The Speechwriter Read online

  Nat and I were at the press conference. You couldn’t hear most of what was said because they’d made the unfortunate choice of staging it near a busy road. The reporters seemed perplexed about what the pyramid meant. One of them called it a “triangle.”

  I’m sure Leatherman’s and Harrell’s staffers told their bosses that the press conference was a huge success, that it was all over the media, that they were creating a “narrative” about how the governor cared more about his national ambitions than about jobs in his own state. But it was a petty shot, and you could tell journalists weren’t buying it. They were prepared to accept the allegation that the governor had his eye on Washington but not that the legislature’s leadership, with their preposterous pyramid, had something new or better to offer.

  During February and March the governor became his party’s most salient critic of the new president’s economic stimulus, which Congress passed in mid-February. Every other day, it seemed, he was on cable TV news or talk radio or speaking on the phone to a Washington Post or New York Times reporter. Often he’d be introduced as “one of the president’s most outspoken critics.” And he was traveling more. Any governor, certainly any popular one, speaks from time to time at out-of-state events, either to do favors for other politicians or to make connections with potential high-level donors (or, sometimes, just because it’s fun). But in these months the governor was flying everywhere all the time—to Austin, to Jackson, to Chicago, to Anaheim.

  He didn’t speak exclusively on the stimulus bill at all these engagements, but the topic of that bill, and of government spending generally, was never far away at any of them. Why was he so deeply opposed to it? The idea behind the stimulus was to pump large amounts of cash into the economy in order to ignite consumer spending and, in turn, growth. The governor thought that idea was foolish for many reasons, but the two that led him to oppose the policy with all his energy were these: the cash was borrowed, and most of it would pass from the federal government to state governments. He understood the culture and habits of government well enough to know that that federal money wouldn’t be used to spur economic growth but to balance state budgets. Maybe it was a good idea to help states shore up their budgets and maybe it wasn’t, but that wasn’t the justification given for the stimulus, and in any case it would have no effect on economic growth. And he understood that, when the stimulus failed to achieve its purpose, people would remember that it was he who had inveighed against it with greater fervor than anybody else.

  All this was happening while the legislature was in session, so the workload in our office became almost intolerable. I was doing all my usual duties: writing remarks for grand openings and graduation ceremonies and responding to every well-wisher who wrote a letter to the governor asking whether he liked barbecue or if he had any thoughts on energy efficiency or whether he would sign a photograph for a nephew or grandson. Now I was also drafting op-eds on the inchoate “bailout culture” of Washington, DC, writing talking points for televised interviews, collecting articles from the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times on debates over monetary policy, and responding to every swooning enthusiast or angry crank who wrote letters telling the governor to “stand firm” against the stimulus or to stop “playing politics” during a national emergency.

  The governor himself was constantly agitated. Ordinarily he would dislike my drafts, but he would at least use what I’d written to create his own versions. Now he either hated what I’d written or bypassed me altogether. He would explode into the press office, hair disheveled, wearing jeans and a tattered T-shirt, and want to know some fact about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe or interwar Germany or Argentina during the 1980s. Once you gave him an answer, he’d disappear into his office again, and eventually he’d give Aaron the finished product and tell him to pitch it to one of the national papers. Some of these were printed, but many were not. One that wasn’t contained the sentence “Oddly enough, the silver lining to graying economic and financial clouds may well be that reforms that have previously fallen on deaf ears may be a little bit more politically palatable.”

  Sometimes he’d forget which products had been drafted for him and which he’d written himself. Once, he came into the conference room and held up a piece of paper. Stewart, Paul, Gil, and I were in the room. “Who wrote this?” he asked. “It doesn’t have a name on it. Again, always put a name on it.” Rather than telling us what it was, the governor had us all look at it. It was a draft of a veto letter. I hadn’t written it. Paul said he hadn’t.

  “Oh, that was mine,” Gil said. “Sorry. Forgot to put my name.”

  “Okay,” the governor said in an unpleasant tone. “What’s this?” He then read aloud a dreadful sentence. We all sat in silence. He looked at Gil. “I’m asking,” he said. “What is this?”

  Gil, whose involuntary response to tense situations was to giggle, made a staccato sound with his throat and said, “I’m a terrible writer.”

  “No!” the governor almost shouted. “It doesn’t have anything to do with whether you’re a good writer or not. You don’t have to be a good writer to know that that sentence”—he slapped the paper and, in his rage, didn’t know what to call the sentence. Finally he said, “Represents a poor effort.”

  Then he did something that surprised even Stewart. He held up the offending paper and, slowly, ripped it from top to bottom. He then dropped the pieces into a trash can and walked out.

  Gil held back tears.

  What it had taken me two years to realize, and what I suspect Gil never learned, is that the governor wasn’t trying to hurt you. For him to try to hurt you would have required him to acknowledge your significance. If you were on his staff, he had no knowledge of your personhood. In such an instance as this, he was giving vent to his own anxieties, whatever they were. It was as if you were one of those pieces of cork placed in the mouths of wounded soldiers during an amputation. The soldier didn’t chew the cork because he hated it but because it was therapeutic to bite hard. Often I felt like that piece of cork. For weeks at a time I would drive to work in the morning nervous to the point of vomiting. I wasn’t worried about any one thing—it was everything. Almost every day threatened to produce some new debacle: an oversight or blunder that would provoke the governor to wonder with inarticulate rage how someone could do such a moronic thing. I would find myself longing for a job as a liquor store cashier or a mailman or a pizza delivery guy, some inconspicuous functionary who had no connection with allegedly important things and allegedly important people. I remember there was a middle-­aged man who worked for the State House maintenance crew; one of his duties, or maybe his only duty, was to make sure the building’s lightbulbs still worked. I would see him wandering around the State House looking up at the various light fixtures. Sometimes I’d see him at the top of a ladder changing a bulb. He would come into the press office, look up at the lights and, satisfied that all were working, walk out. He always wore a tattered New York Mets baseball cap. He didn’t seem anxious. I wanted to be him.

  The governor made the decision early to do everything he could to stop that federal money from transferring to the state. He had criticized the bill in innumerable television interviews and op-eds. When it passed Congress in February, he had the choice of dropping the issue and taking the money on the grounds that what was done was done. Lots of people, mainly those who didn’t know much about either him or politics, thought that’s what he would do. At some point, though, maybe in an op-ed or an interview, it became clear that he intended to refuse the money.

  There were lots of persuasive piecemeal arguments for turning it down. It would be two or three years before that much money could pass through the various stages of government and be injected into the economy, if it ever reached the private sector at all. But of course it wouldn’t; the supposedly stimulatory funds would be eaten away by bureaucratic processing and so do nothing to stimulate anything but the public sector
. Accepting several billion dollars in nonrecurring funds would mean losing that very large source of income two years later when the money ran out; then what? And there were the notorious strings attached to the funding; the federal government never gives states money without telling them how it must and must not be used, and the stimulus bill itself required that, in order to get large portions of the money, states first had to expand Medicaid and unemployment eligibility to levels that, once the stimulus funds dried up, would be unsustainable. You can see how boring all these arguments were. They’re good, in a desiccated logical sense, but they’re boring. For the average person they don’t amount to much compared with this message: The money’s going to be spent anyway; we’re paying for it; why in the land of the living wouldn’t we take it?

  The governor had no gift for articulating complex arguments, and when he put forward his views on the unwisdom of taking stimulus money he usually relied on a few homely phrases: “You can’t solve a problem caused by too much debt by piling on yet more debt”; “You’re talking about a billion-­dollar hole in the budget two years from now.” The phrase “billion-dollar hole” always sounded weird to me (a hole worth a billion dollars?), and I doubt very many people understood what he meant by it. Anyhow he never had a cogent retort to the objection that the state had a right to its share of the cash and if we didn’t take it somebody else would.

  For a lot of people, though, that argument was beside the point. These people had become frightened by the prospect of wanton government spending and generational debt, and here was a man who, in apparent violation of his own political interests, was saying No. He already had the reputation of saying No to his state’s legislature, to his own party, to federal bullying; now he was saying it again, only this time everybody seemed to be awake and listening.

  The governor’s enemies in the legislature thought they sensed weakness. The disputed $700 million, to be spent over two years, would mostly go to education, both K–12 and public colleges. About $37 million, if I remember, would go to law enforcement and prisons, and a few million to other, small-fry programs. But the bulk was meant for education, and education is, of course, the one thing nobody likes to oppose funding for. Over the previous few months, as the governor made clear his opposition to the stimulus, there had been talk about schools having to lay off teachers, of schools in poor rural areas becoming even more ramshackle than they already were, and of districts cutting science and arts programs. In an important sense, all this talk was purely irrational. For a variety of reasons, when people think about forgoing federal money—that is, of going without federal funding that might have been available under different circumstances—they think of it as a cut. The fact that it isn’t a cut at all becomes immaterial; suddenly everyone is bemoaning budget reductions that haven’t happened and won’t happen. In any case, nobody really believed teachers would lose their jobs if the governor turned down the stimulus money. Members of the legislature would starve every agency in state government before they’d open themselves to the criticism that they had let teachers be laid off. Even so, it seemed almost everybody felt that the governor’s intention to turn down stimulus money would somehow result in the widespread firing of teachers.

  This time he had gone too far. The ones who supported the president’s stimulus bill denounced him as an obstructionist, an ideologue, an out-of-touch millionaire; the ones who thought the stimulus bill was a terrible idea said that, although it was a terrible idea, the governor was foolish to turn away money when it would go to some other state if it didn’t come to ours. I remember listening to one state senator, a member of the minority who wasn’t known for speaking much on the floor, making a fervent plea to the governor to take the money. “We understand, Governor,” he said. “We understand. The stimaluss is bad physical policy. Nobody disagrees with you. Least not the people I represent. But the stimaluss is the law o’ the land. Can’t nobody change that, and if we don’t take that money, it’s gon’ go to Arkansas or Nebraska or Timbuktu.”

  On a long afternoon in late March we sat watching these and other speeches on the press office television. There’d already been a series of editorials and op-eds, some of them in the national papers, either ridiculing or reprobating the governor for heartlessness, foolishness, or insanity. The day before, the New York Times had editorialized against him. “It would be best, therefore,” the Times concluded in its characteristic editorialese, for the governor “to find a face-saving way to reverse himself. If he does not, voters should remember that their governor placed politics ahead of schoolchildren and the schools that are struggling to save them.” Somebody turned the television to cable news, and the condemnation was there too. There had been other governors who, back in February, had denounced the stimulus bill and said they didn’t want the money, but most of them (maybe all of them by now) had gone silent. One of the news anchors was having a pleasant conversation with the station’s news analyst, who was speaking of the governor as if his intention to turn down the stimulus money was evidence of a psychosis. “I mean,” he was saying, “his state’s got an unemployment rate of nine-point-five percent, the third highest in the nation. Whether he appreciates the gravity of his state’s economic situation, or exactly what he’s thinking—maybe he’s not able to focus—anyway it’s just a little unclear at this point.” He said it with a smirk.

  Stewart, who’d been leaning back in his chair, lunged forward and spouted a series of profanities at the television. A couple of the words I’d never even heard before.

  Paul said, “I don’t mean to state the obvious here, but we’re arguing over seven hundred million dollars. Sorry, but the Department of Education could piss away seven hundred million in a week.”

  Gil had walked in and did a few high-fives. “This is all good, though, man. Did y’all see that the New York Times slammed the governor yesterday?”

  “No, Gil,” Nat said irritably, “we didn’t see it. This is the governor’s press office and no one here had any idea the New York Times ran an editorial about the governor yesterday.”

  “It’s all good, though, man. It’s all good. Our peeps love it. Do you realize,” Gil said with an uncharacteristic air of gravity, “that in Chinese the word for ‘crisis’ and the word for ‘opportunity’ are the same word? I mean, this looks bad for us, for the governor. But we could use it.”

  Nat: “Hey, that’s fascinating, Gil. And did you know, in English, your name and the word ‘dumbass’ are the same word?”

  Stewart’s laugh shook the room.

  “Gil’s got a point,” someone said. “That’s pretty much why the Cultural Revolution was allowed to happen. Ten million dead, all because they were all saying ‘opportunity’ when they should have been saying ‘crisis.’”

  “Gil,” Stewart said, still convulsing, “this is the press office. These guys live on bits of pseudo-wisdom like that one. They use them, they invent them.”

  “No, but let’s be fair to Gil here,” Nat said. “I was thinking about this yesterday. The Greeks had three words for ‘love,’ whereas we only have one. No, seriously. One of them means ‘brotherly love’; one of them means the kind of love between a man and a woman. And then there’s the word ‘phileo.’ It means ‘love,’ but it’s a special kind of love. Like the love Gil has for stupid bullcrap he finds on the Internet.”

  This went on for five or ten minutes. Gil just giggled.

  Suddenly I found myself saying, “Gil’s right, though.”

  Everybody waited for the joke. But I didn’t have a joke.

  “No, I just mean—all this hostility isn’t a bad thing. It’s an honorable thing, actually. It just means our guy isn’t acting out of base self-interest. He’s doing this because he should.” I wasn’t intending to say any of this; it just came out. “I mean, take a look at Harrell’s press guy, or Leatherman’s staff, or Knotts’s. Their guys were against the stimulus as long as it was the thing to be agains
t. A month and a half ago it was great to bash the president and talk about how he was going to bankrupt the country, about how there was all this irrelevant junk in the bill, designed to do people favors, just expensive thank-you notes to people or companies or whatever who’d done favors for the administration or for some high-powered fraudster in Congress. A month and a half ago all these guys were denouncing central planning and top-down economics and Keynesianism even though they didn’t know what any of those words meant. But now, oh, right, the bill’s passed, it’s the law of the land, and they can’t wait to get their filthy little paws on it. And conveniently enough, that about-face just happens to accord with the conventional wisdom of editorial boards. And, I guess, of the electorate. So all aboard the stimulus train, right? Well, our guy said No. Other guys in other states said No, but then when they found out about giant mounds of federal cash just waiting to be spent, well, maybe all this top-down stuff isn’t such a bad idea, just this once. Our guy said No, and when it was a done deal and there wasn’t anything more he could do about it, he still said No. It doesn’t matter how many editorialists call him crazy or a ‘prisoner to his ideology.’ It doesn’t matter how many people moan into the TV cameras about all the teachers who’ll supposedly be laid off if he doesn’t take the money. It doesn’t even matter if he’s wrong. None of it matters. He said No for a reason, that reason still applies, and his answer is still No. And if the voters don’t like it, they should be careful who they vote for next time.”