This didn't sit well with the true believers on our side. Worse to come was when I got a call from Marty Adrianopolis in the office in Rayburn. I was in a motel room in Santa Fe when he called. "Hey Marty, what's up?"
"I've got reporters around here sniffing around the place. It would seem that Carter Braxton isn't as far in the closet as he thinks he is."
"Tell me something I didn't already know." Carter Braxton was my Assistant Legislative Director, and was quite good at it. He was also gay, and hiding it. He hid it pretty well, too, but both Marty and I had been dinged by our gay-dar. I talked it over with Marty and we basically shrugged. It wasn't our business and Carter was a good staffer. Our biggest question to each other was how come Carter was a Republican, when the party basically wanted to have him tarred and feathered.
"Yeah, well, he's freaking out. He has reporters following him around. Limbaugh outed him today and the phones have been ringing off the hook. He had never told his parents."
"Great! This is 2000, not 1950. It's not illegal.", I replied.
"So, what do you want to do about this?", he asked.
"Nothing. Why?"
"Rove's office called and they want us to cut him loose. Come up with some bogus reason, but cut him loose and get rid of 'the little faggot.' Their words, not mine."
I rolled my eyes at that. "Screw that. Carter has enough problems now. I do that and I play straight into the hands of Al Gore. Tell Carter he's safe. I'll tell him he's safe."
"He's not here. I sent him home."
"Have him call me tomorrow morning. I'll tell him."
I was hit with this in the morning, before I even had a chance to talk to Carter. "Congressman, is it true you are planning on firing one of your key Congressional staff members because he is gay?"
Good question! If I say yes, I look hypocritical and the Democrats rake me over the coals. If I say no, the hard core Evangelicals in the Republican Party have 'proof' I'm not really one of them. It was time to play that most trusted of cards – always answer a hostile question with another question. I gave him my most confused look. "Excuse me? Has one of my staff members been accused of a crime?"
"Are you claiming that being gay is a crime?"
"Do you think it's a crime?"
"So, what about the demands from Rush Limbaugh that you fire Carter Braxton?", asked somebody else.
"Is that who this is about? Carter Braxton? He's on my legislative staff. What's he done?", I asked innocently.
"Are you claiming that you weren't aware Carter Braxton was a homosexual?", asked a third voice.
I shrugged. "Is that something I should be finding out about my staff?"
"So you aren't going to do something about this?"
"What do you want me to do?"
I just kept up the dumb question routine and let them blather on. Later that morning I talked to Carter and told him he wasn't being fired. Fox News wasn't amused, but I just didn't care. George couldn't repudiate my actions either, without painting himself into the same corner.
That made me wonder about the whole event. I wouldn't put it past Rove to throw me under a bus, but in doing so he put Bush at risk. Cheney wasn't going to make a stink, not when one of his daughters was a lesbian. This was shaping up to be a close election. Screwing me over prior to the election didn't make any sense whatsoever. Likewise, it was too easy for a campaign stunt like outing a staffer to backfire if it had been done by the Gore campaign. It was more likely that this was the random investigation of the millions of reporters currently investigating me.
I was now being publicly vetted at a level beyond anything I had ever contemplated during my public life up to this point. Huge sums were being spent to find any conceivable snippet of information about the candidates. My classmates at every school I had ever attended were being tracked down and interviewed, to see if they remembered me. Every speech and vote was being examined by partisan reporters from both sides. Everybody I had ever done business with, from coast to coast, was being interviewed, and every deal was being put under a microscope.
Some of the problems we had were self inflicted. One of the Bush campaign's bullet points was that George Bush was a businessman, and knew how to run the country like a business. Never mind that countries and companies are two different things. Now they had me as another successful businessman. One of my handlers opened his fat yap and said that as a businessman I had invested in companies to increase jobs in America. I remembered how that had bit Mitt Romney in the ass. All it would take was a single company to report that they had laid off a single worker to put some serious hurt on the campaign.
I grabbed Matt Scully and pulled him aside. "Shut that asshole up! He is going to bury us!"
"What is the problem, Congressman? We are pushing your success as a businessman. This plays to that perfectly!"
"This is a disaster. Just follow my lead on this and tell him to knock it off!"
At the next question and answer period, I was asked, "Congressman, is it true that you only invested in companies that were hiring American workers?"
I gave a wry smile, but shook my head negatively. "I think that statement is a bit of a misrepresentation of what actually happened. I invested in companies to make money for my shareholders and investors. While I certainly hoped that I was creating new jobs, that wasn't my only concern. I had a legal duty to maximize returns on investment, not jobs. I was pretty successful at that."
I could see the others staring at each other. There were all sorts of wonderful ways to use this to try and sink me. How dare I say that creating jobs wasn't a politician's primary purpose! The fact that I wasn't a politician at the time meant nothing! A worse case, however, would be trying to have it both ways, which had really fucked over Romney. In this case I had to stick to a single and solitary message, that I was in the money business back in the Eighties, not the political business. I left it to Matt to come up with better ways to tell that message.
The Democratic Convention was held two weeks after the Republican Convention, and was held in Los Angeles. Al Gore kept his selection secret until the second night of the convention, when Joe Lieberman nominated John Kerry as Vice Presidential nominee, and put it to a voice vote. I was watching the entire event on television and was simply stunned into silence. The others in the room noticed my staring at the television, and I waved them into silence. I needed to think!
On my first trip through, Gore had selected Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his VP pick. Lieberman was noticeable for three separate facts. He was considerably more conservative than Gore, he was the first Jewish candidate for national office, and he was quite possibly the only potential choice even less exciting than Gore. Now, everything had changed.
This was a major break with my past history! Why John Kerry and not Joe Lieberman? What had my ascension to national prominence changed? My mind was going a million miles an hour as I tried to process this. John Kerry had first made a national name for himself when in 1971, as a decorated hero of the Viet Nam War, he appeared before Congress to tell them that the war was really fucked up. He rode that into Massachusetts politics, rising through various state positions until he ran for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Tsongas. He ultimately ran against George Bush in 2004 and lost.