Because at the end of the day, Cunningham was right, and David knew it. TV newsmen tried so hard to appear objective when the truth was, they were anything but. CNN, ABC, CBS, they sold the news like groceries in a supermarket, something for everyone. But people didn’t want just information. They wanted to know what it meant. They wanted perspective. They needed something to react against. I agree or I don’t agree. And if a viewer didn’t agree more than half of the time, was David’s philosophy, they turned the channel.
David’s idea was to turn the news into a club of the like-minded. The first adopters would be the ones who’d been preaching his philosophy for years. And right behind them would be the people who had been searching their whole lives for someone to say out loud what they’d always felt in their hearts. And once you had those two groups, the curious and the undecided would follow in droves.
This deceptively simple reconfiguration of the business model turned out to bring a sea change to the industry. But for David, it was simply a way to relieve the stress of waiting. Because what is the news business, really, except the work of hypochondriacs? Anxious men and women who inflate and investigate every tic and cough, hoping that this time it might be the big one. Wait and worry. Well, David had no interest in waiting, and he had never been one to worry.
He grew up in Michigan, the son of an autoworker at a GM plant, David Bateman Sr., who never took a sick day, never skipped a shift. David’s dad once counted the cars he’d built over the thirty-four years he worked the rear suspension line. The number he came up with was 94,610. To him that was proof of a life well lived. You got paid to do a job and you did it. David Sr. never had more than a high school diploma. He treated everyone he met with respect, even the Harvard management types who toured the plant every few months, sluicing down from the curved driveways of Dearborn to slap the back of the common man.
David was an only child, the first in his family to go to college. But in an act of allegiance to his father, he declined the invitation to go to Harvard (full scholarship) in order to attend the University of Michigan. It was there that he discovered a love for politics. Ronald Reagan was in the White House that year, and David saw something in his folksy manner and steely gaze that inspired him. David ran for class president his senior year and lost. He had neither a politician’s face nor charm, but he had ideas, strategy. He saw the moves like billboards in the far distance, heard the messages in his head. He knew how to win. He just couldn’t do it himself. It was then that David Bateman realized that if he wanted a career in politics, it would have to be behind the scenes.
Twenty years and thirty-eight state and national elections later, David Bateman had earned a reputation as a kingmaker. He had turned his love of the game into a highly profitable consulting business whose clients included a cable news network that had hired David to help them revamp their election coverage.
It was this combination of items on his résumé that led, one day in March 2002, to the birth of a movement.
Chapter 7
David woke before dawn. It was programmed into him now after twenty years on the campaign trail. Marty always said, You snooze you lose, and it was true. Campaigns weren’t beauty contests. They were about endurance, the long, ugly blood sport of gathering votes. Rarely was there a first-round knockout. It was usually about who was still standing in the fifteenth, shrugging body blows from rubbery legs. It’s what separated the something from the something else, David liked to say. And so he learned to go without sleep. Four hours a night was all he required now. In a pinch he could get by with twenty minutes every eight hours.
In his bedroom, the wall-size windows across from the bed framed the first glow of sunlight. He lay on his back, looking out, as downstairs the coffee was making itself. Outside he could see the towers of the Roosevelt Island tramway. Their bedroom—his and Maggie’s—faced the East River. Glass as thick as an unabridged copy of War and Peace blocked the endless roar of the FDR Drive. It was bulletproof, along with all the other windows in the town house. The billionaire had paid for the installation after 9/11.
“Can’t afford to lose you to some jihadi cabdriver with a shoulder rocket,” he told David.
Today was Friday, August 21. Maggie and the kids were out at the Vineyard, had been all month, leaving David to pad the marble bathroom floors alone. Downstairs he could hear the housekeeper making breakfast. After a shower, he stopped at the kids’ rooms, as he did every morning, and stared at their perfectly made beds. The decor in Rachel’s room combined scientific gadgetry and horse worship. JJ’s was all about cars. Like all children, they tended toward chaos, a juvenile disorder the house staff erased systematically, often in real time. Now, staring at the sterile, vacuumed order, David found himself wanting to mess things up, to make his son’s room look more like a kid’s and less like a museum of childhood. So he went over to a toy bin and kicked it over with his foot.
There, he thought. That’s better.