“That report is absolutely false,” the Speaker said emphatically.
“Did you turn the offer down?” the CNN reporter followed up.
“There was no offer,” the Speaker said.
A grizzled male reporter yelled from the back, “Would you consider such an offer?”
CNN and most other stations were covering the Speaker’s press availability live, anticipating the drama. The President, the Strategist, and several other senior staff watched in the conference room on Air Force One. The Strategist chuckled maliciously. “She is so fucked. Maybe this is when she’ll finally tell America that she’s not even Hispanic.”
A female reporter for Telemundo asked, “Would you support a separate state for America’s Latino population, if the region were to vote to secede?”
The Speaker ignored the question. She said, “The reports of any terrorist attack—domestic or otherwise—are entirely false. The whole notion of some breakaway Latino nation is completely ludicrous.”
A BBC reporter asked loudly, “Would you still consider yourself the most important voice for America’s huge bloc of Hispanic voters?” The question was reasonable, but it tossed the Speaker into more difficult terrain, as she now had to walk a fine line between dismissing the Latino republic story and protecting a political career built on identity politics.
“My job is to represent all Americans,” the Speaker said.
“That’s not technically true,” the BBC reporter challenged. “You were elected in a congressional district that’s predominantly Hispanic, and the Democrats, who installed you as Speaker, have made repeated attempts to single out Hispanic voters—”
“I speak for all Americans.”
The BBC reporter was dogged. “You have repeatedly emphasized that American Hispanics are different, apart. How does that not create fault lines in the nation?”
The Speaker said dismissively, “I think that characterization is entirely wrong.”
“You gave the first ten minutes of your speech at the Democratic National Convention in Spanish,” the BBC reporter said, prompting loud laughter from his media colleagues.
On Air Force One, the Strategist looked at his watch. “Five minutes in, and she’s still digging out of the hole.”
The President added, “She’s finally learning she’s not as clever as she thinks she is.”
The Speaker changed the subject. “Here’s what’s important: Americans need to understand that there is no terrorist attack—none. Not domestic, not international. This is a common virus that has turned potentially deadly and we are seeking to understand that. In the meantime, I am working aggressively with the administration to solicit Dormigen commitments from around the world. I’m confident we can manage this crisis without loss of life.”
On Air Force One, the President said, “Isn’t that nice: someone gave her our talking points.”
The House Speaker took one more question. Her presidential hopes may have survived but for that last question. An NPR reporter asked, “The Chinese Ambassador will be speaking shortly about the Outbreak. The expectation is that Beijing will offer the U.S. enough Dormigen to cover our shortfall in exchange for diplomatic concessions, perhaps scrapping the South China Sea Agreement. Could you please comment on that?”
The Speaker took a deep breath, nodding to acknowledge the importance of the question. “Our number one priority right now is saving American lives,” she began. “If the Chinese government is offering assistance, we ought to take that offer very seriously.” The comment seemed relatively anodyne in the moment. It felt entirely different when played over and over again juxtaposed against the later remarks of the Chinese Ambassador. Note to self: Never say that an offer ought to be taken seriously before you have seen the offer. But that was still several hours away. The House Speaker had more immediate headaches. As members of Congress arrived in Washington, they were in no mood to have her “steer” their deliberations, whether she was leader of the chamber or not. Over on the Senate side, the Majority Leader had been correct when he predicted that legislators would have to “blow off some steam” before any real business could get done.
Even after America’s political realignment—with the splitting of the Republicans into the New Republicans and the Tea Party, and the President’s election as an independent—the political parties were still basically tribal. The first imperative was to support one’s tribe and bash the other. This had two immediate implications. First, the President, having been elected as an independent, had no tribe. Members of Congress—left, right, and center—heaped abuse on every aspect of the President’s existence, from his CEO wife (which had somehow led to the Centera fraud) to Air Force One flying in circles over the Pacific. He had no legislative defenders. The Senate Majority Leader, the President’s closest ally on Capitol Hill, did not pile on to the abuse, but he did not stop it, either. At one point he stepped out of the Senate chamber to call the Chief of Staff to reassure her that “tempers would soon cool.” The paradox is that for all the venom heaped on the President from every political direction, he remained significantly more popular than Congress, both during and after the Outbreak. His address that morning had gone a long way toward insulating him from congressional criticism, which was perceived (rightly) as petty and self-serving.
Second, the criticism itself was neatly organized along tribal lines, as if each political party were responding to a different crisis. Members of Congress seized on the Outbreak to reinforce their preexisting political beliefs. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party hammered away at the Centera fraud, accusing the President of “privatizing American government.” The Outbreak offered one more bullet to fire at corporate greed. The warehouse fire that made the Centera Dormigen necessary got nary a mention, nor did the inconvenient fact that Dormigen had been invented—$1.5 billion in private research and development spending—by the greedy private sector they were now blaming for a shortage of Dormigen.
The Tea Party, ostensibly reacting to the same crisis, blasted “yet another example of extreme government incompetence.” The government had fumbled its responsibility to keep the American people safe. By this logic, responsibility for the Outbreak lay with government bureaucrats who had failed to offer adequate oversight. It was time, Tea Party leaders opined, for government to “get out of the drug business entirely.” No one took the remarks seriously enough to ask if “getting out of the drug business entirely” included eliminating the government patent protection at the heart of all private investment in the pharmaceutical industry. The Tea Party proposed additional tax cuts, which would somehow induce the private sector to fix this problem that government had created.
Ironically, the far right and the far left found common ground in calling for swift and severe punishment of the Centera executives. For the progressives, this was a no-brainer. The time had come to get serious about punishing corporate malfeasance. Meanwhile, the Tea Party made a more tortured argument about how prompt prosecution would enable the private sector to reach its full potential. Really the rhetoric had the feel of frontier justice. Almost immediately after the Outbreak became public, the Texas attorney general, a Tea Party standard-bearer, issued a warrant for the arrest of the Centera CEO and CFO on capital murder charges, alleging that Goyal and Swensen had “knowingly brought about the deaths of Texas citizens.” The Centera CEO and CFO were already in federal custody on numerous federal fraud charges. The Texas attorney general, a former software executive who had spent $25 million of his own money to win a special election only six months earlier, argued that the federal charges were insufficient because they did not carry the death penalty. The progressive caucus, typically staunch opponents of capital punishment, found an exception in this case and encouraged the Texas murder indictment.