The Speechwriter (6 page)

I didn't respond to hostile letters; the governor said he didn't want to get “tangled up” with people who hated him enough to write and mail letters explaining what a moron he was for vetoing a bill or what a villain he was for failing to nominate a certain highly capable public servant. Still, it was difficult not to read them. You got a sense of how those called “likely voters” think about political questions—not deeply, or much at all, but intensely and without distinctions. Most letter writers seemed to have ingested one or two half-understood facts that accorded with their suspicions and then worked a few inane jibes into paragraph form. They believed their own attitudes, and those of the public officials they admired, to be inerrant, and they felt free to interpret contrary views or remarks in the worst possible light. They stressed their points by putting them in dismissive, vaguely archaic phrasing. For some reason they often
described the governor as “our esteemed governor”: “Our esteemed governor thinks the way to help the unemployed is to do nothing.” Letter writers liked to use the lawyerly “said” to indicate sarcastic disapproval: “That was before said governor got himself elected.” Common expressions were often embellished by the word “proverbial”: “The governor finds himself between a rock and the proverbial hard place.” The phrases “need I add” and “each and every” were favorites: “Need I add that our esteemed governor has vetoed each and every bill to raise the cigarette tax?” And “so much for”: “The governor says he's concerned for the disadvantaged. Yet he vetoed a bill that would have extended Medicaid to the children of low income families. So much for his credibility.”

Writing surrogate letters wasn't quite so easily justified; there was something slightly but definitely dishonest about it. To get one placed, you had to sound like the real thing, but not so much that you discredited your own position or insulted the intelligence of the supporter whose name you were hoping to attach to it. You had to start the letter off with some sassy stock phrase or rhetorical question: “Representative So-and-so just doesn't get it” or “Which constitution is Senator So-and-so reading?” Then you'd make your case without sounding like you knew too much about the topic. That's where surrogate letters sometimes went wrong. They would refer to specific revenue numbers or to the names of subcommittees or explain the difference between house and senate versions of bills. Average people didn't know these things, and if a surrogate letter used
them, it sounded like what it was, and editors wouldn't run them.

I spent a day writing these wretched things. It wasn't worth it unless you produced ten or fifteen; newspapers likely wouldn't print a letter taking a certain view if they got only one, but if they got a handful they'd feel bound to run one or two. It was a mind-numbing exercise: each one had to sound clumsy but not stupid; each had to approach the question from a different angle; and none could use the same vocabulary. We sent them out to the ostensible authors, and over the next two weeks or so I would see my little creations pop up in a variety of newspapers. Sometimes a few words had been changed by the surrogates, but by and large they slapped their names on the letters and forwarded them to their hometown newspapers. I felt the whole exercise was pointless, but perhaps the letters did contribute in a small way to the sense that Knotts's allegations had been grossly unfair and that the governor had acted properly. Had he? I thought so at the time, but enough time has passed that I can admit I don't know. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

The editorialists, momentarily exercised about the NGA scandal, soon forgot about it. At one point the opposition party was said to be preparing a hard-hitting advertisement excoriating the governor for improper use of state money, but it never happened. Why? Not because some independent body rendered a decision and settled the matter in the governor's favor or because the governor's public explanations
were persuasive, but because it wasn't titillating enough to expand into a real scandal. I had done my little part to ensure that it blew over. I'm glad I did, really. Anything said to be an outrage by the egregious buffoon Jake Knotts deserves a full pardon. But it bothered me a little that I had done my part simply because it was my job.

6

THE ART OF SAYING NO

T
he governor could sense that most of us were just bureaucrats: we weren't deeply or emotionally invested in the administration's successes or in the governor's political ambitions, but in our income and career and families; we didn't care much how history would treat him. So it was easy to put off assignments or to do them without great attention to detail. His leadership style, if that's what it was, was to counteract this tendency with erratic bouts of rage. Without notice, he would storm into the office and walk from room to room, a stack of papers in one hand, like notes for a lecture, berating the staff for laziness and incompetence. “Again,” he would say, “I can't be the guy pointing this stuff out. This is your job, and your
job, and your job”—his finger pointing at various bystanders—“not mine.”

The one thing consistently neglected by the staff was, as the governor called it, the big board. This was a massive dry-erase board in the conference room adjoining the governor's office; its purpose was to give him an overarching view of the administration's aims and strategies. The board was meant to display a list of goals, various dates by which these goals were to be accomplished, the names of legislators who were promoting this or that initiative, and many other items that were vital to know one minute and irrelevant the next. He wanted the big board updated constantly; it should always look completely different from what it had looked like a week before. Nat, who had excellent administrative skills, was in charge of it.

There were two problems with the big board. The first was that it was useless. There was such a vast array and quantity of items needing to be written on it that a properly updated big board would have required its own full-time staffer. The other problem was that the governor cared about it only infrequently. He wouldn't bother looking at it or asking about it for months, then suddenly it was all he could think about. He would discern immediately that it hadn't been altered in a month or two and collapse into a fit of angry inarticulacy. “How am I supposed to know where I am?” he'd say, or “I'm on the road and I'm in a black hole, and I come back here and I look at the big board and it hasn't been updated and I'm still in a black hole.”

Sometimes Nat would spend an hour or so on the big
board when the governor was out of the office. I would sit in the conference room to keep him company; he had the look of a great artist creating a masterwork. He never seemed to have the right kinds of markers—some were the permanent kind, which wouldn't erase properly; others were out of ink—with the result that the whole thing looked like a great multicolored palimpsest. There were all sorts of categories on the big board: “the week ahead,” “the long view,” “don't let these die,” and so on. There was one category called “the next 90 days,” and under it I once noticed two items I didn't recognize. The first was “Real ID” and the second was “Shawn's Law.”

Shawn had been killed in 2003, and now his parents wanted a law. Some people joked that when members of the General Assembly wanted badly to pass a bill, they would name it after a dead child. This wasn't fair, since some of these “dead kid laws,” as they were cruelly called, were forced on legislators rather than conceived by them. Bereaved parents would ask their representative to introduce the bill—intended to prevent the means of death visited on their own unfortunate child—and since nobody wanted to be on record opposing the bill, it would make its way through committee, to first reading, back to committee, to second and third readings, to the other chamber, through first, second, and third readings, to conference, usually back to both chambers, then ratified, then to the governor, in barely any time at all. There were all sorts of dead
kid laws: Rebecca's Law and Erica's Law and I don't know how many others. They were called laws even before they passed, so confident was everyone that they would.

Shawn's Law had made its way through committee to the senate floor, then to the house, then to conference in a fortnight. Shawn was a young teenager who'd been killed while driving an ATV, an all-terrain vehicle; he was the latest in a series of four or five boys who'd been killed in similar ways, and several of the state's newspapers and television news channels had run lengthy stories on this trend, as it seemed to be. Shawn's mother and father wanted a law banning kids under sixteen, I think it was, from driving ATVs while unattended by an adult.

The governor had vetoed the bill the year before and, despite some changes in this year's version, would veto it again. That decision had already been made at a “rat meeting,” a ratification meeting. These were meetings of the policy staff with the governor in which staff would explain the substance of ratified bills to the governor and offer their opinions on whether he should sign the bill, veto it, or allow it to pass into law without his signature. After this, unless the right decision was plain to everyone, another member of the policy staff would take the contrary position, and the governor would listen and moderate. As a member of the press office, I wasn't required to attend rat meetings, but I liked to sit in on them if I could. It gave me a sense of what was happening, and I liked the feeling of importance it gave me to argue in favor of or against a bill that might become law for four and a half million people.

All rat meetings went more or less the same way. The first staffer would explain his or her bill and the reasons for vetoing it or not. Having been immersed in the legislation, the staffer would relay the bill's contents in a wonkish way; the governor would snap, “Come on, in English!”; and the staffer would explain it in a more decipherable way. Or, if the staffer proved incapable of explaining it to the governor's satisfaction, Stewart would mediate.

Diane, the health policy advisor, might go first. “H-three-nine-one-nine requires that out-of-state dental labs employ a dental technician registered in-state if that lab performs tech work prescribed by a dentist licensed in this state.”

“Wwww,” the governor would respond. “Wwwhat does that mean? Come on, guys, how many times do I have to say this? In English.”

“Governor,” Stewart would interject, “a lot of dentists prescribe tech work to out-of-state labs. This bill would mandate that those labs, wherever they are, employ at least one technician who's registered here, in-state.”

“Okay. So, if a dentist prescribes tech work, the lab or whatever has to employ somebody registered here?”

“That's correct, sir.”

Governor: “Veto. That's stupid.”

Stewart: “You're clear on what the bill does?”

Governor: “Seems pretty clear. Why does some lab have to employ somebody from in-state to be valid here? That's stupid. Are there any arguments for it?”

Maybe somebody would offer an argument. Sometimes a staffer would mention that some lawmaker was really keen on
getting a bill through or some other practical matter of expedience. It didn't matter who the lawmaker was or how powerful he or she was; the boss's response would be some variation on a repetitive theme: “Again, in case you haven't noticed, I don't care whether some senator likes a bill or not. This is just another stupid mandate pushed by lobbyists for their own mercenary reasons. The technicians want more business, so they hired a lobbyist to get a bill passed that forces dentists to use them instead of someone in another state. That's stupid. Veto. Next.”

“Uh-hut!” That'd be Diane. Rat meetings were always punctuated by her laugh: “Uh-hut!”

Another staffer: “Next bill is S-three-four-eight. Shawn's Law. I think we're all pretty familiar with this one. Some changes from last year's bill, but basically the same idea. It would make it illegal for children under age sixteen to operate ATVs without supervision, and it would require fifteen-year-olds to pass a safety course before using them with adult accompaniment. As I say, this year's version isn't that different. My main concern here is enforcement. We'd be passing a law that—.”

“Exactly.” The governor grasped the point of this one without much explanation. “What are you gonna do, post DNR agents all over the state and tell 'em to watch out for kids riding ATVs? This is a joke.”

“Uh-hut!”

Staffer: “There's also the issue of this safety course. It's not clear how—.”

“Who's going to run that? And what are you going to
do to a kid who rides one on private property? Stop him and make him take out his safety course certificate? This is a joke. Veto.”

“Uh-hut!”

The governor had five calendar days, excluding Sundays, to sign or veto a bill. At some point during those five days, particularly if the bill was a big deal, we might have what Nat called a fire drill. Fire drills happened when a hard deadline approached—a press conference or, as in this case, a ratification deadline—and suddenly the governor's attention became completely fixed on a single task. Maybe he and his family were going out of town that weekend and it had to be done before he left. Suddenly he'd want to discuss every conceivable argument and think through every piece of relevant data. He'd scribble on a notepad and shout questions at whoever was standing nearby. The questions usually had to do with some past veto or policy position, and generally only Stewart knew the answers.

“There was a bill in like 2004, something to do with eyesores on private property. Did we sign it or veto it?”

“I don't know” would be the answer.

“Get Stewart in here.”

That person would run off to find Stewart. Then the governor would shout to the scheduling office, just outside his door, “Hey, Lewis!” Lewis would come in and the governor would ask where Stewart was. Lewis, who hadn't heard him
ask for Stewart the first time, would run off to find him. This would happen four or five times in quick succession. If Stewart was at his desk or outside smoking, it wasn't a problem. If he was elsewhere, we'd see a train of young people walking through the governor's wing of the State House and in the men's room off the rotunda asking if anybody had seen Stewart. Finally Stewart would be rounded up, and he'd answer the governor's question. Then the governor would think of another question, and this one Stewart couldn't answer with the kind of precision the governor wanted (some statistic maybe) and would call into the office a policy advisor, who would be even less capable of answering it but would vow to find the answer in minutes. This would happen two or three times, and the entire office would buzz with people trying to find out how many people under seventeen had died in ATV accidents during the previous decade or how many field agents the Department of Natural Resources employed or how many states required young people to undergo ATV safety courses. And when it was over and the governor was happy with the product, one or two youngsters would still be walking around asking where Stewart was.

After the veto became known some time the next day, Shawn's parents talked to reporters outside the State House. The mother was crying.

Within a half hour the senate had reconvened and the veto had come up for a vote. A few of us went up to the gallery to watch. Almost as soon as debate started, Jakie Knotts dislodged himself from his chair and asked the president if the senator would yield.

“Senator yields,” the president said.

Knotts crammed the microphone into his mouth and said, “I started out in law enforcement. I was a police offissah.” He seemed to burp some of his words, as if he'd just finished a plate of barbecue and coleslaw. “And I know what it's like to go tell a parent they chil' died. I'ma tell you, it ain't fun. You tell somebody they chil' died, you seen what it does to 'em. The governor don't know what it's like to tell a parent they chil' died. I do.”

The legislative staff, Jeane especially, were in disbelief. Knotts had voted to sustain the same veto the year before, and he had been heard in several private settings to pan the bill as more “feel-good legislation.” His county was notoriously full of yokels, but it was adjacent to the capital city, which meant they were informed yokels, if I can put it that way, and they'd know it if their senator voted to put a lot of irksome restrictions on the use of their hunting vehicles. He'd been counted on as a sustain vote, but his hatred of the governor had evidently been too great and he was arguing to override.

“Thass the whole problem with this governor. He don't care. He don't care 'bout the people. He don't give a rat's—a rat's—behind about the people.”

Debate stretched into the afternoon. The senate was about equally divided on the bill, but its supporters needed thirty-two votes to override—two thirds—and they were nowhere near that. They took turns denouncing the governor, and those who opposed the bill seemed reluctant to defend him. At last, when the clerk tabulated the final vote at a few minutes before midnight, the ayes (override) were 25, the nays
(sustain) 17. The bill was dead. For the second time, the governor had successfully blocked a dead kid law, and we all prepared for the outrage-fueled press conferences and the weepy news stories and the accusatory op-eds.

A few nights later, one of the cable news channels ran a four- or five-minute segment on the governor. The Shawn's Law veto was part of the story. The reporter said, if I remember, “And he isn't afraid of saying No.”