The Speechwriter Page 11

  Everybody stared.

  “Actually I can’t really believe I’m saying any of this because most days I want to call the governor terrible names, but my point was just to say—what was it you said, Gil?—that what feels like a crisis isn’t necessarily a crisis. Okay, it might not be much of an opportunity, but it’s not a crisis. The governor’s saying No, and it doesn’t matter how many people tell him to say Yes, he’s not going to do it. So who would you rather work for: some soulless blob like Bobby Harrell, or for our boss? I’ll take the boss, every time. Even if he’s wrong.”

  I must have spoken for long enough to let all the irony seep out of the room. I felt my face turning red. Nat mumbled, “Well said. Go team,” and got back to work. The others changed the topic or walked out.

  * * *

  It was two or three days later, April 2. There had been talk of a rally by educators. The plan was for a crowd to march three blocks from the Department of Education building to the State House, and there protest the governor’s refusal to accept federal money for the education budget.

  We liked protests. They were always happening at the State House for one thing or another. You would walk outside to get some lunch or fresh air, and a small crowd would be waving posters and shouting slogans; usually you couldn’t make out what the slogans were. The more orderly groups would set up a podium and maybe a loudspeaker, and one member of the crowd, sometimes as few as ten or fifteen people, would address the rest. Occasionally you’d see a young black man dressed as a Klansman; he was always shouting about something, and he wore giant placards bearing the words “Judge James Simmons committed FRAUD $ PERJURY and Senator McConnell is trying 2 cover it up!” Once, I saw a single protester speaking at a podium; he was exercised about something, but there was no one within fifty yards of him.

  Any time there was a large protest, “large” meaning more than forty people or so, we would walk outside and have a look. Sometimes we’d hear people denouncing the governor in strident terms. This had a way of lifting our spirits.

  The protest on April 2 was supposed to be big; there had been an AP brief on it the day before. Stewart, Nat, and I stepped outside to watch. A podium and loudspeaker were set up, and various bystanders and security officers stood about. From high atop the State House steps, a few General Assembly members and their staff nonchalantly looked down, trying to figure out if the event merited their presence.

  Ten or fifteen minutes went by, and we heard a drumbeat and whistles. Then, slowly, the crowd made its way through the manicured gardens of the east side of the State House and gathered in front of the podium. Over the course of twenty minutes the crowd grew to, I guessed, about a thousand people. Many of them were waving pink pieces of paper and shouting the words “Pink slip for the governor!”

  As the crowd grew, the suit-wearing lawmakers and staffers gradually made their way down the steps, shyly at first, like coyotes approaching a carcass, but then more deliberately toward the podium. A variety of orators took turns at the microphone before the first of the politicians. Senator John Land, the man who’d been in the legislature longer than any other member, approached the lectern. The dislike between Land and the governor was not of the legendary kind, as it was between Knotts or Leatherman and the governor, but it was real; the governor had once removed Land’s son, Cal, from the board of a state-owned electric utility, and Land the Elder had responded by slipping into a bill a provision divesting the governor of any power to remove board members. Slowly Land adjusted the microphone upward—he was a tall man—and scanned the multitude. The grin he always wore grew wider, and he said, “Well, glory!” The crowd cheered; Land beamed. Behind him his colleagues from the senate, Jakie Knotts and a few others, laughed uproariously at everything he said.

  To one side of the crowd, though, was an antiprotest protest. There were no more than twenty-five of them. They were doing their best to mix their defiant chants in with the rest.

  “Look at these two crowds,” Nat said. “What would you say the difference is between them?”

  I thought about the contrast.

  “Pink slip for the governor! Pink slip for the governor!”

  “Look at their people,” Stewart said, pointing to the pink slip–waving educators. “There’s a sameness about them. Middle-aged women, mostly. A few men, all with facial hair. They’re all public school teachers and principals and district managers. Now look at our people.”

  There were a few hippies, a few Confederates; a woman with hair down to her backside holding up a sign—what did it say?—“Public education harms our children.” There was a guy wearing a red, white, and blue satin jacket with a giant eagle head on the back; no satin jackets among the education crowd. There was a white man with an East Asian wife and three or four of their children skipping about. There was a black man with a chain wrapped around him.

  “Yeah,” Nat said, “what’s the chain mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Stewart replied, “something about enslavement to debt, maybe? The point is, our people aren’t some undifferentiated mass. They’re crazy, but they’re fun. They’re human and they’re alive. You can work with them. You can work with a guy who’s willing to wrap a chain around his body to make some point understood only to himself. You can work with a Harley-riding redneck who probably wants us to secede from the Union. I mean, at least the guy isn’t desperate to fit in. What I can’t work with is a bunch of sanctimonious public employees who think the fate of Western civilization hinges on whether the education bureaucracy gets its hands on another seven hundred million dollars.”

  “Pink slip for the governor! Pink slip for the governor!”

  “Completely agree with that, Stewart,” Nat said. “The only problem is, we’ve got, what, twenty people? And there’s about a thousand in the pink slip crowd.”

  Stewart: “Right about now would be a great time for the silent majority to get off its ass and make some noise.”

  11

  * * *

  TEA PARTY

  It was two weeks later, at around 10:30 A.M., and already you could hear the throb of a bass line coming from outside. A week before the governor had agreed to speak at a tax day rally on the State House grounds. When preparing remarks I usually tried to phone whoever was in charge of the event to figure out what sorts of things might be appropriate for the governor to say. For this event there was no such person, or rather the person supposedly in charge didn’t know much about it. Who have you invited? I asked. “Everyone I could think of.” Everyone? “Everyone.” Is there a speaking order? “Not exactly.” Anybody else organizing it? “Not that I know of.” Are you advising media? “No, but they know about it. I reckon they’ll be there.” Any idea what people might like to hear from the governor? “Whatever he wants to say.”

  He called it a “tea party.” People had been talking about tax day tea parties for a few weeks. Suddenly talk of debts and deficits was everywhere. You heard the word “trillion” more than you ever had before. The stimulus bill had passed, its final price tag coming to $830 billion. The banks and automakers had been bailed out; indeed one of the automakers had just been “reorganized” and partially taken over by the federal government. A bill that would give the federal government vast powers over the health insurance market was in the making. Many people felt the United States had in just one year become something like a European social democracy. That was fine if you thought social democracy a good and noble thing, but if you didn’t, you were scared. It had happened so fast. Lehman Brothers went under, an election happened, and suddenly Congress wasn’t just debating but was passing legislation you didn’t think possible in America.

  There was a feeling that the tea party rally might be a big deal, and in a rooting-for-the-underdog sort of way I hoped it would be, although it sounded gimmicky. At eleven o’clock I went outside to look around. On the north side of the State House there were already a couple thou
sand people milling about, which made me nervous. I’d written remarks for the governor a week before, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t looked at them, since for all he knew he’d be talking to ten people.

  I trotted back inside. The governor hadn’t arrived from the mansion yet. “Do you know if he’s looked at the stuff I gave him for today?” I asked Shelby and Frances, the schedulers. They usually had a sense of whether he’d thought about what he wanted to say. They didn’t think he had. “Can you call him and tell him there are at least three thousand people here?”

  “Is that true?” Frances asked.

  “Probably closer to a thousand. But just tell him three thousand to stress him out. He needs to start going over what he’s going to say.”

  Shelby called him; she compromised and said “like two thousand.”

  He arrived about thirty minutes later. I was waiting at my desk. By this time I had learned to give him three or four options for any one event—not a single prepared text but a series of potential lines of thought. Usually I kept one of those narratives in reserve—in my head—so that if he stormed into the press office and announced his hatred of everything I’d written, which still happened occasionally, I could blurt out something as if it had just occurred to me. I learned that from Nat.

  That is what happened around eleven-thirty on April 16, only in this instance he called me into his office.

  “Wwwww,” he said, looking at the material I’d put in his speech book.

  He wanted me to say something so he could interrupt and tell me how nothing I’d written was any good, but today I thought I’d force him to initiate the conversation.

  “Wwwww. Wwwhat is all this? This is nothing I can use.”

  “Do you have any thoughts about what—.”

  “How many people are out there?”

  “I don’t know, maybe five thousand.”

  “Okay, give me something I can use. Something about the founding fathers, or taxation without representation, or something. I mean, not that, but something like that.”

  Then, starting to walk out, I pretended to recall something important. “Okay, wait,” I said. “That reminds me—something I saw.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Wait—where was it?—okay, I think I got it.”

  “What?”

  It was definitely working.

  “I don’t know why I’m just thinking of this, but it’s perfect.”

  “Come on, what?”

  “Just a couple of blocks away, in the cemetery of the First Presbyterian Church, there’s a gravestone. The name on it is John Calvert. It says, ‘At the Liberty Tree, Charleston, 1766, he pledged to resist British taxation.’” Those are the precise words on the gravestone, but I said, “Or something like that.”

  He paused, which was a good sign. But then he asked, “I mean, so what?”

  “So what? So here was a guy, an American patriot, a citizen of this state, whose whole life could be summed up by the stand he took in Seventeen-sixty-six, by the stand he took against unjust taxation and unjust governmental power. And his gravestone’s three blocks from here. It’s perfect.”

  “Wwwwwhat’s the liberty tree?”

  “I don’t know. They planted liberty trees back then. It just signified liberty taking root or something. They did it in the French Revolution too. I guess it was at some meeting place for patriots in Charleston.”

  “I can’t go out there talking about the liberty tree in Charleston if I don’t know what it was,” he said.

  “Yes you can. Nobody’s gonna care. It was a tree where people met and talked about liberty. It symbolized the growth of liberty. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. What matters—.”

  “Find me something on the liberty tree.”

  “The tree isn’t the point.”

  “Find me—something—on—the liberty tree. Hurry. I’ve got to be out there in ten minutes.”

  Defeat. I enlisted a couple of my colleagues to get some information about liberty trees. Chris, who’d joined the press office a few months before, found something about a judge in Charleston digging up the roots of the liberty tree, which the British had burned, and fashioning the handle of a cane out of one of the pieces and sending it to Thomas Jefferson.

  When we walked outside, we weren’t prepared for what we saw. The whole northern half of the State House grounds teemed with dissenters, not just in the public area in front of the steps but among the trees and shrubs all the way to Gervais Street. It was as if that little band of jolly malcontents protesting the pink-slippers had mated and multiplied. The governor walked slowly through the crowd, his coatless white shirt gleaming in the sun. Leather-bedecked motorcyclists shook his hand and smiled, huddles of flip-flop–wearing students shouted his name, and white-headed men in ties spoke into his ear, then slapped him gently on the back as he made his way toward the microphone. There were men wearing colonial wigs and women with bonnets and giant hoop petticoats. A band of youth (homeschoolers, I assumed) played patriotic songs on flutes and drums. One man had the words of the Preamble printed in black letters on his white shirt and trousers; another played “The Star Spangled Banner” on a saxophone. Families stopped the governor for a picture; one of them had three little girls, the littlest of whom wore a T-shirt bearing the phrase “Mommy’s little tax exemption.”

  When he stepped onto the dais, twenty minutes after the scheduled time, the crowd erupted.

  He began nervously. “Aaahh. Ah I won’t take much of y’all’s time, but I did want to talk for just a minute on this larger notion of why it’s important that we water the tree of liberty.”

  The masses erupted again. He went on to talk about how the present moment is a “gut check moment in American history,” which was his own weird variation on the typical politician’s “crossroads” metaphor (“We’re at a crossroads in American history”). It was hard to hear what he was saying; the sound quality was bad, and he seemed unsure of what he meant. He talked about the “all-seeing eye” on the one-dollar bill (he’d borrowed the dollar from a staffer) to make some point he’d heard or read before but that no one understood. Aaron shot a questioning look at me and I shot one back.

  But the cheers got louder. Verbal inelegance didn’t matter. Incoherence didn’t matter. The crowd was applauding the man and his reputation.

  After the governor and a few others had spoken, a young man approached me. By appearance he was East Asian, but he spoke with a midwestern American accent. “You work for the governor?” he asked. He handed me a large envelope. Inside, he said, was a picture of the governor with him and his dad. They had met at some occasion in Chicago. There was a stamped envelope inside. Would I get the governor to sign it and just drop it in the mail? “My dad will flip out when he sees this,” he said.

  I asked him why somebody from up north cared about the governor of a little southern state. “Oh, you know why,” he said, as if I were teasing him.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “When he spoke to our group—or my father’s group, really—I’d never heard anything like it. I mean, it wasn’t delivery or anything. I’m a student at Penn, okay, and we get great speakers all the time. But I grew up in Chicago, and my dad’s really active in the party there. He came and spoke to my dad’s group, okay. It’s just that I’d never heard a politician talk that honestly, without any of the polish or the b.s. Usually politicians talk about how great things will be once they get their hands on the power. You know, they’re gonna turn everything around. He just like talked about how spending as a proportion of GDP has risen too high too fast, and it isn’t sustainable anymore, and how spending borrowed money is devaluing the currency, you know, and how basically even under the best of circumstances, we’re all in trouble—liberals, conservatives, all of us. Just totally realistic, that guy. And now he’s the only guy who’s willing to actually turn down the stimulus
money. Not to like just talk about how bad it is, but to actually turn it down. I mean—you know all this.”

  “Yeah. So you drove all the way from Pennsylvania to see him?”

  “Well, my brother works in Raleigh. But yeah, when I heard about this, I drove down.”

  Later it occurred to me that this young man had hit on something important. The governor’s heroism, or people’s perception of it, which comes to the same thing, consisted in his brutal honesty about the limits of what could be done. It was a kind of antiheroism, but it was heroism all the same, because telling people what they cannot do takes greater mettle than telling them what they can do.

  * * *

  Session ended that year with the customary barrage of budget vetoes, and as usual the legislature overrode most of them. This time, though, one of the vetoes included $350 million in federal stimulus money, the first half of the $700 million. The fight over stimulus money finally ended in early June, when the state supreme court forced the governor to apply for the funds on the grounds that the General Assembly had appropriated them. We were all sick of the word “stimulus.”

  At the end-of-session party at the mansion, the governor gathered everyone around and gave a characteristically awkward talk about how we were all making a difference for the sake of our children and grandchildren. He said more or less the same thing he’d said the two or three years before (and wore the same blue gingham shirt and blue jeans he’d worn the two or three years before). “It only takes one person to shatter a whole system. Just one person refusing to go along to get along. Think about Rosa Parks. This group is that one person. It’s not about me. It’s about this administration saying, ‘Hold on, let’s think about this before we keep going.’” This year, though, he added a line at the end: “This is about more than this state. This is about the direction we’re headed in as a country.”