If I wasn’t running for office I would have voted for him!
Marilyn took a look at their picture in the paper and pronounced, “He’s cute!”
“Nothing like a little support there, honey!” I told her, earning a raspberry in response.
Charlie took a look at the picture of Steve and his wife standing next to him, and pronounced, “Wow! She’s hot!” I might have to put up with Marilyn, but not Charlie. I smacked him with the newspaper and he took off, laughing.
I was using John Thomas as my campaign manager, and we ran a preliminary poll two weeks after Rymark announced he was running. The results were dispiriting, to say the least. So far I had won three elections by margins of 15 to 25 points. Right now I was down in the single digits. John and I looked at each other and called a meeting of everybody we could think of for the following Friday. I got on the phone and called Brewster McRiley and told him to shag his ass to Westminster; we were going to need all the big guns this time around. We brought Marty up and called in the various heads of the Republican Committees in the three counties I represented. For some extra flavor, we had Marilyn and Cheryl Dedrick, my Field Representative present. If anybody had a feel for the pulse of the Maryland Ninth, it was the person who spent her time sorting out the problems of the locals. Theoretically she was to keep her time separate from the campaign, as was Marty, as government employees. On the other hand, if I lost and Steve Rymark took over, they wouldn’t be government employees for long. They had a stake in this, too.
We agreed that we had to do the usual things, opposition research and extensive polling, as well as research into what the voters were thinking about me. In this regard Cheryl had a few comments, though, which were unpleasant but not unexpected. “The letters we are getting here at the office are relatively content with how we handle the routine stuff, but they aren’t too happy with some of your policy stands. You are being linked closely to Newt Gingrich and that is not playing well here. We got a lot of letters and calls about the monuments down on the Mall being shut down. We’ve had some calls from veterans complaining that they can’t get any response out of the VA, Johns Hopkins oncology department is complaining about the shutdown at the National Institutes of Health… the list is endless.” She laid out a spreadsheet with a summary of complaints and shutdown departments on it. “For all that people complain about hating big government and wanting to shut it down, when it actually happens they don’t really like it.”
Marty nodded and tossed a stack of phone logs on the table. “We’re seeing the same thing in Washington. Everybody wants to shut down government, just not the pieces they like, which turns out to be the whole damn thing anyway. You and the rest of the Gang of Eight and Gingrich are considered by many to be the reason for the mess.”
I sighed and nodded. “The Gang of Eight is no more. We were just a group of guys who liked each other and could work with Newt to topple the Democrats and ram through the Contract with America. We’re not even eight now; Rick Santorum is a Senator and above this pettiness. Besides, Newt isn’t talking to me at the moment.”
There were a few snorts and chuckles around the room. Jack Nerstein summed it up nicely. “Even worse than being wrong is being right, when being right means you disagree with the other guy.” I gave him a wry smile, pointed a finger at him, and nodded.
“So we can’t expect any help from him?” Millie Destrier commented.
“You don’t want any help from Gingrich,” interjected Brewster, who had been listening up until now. It had been a bit over six years now since I had met McRiley, and he was no longer the brash kid. He had managed or overseen seven Congressional and Senatorial elections by now, and won a total of six of them. The one loser was caught in bed with a hooker and his wife divorced him, actually serving him with the papers at a campaign rally designed to put his problems behind him. That one gave the late night comedians a lot of fun!
“Yeah,” I agreed sourly.
He continued, “He doesn’t forgive or forget, and if you aren’t an ally, you’re an enemy.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he waved me quiet. “I know, I know, you’re not an enemy, I know that. Newt is incredibly shortsighted at times, and he doesn’t look past the immediate tactical victory to the long term strategic loss. Right now all he sees is that he just lost to a man he despises. Newt’s natural instinct is going to be to double down and attack again. That is not going to be in your interest.”
“I am going to have to distance myself from him, which I am sure he will be happy to help with.” I could just see running ads saying I wasn’t really a key ally in the Contract with America. Unbelievable!
There wasn’t much we could come up with. This was going to come down to plain old fashioned campaigning. We came up with two major thrusts.
First, just like an old time smash-mouth football game, we were going to have to keep running the ball, going for two or three yards at a time, and not give up too many yards to the other team. There would be no Hail Mary passes or glorious 99 yard kick returns. The legendary Vince Lombardi, longtime coach of the Green Bay Packers, would start each season by holding up a football and saying, “This is a football!” We were going to go back to the basics.
In campaign terms, this meant doing the basics. I needed to contact everybody who had ever donated or helped or worked on a campaign and ask them to do it all over again. Nobody could come up with any dirt on either of the Rymarks. (When discussing Donna Rymark, John Thomas had shaken his head in disgust and commented, ‘What are we going to say? Her tits are too big and her legs are too long?’ Millie and Cheryl countered by pointing to a picture of Steve Rymark in running shorts, with what looked like a roll of socks stuffed down his pants, and said, ‘Some of us like other things, too.’; Marilyn simply giggled. Great! American democracy was being determined by penis length and bra size! How the hell did I ever get in this mess?) We were going to have to buy a lot of ads and push all the wonderful stuff we were doing for everybody, and not dwell on any of the big policy debates in Washington. It was going to be expensive.
There was a very strange response to Donna Rymark, one that I hadn’t expected. I came home one evening to find my wife chatting on the telephone in the kitchen. She tilted her cheek towards me, so I leaned down and kissed her. I glanced at her and noticed that something seemed different, but she was yapping away, so I dumped my briefcase in my office and went to the bedroom and changed out of my suit. When I got back to the kitchen Marilyn was hanging up the phone. “How was work?” she asked.
“Every day it is a privilege and honor to represent the Maryland Ninth and protect the citizens thereof from the godless hordes bent on their utter destruction.”
“You’re a selfless hero.”
“And in need of a drink.” I pulled a bottle of Louis Jadot Burgundy from the wine rack. I looked at Marilyn again. “Is that a new outfit?”
She lit up. “You noticed!”
“I always notice what you’re wearing.”
“No you don’t!”
I had to smile at that. “Guys always notice what women are wearing, so they can figure out how to get it off of them.”
That earned me a squawk of protest. “You are an awful person! If I told the citizens of the Maryland Ninth what you said, you’d lose the women’s vote, for sure!”
“But I’d gain the men’s vote,” I said, shrugging. “So, that’s new?” Marilyn had on a tight black skirt that ended about an inch above her knees, but had an interesting slit up the back a few inches higher. Up top she was wearing a tight fitted red tunic-shirt that overlaid the skirt, unbuttoned down to a point you could see a touch of cleavage, with a gold sash tied asymmetrically at the waist. She also had on some nice sheer hosiery, and some pointy-toed high heels.