Florentyna left for Massachusetts with 6 delegates committed to her; Pete Parkin had 5. The national press declared no winner but five losers. Only three candidates were seen in Massachusetts, and Florentyna seemed to have buried the bogey that as a woman she couldn’t be a serious contender.
In Massachusetts she had fourteen days to capture as many of the 111 delegates as possible, and here her work pattern hardly varied. Each day she would carry out the schedule that Edward had organized for her, a program which ensured that the candidate saw as many voters as possible and found some way to get onto the morning or evening news.
Florentyna posed with babies, union leaders and Italian restaurateurs; she ate scallops, linguine, Portuguese sweet bread and cranberries; she rode the MTA, the Nantucket ferry and the Alameda bus line the length of the Mass Pike; she jogged on beaches, hiked in the Berkshires and shopped in Boston’s Quincy Market, all in an effort to prove she had the stamina of any man. Nursing her aching body in a hot tub, she came to the conclusion that had her father remained in Russia, her route to the Presidency of the USSR couldn’t have been any harder.
In Massachusetts, Florentyna held off Pete Parkin for a second time, taking 47 delegates to the Vice President’s 39. The same day in Vermont, she captured 8 of the state’s 12 delegates. Because of the upsets already achieved by Florentyna, the political pollsters were saying that more people were answering ‘Yes’ when asked ‘Could a woman win the Presidential election?’ But even she was amused when she read that 5 percent of the voters had not realized that Senator Kane was a woman. The press was quick to point out that her next big test would be in the South, where the Florida, Georgia and Alabama primaries all fell on the same day. If she could hold on there she had a real chance, because the Democratic race had become a private battle between herself and the Vice President. Bill Bradley, having secured only 11 percent of the votes in Massachusetts, had dropped out because of lack of funds, although his name remained on the ballot in several states and no one doubted he would be a serious candidate sometime in the future. Bradley had been Florentyna’s first choice as running mate, and she already had the New Jersey senator on her short list for consideration for Vice President.
When the Florida ballots were counted, it came as no surprise that the Vice President had taken 62 of the 100 delegates, and he repeated the trend in Georgia by winning 40 to 23, followed by Alabama, where he captured 28 of the 45 voters, but Pete Parkin was not, as he had promised the press, ‘trouncing the little lady when she puts her elegant toes in the South.’ Parkin was increasingly trying to outdo Florentyna as a champion of the military, but his choice of legislation setting up the so-called ‘Fort Gringo Line’ along the Mexican-American border was beginning to rebound on him in the Southwest, where he had imagined he was unbeatable.
Edward and his team were now working several primaries ahead as they criss-crossed the country back and forth; Florentyna thanked heaven for her ample campaign funds as the Lear jet touched down in state after state. Her energy remained boundless and if anything it was the Vice President who began to stammer and sound tired and hoarse at the end of each day. Both candidates had to fit in trips to San Juan, and when Puerto Rico held its primary in mid-March, 25 of the 41 delegates favored Florentyna. Two days later, she arrived back in her home state for the Illinois primary, trailing Parkin 164 to 194.
The Windy City came to a standstill as its inhabitants welcomed their favorite daughter, giving her every one of the 179 Illinois delegates so that she went back into the lead with 343 committed delegates. However, when they moved on to New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Vice President eroded the lead until he arrived in Texas trailing by only 591 to Florentyna’s 655.
No one was surprised when Pete Parkin took 100 percent of the delegates in his home state; they hadn’t had a President since Lyndon Baines Johnson and the male half of Texas believed that while J. R. Ewing might have had his faults, he had been right about a woman’s place being in the home. The Vice President left his ranch outside Houston with a lead of 743 to Florentyna’s 655.
Traveling around the country under such tremendous daily pressure, both candidates found an off-the-cuff remark or an unwary comment could easily turn out to be tomorrow’s headline. Pete Parkin was the first to make a gaffe when he got Peru mixed up with Paraguay, and the photographers went wild when he rode through Flint in a chauffeured Mercedes on one of his motorcades. Nor was Florentyna without her mishaps. In Alabama, when asked if she would consider a black running mate as Vice President, she replied, ‘Of course, I’ve already considered the idea.’ It took repeated statements to persuade the press that she had not already invited one of America’s black leaders to join her ticket.
Her biggest mistake, however, was in Virginia. She addressed the University of Virginia Law School on the parole system and the changes she would like to make if she became President. The speech had been written and researched for her by one of the staffers in Washington who had been with Florentyna in her days as a congresswoman. She read the text through carefully the night before, making only a few minor changes, admiring the way the piece had been put together, and delivered the speech to a crowded hall of law students who received it enthusiastically. When she left for an evening meeting of the Charlottesville Rotary Club to talk on the problems facing cattle farmers, she dismissed all thought of the earlier speech until she read the local paper the next morning during breakfast at the Boar’s Head Inn.
The Richmond News-Leader came out with a story that all the national papers picked up immediately. A local journalist covering the biggest scoop of his life suggested that Florentyna’s speech was outstanding because it had been written by one of Senator Kane’s most trusted staff members, Allen Clarence, who was an ex-convict himself, having been given a six-month jail sentence with a year’s probation before going to work for Florentyna. Few of the papers pointed out that the offense had been drunken driving without a license and that Clarence had been released on appeal after three months. When questioned by the press on what she intended to do about Clarence, she said, ‘Nothing.’
Edward told her that she must fire him immediately, however unfair it might seem, because those sections of the press who were against her — not to mention Pete Parkin — were having a field day repeating that one of her most trusted staff members was an ex-con. ‘Can you imagine who will be running the jails in this country if that woman is elected?’ became Parkin’s hourly off-the-cuff remark. Eventually, Allen Clarence voluntarily resigned, but by then the damage had been done. By the time the two candidates reached California, Pete Parkin had increased his lead, with 991 delegates to Florentyna’s 883.
When Florentyna arrived in San Francisco, Bella was there to meet her at the airport. She might have put on thirty years, but she still hadn’t lost any pounds. By her side stood Claude, one enormous son and one skinny daughter. Bella ran toward Florentyna the moment she saw her, only to be blocked by burly Secret Service agents. She was rescued by a hug from the candidate. ‘I’ve never seen anything like her,’ said one of the Secret Service men. ‘She could kickstart a Jumbo.’ Hundreds of people stood at the perimeter of the tarmac chanting ‘President Kane’ and Florentyna, accompanied by Bella, walked straight over to them. Hands flew in Florentyna’s direction, a reaction that never failed to lift her spirits. The placards read ‘California for Kane’ and for the first time the majority of the crowd was made up of men. When she turned to leave them and go into the terminal she saw scrawled all over the side of a wall in red, ‘Do you want a Polack bitch for President?’ and underneath, in white, ‘Yes.’