“These numbers are nonsense,” the NIH Director said.
“Do you have something better?” the Strategist asked.
“We will on Tuesday.”
“What if Tuesday’s numbers are worse?” the Strategist replied.
“You are creating needless panic,” the NIH Director said.
“I would argue the opposite,” the Strategist replied calmly. “Now we know how bad this could get.”
The Strategist and the NIH Director were slowly developing an antagonistic relationship. The Director was the heart of the group, always offering up an optimistic spin, even when the facts did not necessarily support her case. The Strategist was all brain. If anything, he tended toward pessimism. “Everything in this town turns out worse than you think it will,” he once told me during a break. We were standing at adjacent urinals. He turned to me and said that, apropos of nothing, and then went back to his business. I could not think of an appropriate response. I don’t think he was looking for one.
The Acting Secretary was visibly shaken. “With respect, I’m the new guy here,” he repeated. “But I hope we can agree on a couple of things.”
“Go ahead,” the President said.
“First, I think we need more people in the room. Is this it?” he asked, looking to his right and left. “Are we the only ones who know what’s going on here?”
The Chief of Staff answered, “We have several groups working on different pieces of the situation. There is a large team from the CDC and NIH working on Capellaviridae. We are learning more by the hour. And we have a team at the State Department who are gathering Dormigen commitments from across the OECD, India, other countries. But yes, the people in this room are the only ones who have a complete understanding of the situation.”
“Given the magnitude of what I just heard, this just doesn’t feel right,” the Acting Secretary said.
“I take your point,” the President said. “On the other hand, we can’t afford mass panic.”
“What about the Speaker?” the Acting Secretary asked. The President leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, visibly frustrated, and then quickly regained his composure. I knew from reading the newspaper that the President’s relationship with the Speaker of the House was notoriously bad, sometimes openly hostile. His reaction suggested it might even be worse than that.
“We’ll take that under consideration,” the Chief of Staff said.
“What was your second point?” the President asked.
“Maybe you’ve already discussed this, but it seems like somebody—maybe all of us—needs to think about what happens if we don’t have enough—enough Dormigen.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?” the President asked.
“No, I mean if we come up short—”
“That’s not going to happen,” the NIH Director said sharply. The Strategist exhaled loudly, causing everyone else in the room to look in his direction, at which point he rolled his eyes.
The Acting Secretary continued, “Yes, I understand we’re going to do everything we can, but in the event we were to come up short… well, who gets what we have?”
The question just kind of hung there.
21.
THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE. WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW ABOUT: She was the meanest, most calculating person I have ever met. I know some nasty people, but most of them are a little thick and not particularly strategic. They are impulsively mean, often because they do not know any better. The Speaker of the House was mean in a strategic, long-term, highly intelligent kind of way, like one of those predators on the Discovery Channel that tracks its prey for hours before seizing exactly the right moment to leap from behind a bush and sink its teeth into the jugular. She rose in California politics as “a Latina small business owner.” There is nothing about that phrase—not the Latina part, not the small business owner—that was true in spirit. Both descriptions were technically accurate, I suppose, but I am shocked the media did not push back more aggressively on her political narrative. She grew up in suburban Connecticut, born to upper-middle-class parents. Her maternal grandfather, a Harvard Law School graduate and prominent appellate court judge, was Colombian. The Speaker of the House took from him a gift that kept on giving: a Hispanic surname. As a twenty-two-year-old graduate of UC Berkeley, an age when most of the rest of us are hoping to find some reasonably steady form of income, a rental apartment without roaches, and a roommate who is not psycho, she changed her last name from Ryan to Rodriguez. How many people are planning a political career at age twenty-two with that degree of seriousness?
The small business part was arguably bogus, too. She and a business partner bought a large chain of California health food stores. The businesses were already up and running; she spent her days at the corporate headquarters, not behind the counter selling fish oil. Yes, each store was a small business, but to describe the Speaker as a small business owner was like saying that Henry Ford tinkered with cars. Everything she did was political, and I mean everything. The President could not stand her, and it was mutual. The Speaker had entered the 2028 presidential primary as the solid favorite of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She had California locked up. She built a solid organization and was a terrific fundraiser. The polls were saying that she could steamroll any centrist opponent in the Democratic primaries. Meanwhile, the Republicans had just split into the New Republicans and the Tea Party, leaving them without a candidate who could unite the two. The Speaker was convinced, not unreasonably, that she had a clear path to become the first female president, and, if you buy the narrative, the first Hispanic president, too.
Then the President declared he was running as an independent—the whole “one term for one nation” campaign. The Speaker’s well-laid plans imploded. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party abandoned her for the independent Virginia senator, since he was far more likely to win the general election. Meanwhile, the New Republicans figured he was almost as good as anyone they could field, so they tossed him their support, too. And so on. Yes, the Speaker won the early Democratic primaries handily, but the polls showed her getting trounced in the general election. Rather than face humiliation, she dropped out before Super Tuesday.
After the election, the Speaker and the President tried to patch things up, but it was a superficial effort. To her mind, he was sitting in the seat that should have been hers. The animus was compounded by genuine ideological disagreements. She was coming from the California left; he was coming from the Virginia center. There was plenty of potential common ground, of course, but the first one hundred days—what the President believed should have been his honeymoon—turned into a pissing match with the House of Representatives, for lack of a more accurate description. The Speaker introduced two explosive bills, one proposing a $22-an-hour minimum wage and the other setting aside $100 billion for slavery reparations, a fund that would be dispersed (somehow) among the descendants of American slaves. Neither bill had even a remote chance of passing the Senate, but the President was forced to oppose both of them, which infuriated progressives on the hard left. The Speaker clearly designed the whole effort to strangle the President’s support among her progressive base, and she succeeded brilliantly. To what end? That is what infuriated the President. It was not like low-wage workers or African-Americans emerged from this legislative charade any better off. It was just a lot of political churn to get nowhere.