Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

A few weeks later, Eric came running into Grant’s office very excited.

“Did you hear the news about the State Auditor?”

“No. Is it good?” Grant asked.

“Oh yeah. Wait till you see this.” Eric was practically running to Tom’s office where there was a TV.

A small crowd had gathered around the TV. The local news was playing a grainy video of a police dash camera. It showed a drunken woman in a business suit doing a sobriety test. Then she shoves the cop, jumps in her car, and takes off — only to hit a little kid in a cross walk! Then the camera catches her screaming, “Do you know who I am! Don’t fuck with me, pig!” Finally, the police tackled her and then tried to give first aid to the kid, who was a little girl.

The room of WAB staff was silent. Stunned. No one could believe it.

“She’s done,” Tom finally said. “Call Menlow. We’ve got a campaign to run.” There was blood in the water. The WAB staff was charged up and running on adrenaline.

The Democrat State Auditor tried to resign the next day. This would give the Governor time to appoint another friendly person to make sure things kept getting covered up at the State Auditor’s Office. But it was right before the election so the Auditor’s name was already on the ballot. There was only one other name on the ballot: Rick Menlow.

In the next few days, WAB raised a ton of money for Menlow. It wasn’t too hard. WAB was the 900 pound gorilla of the “right wing” in Washington State. The media constantly replaying the drunken State Auditor screaming “Do you know who I am!” didn’t exactly hurt Menlow’s campaign. WAB polling showed Menlow would win so there wasn’t much drama for election night. It would be a rare celebration instead.

The WAB staff, including Grant, went to the Republican election night “victory party.” Grant had gone to one a few years earlier but quit going. They were like funerals. There never were any “victories” on election night.

The first returns came in a little after 8:00 p.m. Menlow was winning but it was surprisingly close, though, 52% to 48%. A drunken lunatic running over a child still got almost enough votes to win with a “D” after her name. Grant hoped that those voters simply didn’t know what had happened. But, with the constant repeating of the video of her on TV, most of the people in the state must have seen her running over that little girl. That meant a sizable portion were still voting for the State Auditor because she had that all-important “D” after her name on the ballot.

WAB staff were invited to Menlow’s hotel room at the party. At this joyous moment, they were all silent. They still couldn’t believe that a Republican—and one who promised reforms, no less— might actually win an election in ultra-leftist Washington State.

Then Menlow’s cell phone rang. Everyone knew what that meant. The concession call from the other side.

Menlow was very polite and respectful. When he hung up he wasn’t smiling. He looked scared.

“Well, that was the concession call.” Menlow said, still very disturbed. “Oh crap. We won. Now what do we do?”

Menlow’s campaign manager, an attractive and savvy-looking young woman named Jeanie Thompson, blurted out, “Dunno. Maybe a transition team?” Everyone in the room laughed. No one had any plan whatsoever for actually winning. This was the first time it had actually crossed their minds.

Menlow pointed at Tom and said, “We need to talk.” It was pretty obvious that the people in the hotel room would be the transition team. It was an electric feeling. Finally! The good guys had won. We can do some good things, Grant thought. Finally. It was their turn to fix things.

Not surprisingly, WAB essentially ran the transition. There was no one in the Washington State Republican Party who remembered how to do one since they hadn’t won any statewide elections in over thirty years.

So WAB just made it up as they went along. Grant, Ben, and Brian were the main WAB people working the transition team. They were Olympia insiders and knew all the things necessary to come into a state agency and transform it.

The ring leader of the old State Auditor’s bureaucrats was Nancy Ringman. She was the Chief of Staff. She was a hateful little troll.

Like most of the other people running Washington State (and the rest of the country at that point), she was a baby boomer. Similar to so many others of her generation, she grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, was raised by “squares,” rebelled against all that was official American squaredom in the late 1960s and early 1970s, went to college and learned about how great socialism was, got various jobs, and excelled in her career. She had to prove “woman power” to everyone and do it all: career and kids, although the career was more important. She had to be tougher than any man because the “old boys” would try to trip her up.

The problem with that mantra was that there were fewer and fewer “old boys.” Most of the work force at the management level, especially in government, were either female baby boomers like Nancy Ringman or feminized male baby boomers who felt guilty about being male and didn’t want to look “macho.”

Nancy Ringman revered government. It could solve all problems. In her mind, the only bad thing in the world was people who got in the government’s way. Why did those people oppose all the great things government could do? They were greedy, that’s why. Greedy people wanted to keep their ill-gotten gains.

Nancy was the typical Olympia bureaucrat, and she lived in the Cedars, along with Grant. She knew that Grant worked at WAB, which meant that he was one of those evil people.

Grant didn’t really recognize Nancy at first. He didn’t recognize most of the people who lived in his neighborhood. One day, when Grant was over at the State Auditor’s Office meeting with the new Auditor-elect, Nancy saw him. To say that she hated Grant was an understatement. But her job was on the line so she thought she’d try the pleasantries that had gotten her this far.

“Oh, hi, Grant,” she said. “I’m Nancy Ringman. Your adorable children come over to trick or treat. I’m on Whitman Street. I understand you’re helping Auditor-elect Menlow on, ” she couldn’t bear to say “transition.” “Helping him on some matters,” she finally said. Nancy was trying to smile, but it was coming off as gritting her teeth.

Grant didn’t hate Nancy, although he would be entitled to. He just thought of her as typical of everything that’s wrong. She and the rest of the government-worshipping baby boomers needed to make room for a new generation of people. The new generation who had borne the brunt of all this wonderful government and knew what was wrong with the utopia the baby boomers had created— and who weren’t so corrupted by the system that they could actually fix things. All Grant could think when he was talking to her was, “Get out of the way.” But he didn’t say it out loud.

Obviously the old Chief of Staff would need to go. That was a top-level change that Menlow himself needed to do. Grant, Ben, and Brian would do all the rest of the firings. At first, Grant felt bad about firing people, although most were crappy at their jobs and many of them were lazy. They all, to one degree or another, had covered up bad things. But it was still hard to fire someone.

They all had jobs waiting for them in some other state agency. The government knew how to take care of its own. The State Auditor’s Office hacks would come out of this unscathed. They didn’t see it that way, though. Even though they had guaranteed jobs— most were actually making more at their new agencies run by fellow Democrats —they still felt entitled to do the job they wanted to do. They actually felt it was entirely their choice which job they had. And, in the past, they had always got what they wanted. The old Auditor’s staff viewed the voters as idiots who were meddling in their careers.