline alcohol problem – died eighteen months ago. It’s a cheap trick. Cheap tricks often work.

The candidate rolls his shoulders like a prize fighter, and they’re back for the second half.

The candidate’s a different man now, and Morrison doesn’t know if it was the coke or the pep talk but, either way, he thinks, Well, I’m a hell of a guy.

The candidate comes out fighting on question after question. Unions? Boom. Minority rights? He sounds like the natural heir to the Founding Fathers, and she comes off as defensive. It’s good. It’s really good.

That’s when Morrison and the audience notice something. Her hands are clenching and unclenching. As if she were trying to stop herself … but she can’t be. It’s impossible. She’s been tested.

The candidate’s on a roll now. He says, ‘And those subsidies – your own figures show that they’re completely out of whack.’

There’s a noise from the audience, but the candidate takes it as a sign that they approve of his strong attack. He goes in for the kill.

‘In fact, your policy is not only out of whack, it’s forty years old.’

She’s passed her own test with flying colours. It can’t be. But her hands are gripping the side of the podium, and she’s saying, ‘Now, now, now, you can’t just, now, now,’ as if she were pointing out every moment as it passed, but everyone can see what she’s trying not to do. Everyone except the candidate.

The candidate goes for a devastating move.

‘Of course, we can’t expect you to understand what this means for hard-working families. You’ve left your daughters to be raised by NorthStar day camps. Do you even care about those girls?’

That’s enough, and her arm reaches out and her knuckles connect with his ribcage and she lets it go.

Only a tiny amount, really.

It doesn’t even knock him over. He staggers, his eyes go wide, he lets out a gasp, he takes one, two, three steps back from his podium and wraps his arms around his midriff.

The audience have understood, both those live in the studio and the folks back home; everyone has watched and seen and understood what’s happened.

The crowd in the studio go very silent, as if they were holding their breath, and then there’s a bubbling, gathering, discordant, roiling murmur rising higher and higher.

The candidate tries to stumble on with his answer at the same moment that the moderator says they’re taking a break and Margot’s expression changes from the angry, nose-curling victory of aggression to the sudden fear that what she’s done cannot be undone, in the same instant that the studio audience’s rising bubble of anger and fear and incomprehension turns into a mighty wail, at the very same second that they cut to a commercial.

Morrison makes sure that the candidate comes back from the commercial break looking groomed and smooth and poised, but not too perfect, maybe just a little shocked and saddened.

They run a smooth campaign. Margot Cleary looks tired. Wary. She apologizes more than once over the next few days for what happened, and her guys give her a good line to play. She’s just so passionate about the issues, she says. It was unforgivable, but it was only when she heard Daniel Dandon lie about her daughters that she lost control.

Daniel is statesmanlike about the whole thing. He takes the high ground. Some people, he says, find it tough to keep their composure in challenging situations and, although he admits his figures were mistaken, well, there’s a right way and a wrong way to handle these things isn’t there, Kristen? He laughs; she laughs and puts her hand over his. There certainly is, she says, and now we have to go to commercial; when we come back, can this cockatiel name every president since Truman?

The polling numbers say that people are, in general, appalled by Cleary. It is unforgivable, and immoral – well, it just speaks of poor judgement. No, they can’t imagine voting for her. The day of the election, the numbers are looking strong and Daniel’s wife starts looking over those plans to renovate the Governor’s mansion arboretum. It’s only after the exit polls that they start to think something might be wrong, and even then – I mean, they can’t be this wrong.

But they can. It turns out the voters lied. Just like the accusations they always throw at hard-working public servants, the goddamned electorate turned out to be goddamned liars themselves. They said they respected hard work, commitment and moral courage. They said that the candidate’s opponent had lost their vote the moment she gave up on reasoned discourse and calm authority. But when they went into the voting booths in their hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands, they’d thought, You know what, though, she’s strong. She’d show them.