Paisley looked a little amused and confused, but he was a game trouper. “Of course, sir. What can I do?”
I turned towards my wife and said, “Marilyn, can you come on up here with me?”
Marilyn looked mystified, but she was game. She joined us on the stage and said into the mike, “I have no idea what he’s up to,” which got us some laughs.
I answered that with, “Brad, the First Lady and I have had an argument for years now, and you are qualified to settle it.”
He glanced over at Marilyn, who had a curious look on her face, but he was in too far now. “I’ll do what I can, sir.”
“Okay,” I continued. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you began singing and playing guitar back in high school, right? Back when you were a teenager, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
I looked towards his backup band. “How about you guys? The guys I mean, not the ladies, were you in groups then, too?” I got several agreements and thumbs-up from the band, though I doubt much of it made it to the microphones. “Okay, so here’s the question. You’ll see why I have to ask you, and why I couldn’t ask Alison earlier. Marilyn and I have been arguing for years about this. She says that performers like you join bands and musical groups because they love music and performing and I say that teenage guys join bands in order to meet girls.”
Paisley started laughing loudly at this, and his band pretty much broke down. Even the backup singers, all women, were laughing fit to bust a gut. Meanwhile the audience was laughing, as was Marilyn. “You are a rat!” she told me.
Paisley was grinning as he spoke into the microphone. “Nothing like putting me on the spot, Mister President! Who do I make angry, the lady of the house, or the guy who can order the IRS to investigate me?” I just smiled at that. “I’m going to have to say — the music and the performing. Sorry, sir, my mother would never forgive me if I got a lady angry at me!”
“Hah!” added Marilyn, giving me a superior look.
I wasn’t done, though. I looked back at the band. “Guys? The music or the girls?!”
“Girls!” roared out from the band.
Brad was laughing again, and Marilyn punched me in the ribs lightly. “Brad, I think you’ve been outvoted! I think I’ll let you get on with the music now.”
“Good idea, sir, and I’ll let you get on with your divorce!”
Marilyn laughed and hugged me, then went over and kissed him on the cheek, and we sat back down. Even the kids seemed to enjoy the evening after that, and clips ran on most of the comedy and news shows the next day.
I was hopeful that this year I would be able to get some stuff accomplished in Washington. Certainly last year, an election year, was a lost cause. Nothing gets done in D.C. every fourth year. Now, I wanted to head off a housing bubble, even if that caused a recession. A recession is nothing unusual, and was often the result of a bubble collapsing. The trick is not to let the bubble get too big. The Great Recession was caused by artificially inflating the bubble to monstrous size, and then suddenly popping it. I wanted some sort of increased banking regulation and to chew on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, make people look at them more realistically. If we had a mild recession in 2006, which was five years after the last one, then by the time the elections rolled around in 2008, we would be on the rise again, always good for the incumbent party. It’s a cold calculus, but a realistic one. It was still a lot less painful to work with than to keep blowing smoke up everyone’s ass until the wheels came off, and we suffered the worst recession since the Great Depression!
Oh, I also had to keep balancing the budget in the face of some heavy Democratic and Republican opposition! The Republicans were really pushing for a tax cut. I had been putting them off for three years, and running budget surpluses and paying down the debt. The Dems wanted to keep taxes where they were and increase entitlements. Everybody wanted to keep the gravy train rolling on biscuit wheels, especially with the gung-ho housing market. I knew what would happen and I desperately wanted to keep things under control.
Worst of all for me, I now had a split Congress. The House was still solidly Republican, but the Democrats had managed to take back the Senate, with 50 Dems and Bernie Sanders as an Independent, versus 49 Republicans. The worst part? Harry Reid was the new Senate Majority Leader, and Harry didn’t like me. We had never really jelled. He was a fair bit more liberal than me, and we disagreed on a number of items. Even when I had a liberal position, such as being pro-choice, he turned out to be pro-life! I could already feel an itch between my shoulder blades from where I knew the knife was going to go in!
One agency I really wanted to see get better was FEMA. I had been trying over the past few years to beef it up. It might have been a dumping ground at the top for political operatives in need of a job, but a lot of the people at the lower levels were quite dedicated. I had been pushing since 2001 for realistic and large scale exercises and disaster training. I remembered back during my first trip, FEMA had been sucked willy-nilly into Homeland Security, and it hadn’t done well there. One thing that Homeland Security had done was imbue everything it touched with antiterrorism. They no longer practiced for routine disasters like tornadoes or floods or earthquakes. Everything became terrorism related disasters, like nuclear drills, chemical attacks, biological attacks, and such. Never mind that none of that ever happened, and that we were hit with natural disasters on a routine basis. FEMA didn’t worry about those.
Well, this time around we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security. FEMA’s main focus was still natural disasters, and I had hammered both Joe Allbaugh and Michael Brown, the heads of the agency. Allbaugh was leaving after the inauguration, and Brown was taking over, and I was stressing the need to handle disasters proactively. There was a really good reason for that. In seven months the largest natural disaster in U.S. history would be barreling straight for the Big Easy. Hurricane Katrina was coming, and it would not be pretty.
In April, however, my life turned upside down. It was a Friday night, and the twins were with us, having come over from College Park. Charlie was between races, and he was at the house in Hereford.
The girls were now juniors, and had selected majors. Molly had told us she wanted engineering, and had settled on mechanical engineering, which was my father’s field. Holly had bounced around a bit on the science side, first going with physics, then over to chemistry (like I had once been in another lifetime), and then switching back to physics. Molly was planning on staying at College Park for a fifth year and getting a masters degree, but Holly would be moving on to get a doctorate somewhere else. We were both pretty proud of them. They weren’t straight A students anymore, but still had GPAs that put them on the Dean’s List and probably had them graduating with some sort of honors.
Regardless, the phone rang in the Residence and a Secret Service agent announced that we had a visitor, Buckman Tusk. “Send him on up!” I told him. Bucky and the Tusks were on the list of approved ‘whenever’ guests. To Marilyn, sitting next to me in her lounger, I said, “Bucky’s here. I wonder what he’s up to.” She simply gave me a curious look.
There was a knock on the door a moment later, and I stood and opened it. I could see one of the agents standing post, and Bucky was at the door, so I let him in. “Well, look what the cat dragged in! How you doing, Bucky?” Bucky was wearing riding leathers and carrying a helmet, so he must have ridden his bike down.
“Good, Uncle Carl, real good. How are you and Aunt Marilyn?”
“I’m doing fine. Come on in. You can ask Marilyn herself.” I pointed him towards the living room.
“Hi, Bucky come on in,” my wife called out. She waved at him from her chair.