TERRIFIED eyes tried to meet through the cigar smoke, and Bill Edwards’ colleagues startled when he stood his entire bulk, thumped the table, and bellowed, “Somebody… find me that damn Bolivian whore!” Myron Kowalski, of course, was snickering since, in their younger days, he’d delivered on many similar requests from Bill.
Bill had done all he could tonight, so he sat back down and puffed on his cigar, devastated, though the others in the room wouldn’t be able to tell it from his rock-hard expression.
Bill was thinking fast. But as quick as he was, his mind kept taking him back to two years ago, when he had the vision to identify Isabel, from among the hundreds, as the best candidate. And how he went after her, chasing her, persuading her, cajoling her, using whatever influence he had to win her over. He’d watched her in action before that, and had liked what he’d seen. To him, she was the one way out in front, and it didn’t matter a squib to this ancient conservative that she was female, Hispanic, Catholic, childless, rich, had a weird scar, or any of the other negative qualifications he could imagine being drummed up against her. It was Bill who, once he got her interested, used his clout and stature to dismiss all the party’s teeth-sucking and hand-wringing—some of which, undoubtedly, was a smokescreen for racism and sexism. In fact, he boldly told his Republican National Committee, with Isabel—he had never been a Sarah Palin fan—the time had clearly come for a female president, let alone a Hispanic, and that he personally wanted the Republicans to have that first honour.
What were they to do now? The ExCom met around Bill’s table till 3 AM, though Kowalski and other non-ExCom attendees had been dismissed at midnight. Bill, as chairman of the RNC, knew that the party rules bestowed enormous powers on ExCom, but filling a vacancy in the candidacy for president wasn’t one of them. Under Rule 8, that had to go to the full RNC in five long days time, the shortest period of notice he could give.
For a brief moment, Bill contemplated substituting Ed as the candidate; the war hero was almost as well-known as his wife and, if Ed won, she’d still be in the White House. But even Bill knew that was an impossibility.
The debate about Isabel’s running mate, Hank Clemens, raged. Only that day’s Washington Post had them cringing over its accuracy: “Henry Samuel Langhorne Clemens III has as much grip on the major political issues as on a wet bar of soap.” The feature on Hank was excruciating, detailing that while the Clemens family fortune was founded on hogs and river boats, he had spent his pre-public life making a hash of managing it. Hank was the classic butt of the old joke, “How can you make a small fortune…? First, you give Hank Clemens a big one.”
Until Bill had pushed him forward as Isabel’s running mate, Hank had enjoyed a richly deserved obscurity, apart from a stint as deputy director of Homeland Security, where the best that could be said was that nothing had happened on his watch. Even the Republican hard-core was underwhelmed, with the Weekly Standard, their bible, painting Clemens as “a shocker with no awe, a man whose very bright future lies behind him. His entire manner is a drawl, having lived his life like a shoe stretching out a wad of gum stuck to the sole.”
But Bill had backed him, as a sop to appease the law-and-order crowd who saw Isabel as too soft. He didn’t expect Hank would actually have to step forward, but so be it.
So, pressed hard by Bill, the ExCom decided four things that night: to convene an urgent meeting of the RNC in five days; to recommend that Hank take Isabel’s spot; to recommend that Perry Patein, a Wisconsin congressman, become Hank’s running mate; and to press Isabel Diaz to stay on the stumps and keep campaigning, despite her disqualification, using her charisma and the nation’s sympathy to back up the new team.