The President and Chief of Staff were watching the statement in the conference room on Air Force One. “For fuck sake,” the President muttered. “Please tell me this is not happening.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” the Chief of Staff said, genuinely perplexed. “We don’t have enough Dormigen. She’s not an idiot. What does she think we’re going to do? You can’t promise what you don’t have—”
“She thinks we’re going to avert the crisis,” the President said with a sardonic laugh. “It’s a backhanded compliment, actually.”
“I don’t follow,” the Chief of Staff said.
“You have to give her credit for creativity, if nothing else,” the President answered. “She thinks we’re going to come up with the Dormigen, or figure out the virus, or something. She doesn’t think we’re going to have to ration anything. So she introduces her grandiose bill—protecting the old, the infirm, the left-handed, and everyone else—right before we lay out our rationing plan. Then, when the crisis is averted, she’s the one who promised Dormigen to everyone and we’re the ones who planned to let old people die.”
“And if things don’t turn out all hunky-dory?”
“Then it doesn’t matter anyway,” the President explained. “We can’t give out Dormigen we don’t have. She’s taking a gamble here.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You don’t win the presidency without taking some risks,” the President said with what his Chief of Staff would later describe as “an admixture of respect and disgust.”
The Speaker finished her statement: “The President will soon tell the nation who will be excluded, who is too sick or too old to be saved. Congress cannot allow that to happen. I will not live in a country that turns its back on the most vulnerable. In my America, there is Dormigen for every one of us.”
She did not take questions. There was no way she could. The statement made no sense given the reality of what was going on; some members of the media were openly snickering. We had crowded around my laptop to watch the talk in the NIH conference room, which had grown warm and stuffy. “Is that woman crazy?” Giscard asked without a hint of sarcasm or irony. “I mean, really, does she understand what is happening?”
“She’s a politician,” one of the CDC scientists said.
“Yes, okay, I understand, but stilclass="underline" How can one promise Dormigen for all when there is no Dormigen?” Giscard asked, genuinely flummoxed. Several of us shrugged by way of reply. The Speaker clearly had better political antennae than the rest of us, because almost immediately social media exploded with what would become the #norationing campaign. Progressives organized rallies in D.C. and other big cities. One influential lefty blogger compared the President to a concentration camp guard who met the trains and sent prisoners “left or right.”
The President called the Acting Secretary of HHS just before he was scheduled to do the congressional briefing. “Thank you for doing this,” the President said.
“I’m too old for this shit,” the Acting Secretary said. “What was she thinking?”
“About the 2032 race,” the President said.
“Apparently. How should I respond?”
“Don’t. Just lay out our plan. Stick to the briefing materials. The important thing is that people realize how serious the situation might become. That’s our responsibility here. Everything else is just noise.”
“What about Q and A?” the Acting Secretary asked.
“You have to answer questions. It’s Congress. But you know the drilclass="underline" act professional and say as little as possible, no matter what they throw at you. It’s like a congressional hearing; you’ve done it a hundred times,” the President assured him.
“Except this time it’s all of Congress and we’ve just been compared to concentration camp guards.”
“Right. Good luck with that,” the President replied. And then, after a pause, “Seriously, thank you for carrying the water on this one.”
“It’s an honor to do what I can, Mr. President.”
“Okay, then, good luck. I’m on right after you.”
In New Delhi, the phone rang—the phone call the U.S. Ambassador had been hoping for, or at least a step in that direction. A functionary in the Indian Ministry of Health called the U.S. Embassy, asking if perhaps the U.S. Ambassador would have time for a short chat with someone in the Prime Minister’s office regarding the American Dormigen shortage. As soon as possible.
72.
THE U.S. AMBASSADOR IMMEDIATELY RELAYED THE NEWS TO the Secretary of State and the Strategist, who cut their tour of the Bahraini base short and ensconced themselves in a small secure conference room. “I assume I call him back?” the U.S. Ambassador asked.
“Give it at least a half an hour,” the Strategist advised. “The Indian PM is a rug merchant—”
“Can we show some respect, please?” the Secretary of State interrupted, casting an exasperated look across the table.
The Strategist, not one to back down when he believed himself to be right, said, “Isn’t that literally true? His family traded carpets. Wasn’t his family in the carpet business?” the Strategist asked the U.S. Ambassador.
The Ambassador replied uncomfortably, “I do believe his mother’s family exported carpets from Kashmir.”
“He wrote about it in his autobiography,” the Strategist explained.
“Fine, but for my benefit, can we please not call him a rug merchant?” the Secretary of State said. (In her memoir, she would describe herself as “horrified” by the Strategist’s manners but “simultaneously impressed” by his depth of knowledge on myriad topics.)
The Strategist, taking no offense, replied, “I don’t care what we call him. The point is that he sees the world as a zero-sum game—everything. If we win, he loses, and vice versa.”
“I would agree,” the Ambassador offered. “He’s hard to deal with that way.”
“We need to make him think he’s getting a huge win and that we’re somehow losing,” the Strategist said.
“That seems difficult, given the circumstances,” the Ambassador said earnestly. “How does the U.S. lose by getting Dormigen that’s going to save thousands of lives?”
“We suggest that we can’t give him what he most wants,” the Strategist said.
“Publicity,” the Secretary of State offered.
“Exactly,” the Strategist said, impressed his pupils were keeping up with him. “The PM wants a political win, domestically and on the international stage. We tell him that won’t be possible. We appreciate his Dormigen offer, but the President is not comfortable appearing dependent on a developing country to protect—”
“Do not refer to India as a developing country,” the Ambassador said firmly. “He will be very sensitive to that.”
“Of course he will!” the Strategist blurted out, now exasperated that one of his pupils was falling behind. “Not that people tend to confuse India with Switzerland, but still, you’re correct, so we need to exploit that sensitivity. What better way for India to signal its economic progress than to bail out the richest country on the planet?”
“I agree,” the Secretary of State said.
“Okay, so what next?” the U.S. Ambassador asked.
“You need to set up a meeting with someone in the Prime Minister’s office,” the Strategist instructed the Ambassador. “Tell them it needs to be confidential. Request to meet in a shopping mall, or a restaurant, or someplace like that. Tell them the President is very sensitive to appearing as a supplicant—yes, use that word, ‘supplicant.’”