I shrugged and smiled. “Don’t sweat it. I’m a big boy. If the biggest secret to come out of this family is that my son doesn’t like to kill people, I can handle that real easy. You’ll get the worst of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait until a picture of you shows up on the cover of The National Enquirer, wrapped up in a straight jacket, with the headline, ‘The Buckman Family Curse Strikes The Next Generation!’”
“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed.
“Welcome to my life, Charlie!” I laughed. “You think being called crazy is bad? They call your mother and sisters sluts and bimbos!” He looked shocked at that, so he must not have heard about some of the stuff that had happened. “Just do me a favor, and try not to get into too much trouble on the tour circuit. Don’t get drunk in public and keep your pecker wrapped if you pick up a girl. Can you at least do that?!”
He laughed at me and said, “Yes.”
You don’t end up in the White House, at any position, unless you are a hard core political junkie. Watching the Democratic Follies, otherwise known as the primaries, was vastly amusing for us, and left me perpetually thankful I didn’t have to go through with it! We stayed out of it, biding our time and building a war chest. With the sole exception of Joe Lieberman, every Democrat running was considerably more liberal than I was. One of the big strengths I had was that I didn’t really need to pander to the Republican base, since I didn’t have a primary challenge and all the Democrats were too liberal for the base. We didn’t have a Tea Party movement yet, and if I did my job right, we wouldn’t.
This was just guesswork on my part. I believed the Tea Party was ultimately a judgment on the economy. Lots of people got totally screwed over when the economy entered the Great Recession. So far that hadn’t happened, and in fact the economy looked healthy. The 2001–2002 recession had been painful, but it was behind us, and jobs and wages were both rising. The nation also had a lot of structural problems, like jobs going overseas and the overall loss of manufacturing, but right now, the good economy was papering over these issues. During the Great Recession, which was far deeper and longer than anything since the Depression, those angry and screwed over people took their outrage out on their elected politicians, and sent a new batch to Washington. We weren’t there yet.
Would we get to that point? That I wasn’t at all sure of. This job was a lot like riding a tiger. You hang on for dear life and hope not to get eaten. Actually getting the tiger to go in a direction you want him to go is simply icing on the cake!
Currently things were good, but the housing markets and financial markets were both bubbles growing bigger and bigger. We needed to pop the balloons. My plan, which was not popular in all corners, was to increase financial regulation. I can remember being in the housing business with Lefleur Homes on my first trip. We would see these loans where you didn’t need any money down, and you didn’t even have to pay the principal, only the interest, and then had a balloon payment to pay off the principal when you flipped the property. I remember talking to a couple of bankers at the time and asking them who in their right mind thought these were good loans! These were disasters waiting to happen, which is precisely what happened.
I could see it happening again. The problem was that a lot of people liked things just the way they were. The finance companies loved it, and home buyers loved it, and Wall Street loved it, and home builders loved it. When the wheels came off in a few years, nobody would love it, and they would point their fingers at everybody else.
My solution, which I had been pushing for awhile now, was a two-parter. First, no new rules and regulations. All my life I had heard people complain, when something went wrong, “There should be a law!” Well, the odds were pretty good that there already was a law, but nobody was enforcing it. No new laws, we had plenty of them on the books already. Part Two was even simpler! We were actually going to fund the regulatory agencies! Many times Congress would pass a law to correct some sort of outrage, and mandate some new agency or program to fix something, but stop there. They wouldn’t actually fund the program or office, so there might not be any employees in the agency.
Pay for some inspectors at the FDA, and some analysts and investigators at the SEC. Slip some money to the Surgeon General and pay for some of the public health programs already mandated by law. Almost every one of these programs and regulations had a positive benefit in terms of cash, in many cases saving $3 or $4 or $5 for every $1 spent. On the plus side, the U.S. government is so big, there is almost always something breaking down and letting something happen. Crank up the appropriate outrage and force Congress to get the agencies some funding. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
I almost never got everything I wanted, but I usually got some, and then simply told people to not stop pushing and go for more the next time. It’s a never ending battle. I had used up a lot of my political capital getting the DREAM Act passed, and almost all of the rest of it in killing off a bunch of Pentagon weapons programs. I had gotten these bills through Congress, suitably watered down of course, but through the system, though with a fair bit of screaming. I had also lost some popularity by my refusal to lower taxes any further, and by continuing to run a modest surplus. I was going to face a backlash sooner or later over taxes, and probably sooner. On the other hand, Monrovia had built up my political capital and popularity again, by showing ‘leadership in a crisis’, and I was cynical enough to accept my son’s wounds as part of that.
Through the winter and early spring the Democrats scrapped like a pack of feuding cats. I would have enjoyed it immensely, except for the fact that I got sick! It started out with just a routine evening in the White House Residence in mid-February. Marilyn and I had gone to bed, and for once I managed to join her at the same time. Usually she would fall asleep in her chair with Stormy, and I would chuckle when she roused herself and headed into our bedroom. I would usually watch some late television, but for whatever reason, that night she stayed up late and I went to bed around the same time she did. I wasn’t feeling quite right, and had a crick in my upper back.
Marilyn snuggled up next to me, and ordered Stormy out from between us. She began running a hand across my chest, and I brought my arm up to let her rest her head on my shoulder. Somehow, doing that didn’t make me feel all that comfortable, and I moved my shoulders around and tried to get comfortable. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I don’t know. My back is bothering me, a bit, anyway.” I flexed my muscles and shrugged my shoulders, to see if that helped. It didn’t.
“Not feeling well?”
“I’ll be fine. Maybe I just need a good night’s sleep.”
“Okay.” Marilyn kissed me quickly and then rolled over, her rump pushing against me.
I mused for a moment about missing out a chance to sample my wife’s pleasures. After all these years, I still enjoyed making love to her, and never really felt any urge to stray. Still, we had been together long enough that we knew that if either one of us was feeling poorly, it wasn’t a time to push things. As it was, while Marilyn zonked off to sleep in a minute or two, I just couldn’t get comfortable. I twisted and turned, rolled from side to side, and kept moving. The pain in my back kept growing. It was in my upper torso, between my shoulder blades, and I was feeling a bit nauseous and sweaty. Something wasn’t right.
I rolled over and sat upright, groaning as I did so. That didn’t help much. I sat there on the edge of the bed, slumped over, as the pain scale kept moving up. Marilyn woke up, probably because I was moving around some, and she flipped on the bedside lamp, waking Stormy as she did.