The Speechwriter Read online

  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

  The 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.

  10

  * * *

  STIMULUS

  Around this time the word “stimulus” became part of every working day. The new president was pushing Congress to pass what the news media liked to call a “stimulus package,” a giant spending measure designed to “jump-start” or “stimulate” or “revive” an economy that, according to the metaphor, was moribund. The size of this package kept growing; reports cited $400 billion, then $500 billion, then $675 billion, and nowhere, so far as I could tell, was there any explanation of what was responsible for this growth. I remember this clearly because, although I’ve never understood numbers at all, I was used to thinking about our little state’s $5 billion General Fund and $19 billion total budget. These were the big numbers to me. And now Congress was debating a single bill—not the budget itself, but just an ordinary piece of legislation—that was twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five times larger than the state’s entire budget. For the first time in my life I considered the fact that a billion is a thousand millions.

  The governor was in demand. Almost every day, it seemed, we were preparing talking points for another television interview. He was one of only a few politicians in the country who could talk knowledgeably about fiscal policy in broad terms, and he was the sort of person who, in contrast to most of his peers, might say something interesting at any moment. As maladroit as he usually was with words, occasionally he’d find some phrase that expressed the forebodings of millions. In one interview with one of the cable networks, he worried that the United States was creating a “savior-based economy,” an economy in which “what matters is not how good your prod
uct is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.” Instantly the phrase was everywhere, and I wished I could take credit for it.

  It was often said during these years that the relationship between the governor and the legislature was as sour as it had been in generations. I don’t know if that was true in any verifiable sense; I doubt it. But now, in the winter and spring of his greatest and worst year, it certainly felt true. Legislators sensed that his attention was elsewhere; they knew what his ambitions were, and many of them longed to show the world that he wasn’t the brave and winsome statesman many people thought they saw. He was popular, and they hated him. For the most part, though, they couldn’t come up with any way to discredit him, unless you count overriding nearly all his vetoes.

  Occasionally they’d come out with some gimmicky ploy, but it all remained pretty silly. In March, for example, Senator Leatherman and Speaker Harrell, together with the newly appointed state university president, staged a press conference showcasing a new jobs plan. This consisted, strangely, of a pyramid: on the lower parts of the pyramid were written the names of various state agencies; in the middle were the names of other state agencies; and at the top were the words “Economic Development Executive Council.” It wasn’t absolutely clear how such a thing would result in greater employment opportunities for actual people, but the purpose of the jobs plan wasn’t to carry it out, since it had already been carried out and was nothing but a confusing, top-heavy bureaucratic bungle; the purpose rather was to show how concerned Leatherman and Harrell were about the economic well-being of the state. Unlike the governor.