“How many deaths?” the President asked.
“The low end of the projection is now forty-five thousand.”
“What’s the top end?”
“A hundred and fifty.”
“Jesus.”
The Communications Director had been sitting in on the meeting. He interjected, “The NIH has been working up some new numbers. There is a way to dress up the figures—”
“They’re dead. How do you dress that up?” the President snapped.
The Communications Director, impervious to the President’s tone, continued. “Most of the projected deaths are people who are already old or ill.”
“So they don’t count?”
“Kind of. I was talking to one of the senior guys at NIH. He explained something to me that’s kind of intuitive, if you think about it. Most of these people were going to die anyway, right?”
“Get to the point,” the President said wearily.
“If we measure incremental deaths over a longer period of time, say a year or two, the number is going to be a lot lower.” The President frowned, took a bite of toast, and said nothing. The Communications Director continued, “The number of deaths will spike when we run out of Dormigen, but then the death rate will be below average for the next three to six months. That means over the next year, the number of incremental deaths will be much, much lower—close to zero.”
“People aren’t really being killed by the epidemic, they’re just dying early,” the President said sarcastically. “Why don’t you call Cecelia Dodds’s grandchildren and explain that to them? ‘She won’t be at your wedding because she died early.’”
“This is straight from the NIH,” the Communications Director said defensively.
The Chief of Staff said, “People are going to go to the hospital, they’re going to be denied Dormigen, and they’re going to die. It doesn’t matter how we tally the deaths, that reality is not going away.”
The President added, “Maybe Hallmark can do a new card: ‘Sorry for your loss, but she was going to die in the next twelve to eighteen months anyway.’ I can send one to the Dodds family.”
“I’m just trying to get through today,” the Communications Director said, displaying some impatience of his own.
The cable news stations had developed fancy graphics and names for the crisis: the Dormigen Countdown; the Dormigen Debacle; and so on. The new NIH projections had not leaked, but some of the old ones had. The media had a decent idea of when the Dormigen supplies would run out, as well as a crude projection for the virulence of Capellaviridae. Overall, their estimates were not wildly wrong, no doubt because some of the concerned scientists on our team were feeding information to the press. The President also suspected the Speaker had been strategically leaking information to create support for the China option before that deal blew up and made her collateral damage. In any event, the public would soon have a more refined sense of the situation. Congress had (rightfully) demanded a full briefing on the situation. With the President in Australia, the Acting HHS Commissioner was tapped to do the congressional briefing. That briefing would be private, but anything said in there would leak immediately. The Communications Director recognized the White House needed to get out in front of the leaks to put its own spin on the situation. (Hence his reference to just getting through the day.) The President would do a national television address immediately after the “closed” congressional briefing.
The President’s senior advisers were feeling the same sense of doom that had descended on me the day before. At previous junctures in the crisis, we could imagine developments that would bail us out: Dormigen from allies; China; a scientific breakthrough on the virus. Each of those options was now gone, or dwindling away. The bravado of the takeoff to Australia had bought some political breathing space, but it had done nothing to improve Cecelia Dodds’s condition. The hourly update from that Seattle hospital now became a barometer of the nation’s future. Meanwhile, the press had begun to ask what the President could accomplish in Australia. And whatever goodwill the President had amassed by standing up to China would dissipate immediately as Americans began dying in serious numbers. The Chief of Staff would later describe the mood as “an oppressive anxiety as we internalized the reality of what was likely to happen.”
“I need to draft remarks for the congressional briefing,” the Communications Director said. He looked around the room for some general guidance to get him started. Curiously, the Strategist had gone missing. The President’s more substantive advisers typically considered the Strategist an irritant, not just because of his irreverent demeanor, but also because he was a constant reminder of the messiness and tawdriness of politics. He was the one who explained impatiently why high-minded policies would have “absolutely no fucking support” in most of the Midwest, or how information could be cleverly spun to obscure, confuse, or persuade. He had famously called the Secretary of Energy a “total moron” for using the word “tax” to describe the administration’s carbon tax proposal. One might assume that the word “tax” was an accurate and efficient way to describe a policy that was, in fact, a tax on carbon emissions. “It’s a pollution fee,” the Strategist yelled during a staff meeting. “Tell the jackasses at the EPA to stop calling it a tax.”
“Which part of it is not a tax?” a young economist from the Council of Economic Advisers had made the mistake of asking. The Strategist had literally thrown a bundle of papers across the conference table at him.
“Read that, you smug prick!” the Strategist screamed. Behavior aside, the public opinion data he had thrown across the table confirmed his point. Only 23 percent of the American public supported a carbon tax. But when the exact same policy was described as a “fee on polluters,” support climbed to 68 percent. “If you want to sit alone in your office doing mental masturbation, go back to Harvard,” the Strategist told the young economist (who was from Stanford). “If you want to improve American energy policy, don’t use the word ‘tax.’ Not fucking ever.”
The more cerebral members of the President’s team bristled at the manipulation, clinging to the politically naïve notion that a policy was just a policy, regardless of the words one used to describe it. They would appear on the Sunday morning talk shows, awkwardly trying to explain how the President’s proposed tax on carbon was not a tax. The host would probe relentlessly: “If the government imposes a charge on the emission of carbon, how is that not a carbon tax?”
The Secretary of Energy or the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers or the head of the EPA would parry uncomfortably: “What we are proposing is a fee on polluters.”
“What’s the difference between a tax and a fee?”
“A fee is a charge levied on some activity, such as registering a car. The most elegant part of the President’s proposal is that the biggest polluters will pay the largest fees.”
“How is that any different than the income tax, where those with the highest incomes pay the most in taxes?”
“Because this is a fee, not a tax.”
And so it would continue. The cerebral advisers would apologize to their erstwhile academic colleagues for such silliness. The fact that the Strategist was generally right on these matters was no salve for wounded academic dignity. Congress eventually passed a modified version of the “carbon emissions fee,” with many members declaring to their constituents that they were supporting it because it was not a tax.
Now, with the Communications Director trying to put a positive spin on a minimum of forty-five thousand deaths, the senior advisers were looking for some guidance from the Strategist. “He needed some rest,” the President said, explaining the absence unconvincingly.