Stochastic Man (7 page)

12

In the next few weeks we got down in earnest to the job of planning Paul Quinn’s ascent—and our own—to the White House. I no longer had to be coy about my desire, bordering on need, to make him President; by now everyone in the inner circle openly admitted to the same fervor I had found so embarrassing when I first felt it a year and a half earlier. We were all out of the closet now.

The process of creating Presidents hasn’t changed much since the middle of the nineteenth century, though the techniques are a bit different in these days of data nets, stochastic forecasts, and media-intensive ego saturation. The starting point, of course, is a strong candidate, preferably one with a power base in a densely populated state. Your man has to be plausibly presidential; he must look and sound like a President If that isn’t his natural style, he’ll have to be trained to create a sense of plausibility around himself. The best candidates have it naturally. McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, FDR, and Wilson all had that dramatic presidential look. So did Harding. No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there. Dewey, Al Smith, McGovern, and Humphrey didn’t have it, and they lost. Stevenson and Willkie did, but they were up against men who had more of it. John F. Kennedy didn’t conform to the 1960 ideal of what a President should look like—sage, paternal—but he had other things going for him, and by winning he altered the model to some degree, benefiting, among others, Paul Quinn, who was presidential plausible because he was Kennedyesque.
Sounding
like a President is important, too. The would-be candidate has to come across as firm and serious and vigorous, yet charitable and flexible, with a tone communicating Lincoln’s warmth and wisdom, Truman’s spunk, FDR’s serenity, JFK’s wit. Quinn could hold his own in that department.

The man who wants to be President must assemble a team—someone to raise money (Lombroso), someone to charm the media (Missakian), someone to analyze trends and suggest the most profitable policies (me), someone to put together a nationwide alliance of political chieftains (Ephrikian), someone to direct and coordinate strategy (Mardikian). The team then goes forth with the product, makes the proper connections in the worlds of politics, journalism, and finance, and establishes in the public’s mind the concept that this is the Right Man for the Job. By the time of the nominating convention enough delegates have to be rounded up, via open or covert pledges, to put the candidate over on the first ballot or at worst the third; if you can’t get him the nomination by then, alliances crumble and dark horses stalk the night. Once he’s nominated, you pick a running mate who is as much unlike the candidate in philosophy, looks, and geographical background as anyone can be who is still on speaking terms with him, and off you go to pound the esteemed opponent into the dust.

Early in April ‘99 we held our first formal strategy meeting in Deputy Mayor Mardikian’s office in the west wing of City Hall—Haig Mardikian, Bob Lombroso, George Missakian, Ara Ephrikian, and me. Quinn wasn’t there; Quinn was in Washington haggling with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for an increased appropriation for the city under the Emotional Stability Act. There was an electric crackle in the room that had nothing to do with the purifying system’s output of ozone. It was the crackle of power, real and potential. We had gathered to begin the business of shaping history.

The table was round, but I felt myself occupying a place at the center of the group. The four of them, ready far better versed in the ways of might and influence than I, were looking to me for direction, for the future was a mist and they could only guess at the riddles of days undawned and they believed I
saw,
I
knew.
I was not about to explain the difference between
seeing
and merely being good at guessing. I savored that sense of dominance. Power is addictive, oh, yes, at whatever level we may attain it. There I sat among the millionaires, two lawyers and a stockbroker and a data-net tycoon, three swarthy Armenians and a swarthy Spanish Jew, each of them as hungry as I to feel the resonant triumph of a successful presidential bid, each as greedy as I for a share of vicarious glory, each already carving empires for himself within the government-to-come, and they waited for me to tell them how to go about what was in literal fact the conquest of the United States of America.

Mardikian said, “Let’s begin with a reading, Lew. How do you rate Quinn’s actual chances for getting the nomination next year?”

I made the appropriate seerlike pause, I looked as though I were grasping for the stochastic totems, I gazed into the vasty reaches of space, staring at dancing dust motes for auguries, I cloaked myself in vatic pomposity, I did the whole wicked impressive act, and after a moment I replied solemnly, “For the nomination, maybe one chance in eight. For election, one chance in fifty.”

“Not so good.”

“No.”

“Not good at all,” said Lombroso.

Mardikian, dismayed, tugging at the tip of his fleshy imperial nose, said, “Are you telling us we ought to skip it altogether? Is that your evaluation?”

“For next year, yes. Forget the presidency thing.”

“We just quit?” Ephrikian said. “We just stick here in City Hall and drop the whole deal?”

“Wait,” Mardikian murmured to him. He faced me again. “What about running in ‘04, Lew?”

“Better. Much better.”

Ephrikian, a burly black-bearded man with a fashionably shaven scalp, looked impatient and bothered. He scowled and said, “The media is talking big right now about what Quinn has accomplished in his first year as mayor. I think this is the moment to grab for the next rung, Lew.”

“I agree,” I said amiably.

“But you tell us he’ll be beaten in 2000.”

“I say anybody the New Democrats put up will be beaten,” I replied. “Anyone. Quinn, Leydecker, Keats, Kane, Pownell, anybody. This is the moment for Quinn to grab, all right, but the right next rung isn’t necessarily the top one.”

Missakian, squat, precise, thin-lipped, the communications expert, the man of clear vision, said, “Can you be more specific, Lew?”

“Yes,” I said, and swung into it.

I set forth my not very chancy .prediction that whoever went up against President Mortonson in 2000—Leydecker, most likely—would get beaten. Incumbent Presidents in this country don’t lose elections unless their first term has been a disaster of Hooverian proportions, and Mortonson had done a nice clean dull unexceptionable sluggish job, the kind a lot of Americans like. Leydecker would mount a respectable challenge, but there were really no issues, and he would be defeated and might be defeated badly, even though he was of obvious presidential caliber. Best to stay out of Leydecker’s path, then, I argued. Give him a free run. Any attempt by Quinn to wrest the nomination from him next year would probably fail, anyway, and would certainly make Leydecker Quinn’s enemy, which wasn’t desirable. Let Leydecker have the accolade, let him go on to destroy himself in the election trying to beat the invincible Mortonson. We would wait to put Quinn up—still young, untarnished by defeat—in 2004, when the Constitution prohibited Mortonson from running again.

“So Quinn comes out big for Leydecker in 2000 and then goes to sit on his hands?” Ephrikian asked.

“More than that,” I said. I looked toward Bob Lombroso. He and I had already discussed strategy and come to an agreement, and now, hunching his powerful shoulders forward, sweeping the Armenian side of the table with an elegant heavy-lidded glance, Lombroso began to outline our plan.

Quinn would make an open bid for national prominence during the next few months, peaking in the early summer of ‘99 with a cross-country tour and major speeches in Memphis, Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco. With some solid attention-getting accomplishments in New York City behind him (enclave realignment, curriculum streamlining, deGottfriedizing of the police force, etc.), he would begin speaking out on larger issues like regional fusion-power interchange policy and reenactment of the repealed Privacy Laws of 1982 and—why not?—mandatory oil gellation. By autumn he would begin a direct attack on the Republicans, not so much Mortonson himself as selected cabinet members (especially Secretary of Energy Hospers, Secretary of Information Theiss, and Secretary of the Environment Perlman). Thus he would inch into contention, becoming a national figure, a rising young leader, a man to reckon with. People would start talking about his presidential possibilities, though the polls would rank him well behind Leydecker as a favorite for the nomination—we’d see to that—and he would never actually declare himself in the running. He’d let the media assume he preferred Leydecker to any of the other declared candidates, though he would be careful not to make any outright endorsement of Leydecker. At the New Democratic convention in San Francisco in 2000, once Leydecker had been nominated and had made the traditional free-choice speech declining to name his running mate, Quinn would launch a game and dramatic but ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Wee-presidential nomination. Why vice-presidential? Because the floor fight would give him major media exposure without opening him, as a presidential bid would, to accusations of premature ambition, and without angering the powerful Leydecker. Why unsuccessful? Because Leydecker was going to lose the election to Mortonson anyway, and there was nothing for Quinn to gain in going down to defeat with him as his running mate. Better to be turned aside at the convention—thereby establishing the image of a brilliant newcomer of great promise thwarted by political hacks—than to be repudiated at the polls. “Our model,” Lombroso concluded, “is John F. Kennedy, edged out for vice-president just this way in 1956, head of the ticket in 1960. Lew has run simulations showing the overlap of dynamics, one on one, and we can show you the profiles.”

“Great,” Ephrikian said. “When’s the assassination due—2003?”

“Let’s keep it serious,” said Lombroso gently.

“Okay,” said Ephrikian. “I’ll give you serious, then. What if Leydecker decides he’d like to run again in 2004?”

“He’ll be sixty-one years old then,” Lombroso replied, “and he’ll have a previous defeat on his record. Quinn will be forty-three and unbeaten. One man will be on the way down, the other obviously on the way up, and the party will be hungry for a winner after eight years out of power.”

There was a long silence.

“I like it,” Missakian announced finally.

I said, “What about you, Haig?”

Mardikian had not spoken for a while. Now he nodded. “Quinn’s not ready to take over the country in 2000. He will be in 2004.”

“And the country will be ready for Quinn,” said Missakian.

13

One thing about politics, the man said, is that it makes strange bedfellows. But for politics, Sundara and I surely would never have wandered into an ad hoc four-group that spring with Catalina Yarber, the Transit Creed proctor, and Lamont Friedman, the highly ionized young financial genius. But for Catalina Yarber, Sundara might not have opted for Transit But for Sundara’s conversion, she would very likely still be my wife. And so, and so, the threads of causation, everything leading back to the same point in time.

What happened is that as a member of Paul Quinn’s entourage I received two free tickets to the $500-a-plate Nicholas Roswell Day dinner that the New York State New Democratic Party holds every year in the middle of April. This is not only a memorial tribute to the assassinated governor but also, indeed primarily, a fund-raising affair and a showcase for the party’s current superstar. The main speaker this time, of course, was Quinn.

“It’s about time I went to one of your political dinners,” Sundara said.

“They’re pure formaldehyde.”

“Nevertheless.”

“You’ll hate it, love.”

“Are you going?” she asked.

“I have to.”

“Then I think I’ll use the other ticket. If I fall asleep, nudge me when the mayor gets up to talk. He turns me on.”

So on a mild rainy night she and I podded out to the Harbor Hilton, that great pyramid all agleam on its pliable pontoon platform half a kilometer off Manhattan’s tip, and foregathered with the cream of the eastern liberal establishment in the sparkling Summit Room, from which I had a view of—among other things—Sarkisian’s condo tower on the other side of the bay, where nearly four years earlier I had first met Paul Quinn. A good many alumni of that gaudy party would be at tonight’s dinner. Sundara and I drew seats at the same table as two of them, Friedman and Ms. Yarber.

During the preliminary session of bone-doping and cocktails Sundara drew more attention than any of the senators, governors, and mayors present, Quinn included. This was partly a matter of curiosity, since everybody in New York politics had heard about my exotic wife but few had met her, and partly because she was surely the most beautiful woman in the room. Sundara was neither surprised nor annoyed. She has been beautiful all her life, after all, and has had time to grow accustomed to the effects her looks evoke. Nor had she dressed like one who minds being stared at. She had chosen a sheer harem suit, dark and loose and flowing, that covered her body from toes to throat; beneath it she was bare and when she passed before a source of light she was devastating. She glowed like a radiant moth in the middle of the gigantic ballroom, supple and elegant somber and mysterious, highlights sparkling in her ebon hair, hints of breast and flank tantalizing the onlookers. Oh, she was having a glorious time! Quinn came over to greet us, and he and Sundara transformed a chaste kiss-and-hug into an elaborate pas de deux of sexual charisma that made some of our elder statesmen gasp and redden and loosen their collars. Even Quinn’s wife, Laraine, famous for her Gioconda smile, looked shaken a bit, though she has the most secure marriage of any politician I know. (Or was she merely amused by Quinn’s ardor? That opaque smirk!)