Now somebody had dropped it in my lap. I needed this like I needed more holes in the head. After a second, I answered, “Well, I think it is the right of the citizens of Kansas to teach their children the way they see fit. If that means they want to stop teaching science and start teaching the Bible, then I suppose that is okay. On the other hand, it is also the right of every accreditation board in Kansas to yank the accreditation of any school that teaches creationism, and it is also the right of every college around the country to refuse to admit students who haven’t been properly taught science.”
That set a fox in the hen house! Punish children for the mistakes of their parents? How dare I suggest such an inhumane thing! More than a few op-ed pieces agreed with me, but not all. A number of newspapers, mostly from rural areas, railed about how Washington was taking over local education, and how much better children would be learning the values of their parents and communities, and how education was historically a state and local matter, and how I had overstepped my bounds by weighing in on the subject. I tried to stay out of it, since I was figuring the matter would eventually blow over. Sooner or later the fine citizens of Kansas would come to their senses and toss out the religious right.
Will and Frank came to me and asked me if I wanted to speak on this in some public forum. I looked aghast at this, and answered, “Not on your life! You want me tarred and feathered!?”
Will replied, “There are a lot of religious groups that want to ask your feelings on things.”
“And that is exactly why I don’t want to answer them! Ever heard that a little religion goes a long, long way? Will, we do not want to fight this fight.”
“How so, Mister President?” asked Frank.
“Because religion makes no sense. You can’t mix religion with science and math. The religious folks want me to be a true believer, and I’m not all that true. If I say that evolution is correct, then I am telling them that the Bible is wrong. There are huge numbers of people who believe that Jesus personally wrote the Bible in 17th Century English. Well, he didn’t, and you know it. It’s entirely possible the man couldn’t even read and write, and if he did, it would have been in Aramaic! Do you think I actually want to get into this on national television?”
“So, how do you reconcile the facts?” he asked. “I’m just curious, is all.”
I smiled at that. “The same way most of us do, by picking and choosing and ignoring what I don’t understand. Am I a Christian? Yes, but not one who’s all that fired up. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and I’ve been in a foxhole, and that is true. Us scientific types believe in the Big Bang which started everything. Great, but somebody had to light the fuse, right? Let’s leave it at that.”
I refused to get dragged any further into this. The religious right did not have a friend in me, and they knew it. They had learned that very early on in my first term, when I refused to put into law any restrictions on stem cell research. George had planned a ban on research, and I shitcanned that, just about the same time I cleaned out the Faith Based Initiatives group. Likewise I had studiously stayed out of the Terry Schiavo case, refusing to allow the Justice Department into that mess, and counseling Jeb Bush to leave it alone. The same was true with my stance on gay rights. I was the only Republican to have voted against the Defense of Marriage Act when it passed in 1996. It wasn’t so much a matter of gay rights (I wasn’t ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, I was ‘Don’t ask, don’t care.’) as the fact that the law was unconstitutional on its face. These were fights I was never going to win.
Meanwhile, John began ramping up his campaign, and began flying out to Iowa and New Hampshire on a regular basis. I advised him to feel relatively free to publicly disassociate himself from some of my positions, though I was sure that was going to bite the both of us in the ass. For instance, I had managed to avoid supporting ethanol for fuel throughout the last campaign, since I didn’t have to campaign in Iowa for the primary. Personally, I thought that using corn for fuel instead of for food was moronic! John was not going to have that luxury. He was going to need to campaign, and in Iowa, and somebody was going to ask him.
He wasn’t the only one running, of course. Oh, no question, he was the front runner, and the strong favorite, but there were a bunch of others. Whatever unanimity the party had was breaking down. Mike Huckabee was the former governor of Arkansas (a job Bill Clinton once held) and was the vanguard of the Religious Right. Ron Paul, a Congressman from Texas, was pushing his Libertarian agenda, and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was pushing his business credentials. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, was riding his leadership during 9-11 in the hopes of moving into the big leagues. There were others, too, without a hope in hell, but looking for support. Nobody had officially announced they were in the running, but everybody was forming exploratory committees dedicated to exploring for money and support among the local party faithful.
The standard plan would be to explore all through 2006 before making an official announcement sometime around the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007. After that, they would be officially campaigning. The primaries would start in January of 2008, run for about three or four months, and be tied up long before the conventions.
Right now, everybody was running around New Hampshire and Iowa, trying to line up precinct captains and local supporters, and giving speeches and going door to door. No way would I ever have gone through with that! Some of these guys were practically living in these states. The theory was that they only had a little money, so they would concentrate in the early primary states. If they could do well, they could use that to force open donor’s wallets and get enough money to bombard the next few states, and so forth. These were all long shot candidates, but it was a definite possibility, which was why they did it.
On the Democratic side, the odds-on favorite was Hillary Clinton, who had separated herself politically from her worthless philandering husband, and was now the junior senator from New York. After that, it was just a pack of wannabes, led by John Edwards, the V.P. nominee from last time, the guy who had ridden my ass about my bastard son. The dark horse candidate (and what a pun that was!) was Barack Obama, who had given such an electrifying speech at their last convention, and was the junior senator from Illinois. There was a very dangerous dynamic going on. Women loved Hillary, and most women voted Democratic. Blacks loved Obama, the first really serious black candidate this country had ever seen who could actually win white votes. Either one might win their nomination and face off against John McCain.
When this happened on my first trip, the country had been on a seven year binge of overspending and a real estate bubble, all of which broke the economy in the late summer of 2008. Until that point, McCain was winning. After that, he lost. Additionally, he had the albatross of a very unpopular President around his neck. I was nowhere near as unpopular as George would have been by now. McCain had an excellent chance at beating either Clinton or Obama, unless the wheels came off by 2008. It was my job to see that didn’t happen.
It didn’t always work out so easily. In early 2006, Harry Reid decided to poke a finger in my eye, because he was getting heat from Governor Blanco in Louisiana. He decided to put a hold on any further appointments I wanted to make. He had been making himself a nuisance for the last year, since the Democrats took power in the Senate, and was starting to feel like he was in charge. My appointments last year had taken longer to confirm, with a lot of hullaballoo at times, and several Federal judgeships were still sitting vacant. Now he informed us that nothing would get approved until hearings were held on the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina. He wanted Michael Brown’s head on a platter, as a sop to Blanco.