Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

“It’s good idea. You are clever priest.”

Free at last…

“But you should also be making donation. Poor orphans. They are so hungry.”

Frank Cohane had wanted an office in the West Wing. Bucky Trumble explained that not even he could arrange that. Under the law, campaign operatives could not occupy government buildings. “Under the law” was not a concept that particularly interested Frank Cohane, but Bucky mollified him with a White House pass so he could have the illusion of working in the White House. He also made sure that Frank got lots of “face time” with the president in the Oval. That would keep the bastard happy. That and an orgiastic night with Lisa in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was all they cared about, the big donors. They wanted to go back to their friends and say, “I screwed my brains out in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

In keeping with the deal that he had worked out with Frank, once Bucky had got him the finance chairman job, Frank handed over the tape of Bucky asking him to plant incriminating e-mails on Cass’s computer.

“How do I know this isn’t a copy?” Bucky said.

“You don’t.” Frank grinned.

There was media interest in Frank Cohane, in particular about him and his estranged daughter, who was working for another presidential candidate. Washington loves such polarities.

“Do you still regard her as morally repellent?” asked a reporter for the Post .

“I didn’t come to Washington to comment on my daughter,” Frank said. He now had his own team of media advisers. “I came to reelect President Peacham.”

“To help reelect President Peacham,” his media handler gently suggested to him after the interview.

“Right,” Frank said.

Frank had, amazingly, agreed to Lisa’s suggestion that he hire a personal anger management consultant. Frank was a smart man, smart enough to know that he could no longer indulge his temper. It’s one thing to be a billionaire and call reporters “cocksuckers,” another if you are the finance chairman for the reelection campaign of the president of the United States, with aspirations to become secretary of the Treasury. The triggering event was when one of the crew members on Expensive told a reporter how Frank stepped on someone’s hand while screaming obscenities at someone else on a cell phone.

So Frank was determined to be pleasant. Each morning, his first appointment was with the anger consultant, a small intense woman named Harriet. He would tell Harriet how he anticipated the world would disappoint him that day. She would listen, reaffirm his superiority over the rest of humanity, and then encourage him to have a good loud scream, cuss a blue streak-really dirty words-then finish off with some yoga and breathing exercises. Finally, she would give him his mantra for the day, a variation on “Don’t waste your energy getting mad. You’re better than the rest of them put together.” It worked, more or less. Frank hadn’t called anyone an “incompetent cocksucker” in over a week. He was still allowed to vent on staff.

He installed Lisa in a large redbrick Georgetown mansion that had belonged to someone who had become famous largely by initiating one of America’s more catastrophic wars. Since he had agreed to anger therapy, Lisa agreed to etiquette lessons. He hired a former head of State Department protocol to-so were his instructions-“sand off the rough edges and get her set up as a Washington hostess.” Lisa’s rйsumй was buffed up. “Tennis pro” became “tennis enthusiast.” She was “an avid art collector” and “active in philanthropy.” She was given her own charitable foundation-always a reliable social lubricant-which Frank funded with $30 million. Boyd, now a Yale (moolah, moolah) sophomore, was kept out of sight. Frank told him he would buy him a Maserati if he actually managed to graduate. Frank’s PR people had even managed to spin the Yale bribe story to his advantage. They funneled a fat cash donation to a foundation that gave out fatherhood initiative awards. The organization was more than happy to create a special “Stepfather of the Year” award for Frank, in recognition of his “devoted involvement in the life of his stepson.”

With the personal details all taken care of, Frank plunged into work. Within weeks, he had raised the eye-popping sum of $40 million for the Committee to Reelect President Peacham. He was not shy about suggesting to the big corporate contributors that he would be Treasury secretary in the next term but stopped short of saying outright, “I’m sure you want to stay in business over the next five years.”

Terry busied himself with coming up with “Boomsday”-themed podcasts and flash and pop-up Internet ads designed to put the fear of God into the under-thirties. Cass blogged away on CASSANDRA to rally the troops. She was finding this harder than she’d thought it would be. It was easier getting them to assault gated retirement communities and golf courses. Getting them excited about the political process… bo-ring .

She did online focus groups. She told them, “Okay, some of it may be boring and hard work, but if you want to get it done, you have to get involved.”

“Why can’t we just, you know, vote?”

A generation that had grown up with the Internet and text messaging was not inclined to go around banging on doors and handing out pamphlets and doing voter registration drives. They were, however, willing to blog.

And you could, Cass found, get their attention.

“What would you say if I told you that one-third to one-half of everything you earn over your lifetime will go to paying off debt incurred before you were born?”

“That totally sucks.”

She thought, Maybe we should change Randy’s slogan to “Jepperson-He Won’t Suck.”

One problem they did not have was fund-raising. Randy was happy to be the first president in U.S. history to pay for his own campaign out of his own pocket. This didn’t sit well with Cass.

“I think we at least ought to try to raise some money,” she said. “It’ll look better.”

“Au contraire,” Randy said. “Lots of my colleagues in the Senate bought their seats. I think it sends a good message: He can’t be bought. He already has all the money he needs.”

Cass had noticed that Randy had started referring to himself in the third person. One night, during a rare dinner alone at the Georgetown house, he began speaking as if he were being interviewed.

“Do you want more chicken, honey?” she said.

“The chicken was delicious. The peas were delicious. Everything was scrumptious, in fact. I remember as a child, we’d have peas with every meal. Proper nutrition was a factor. Balanced meals were a factor-”

“Randy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“You, dear. Why?”

“I got the impression that we were doing a live network feed.”

Randy looked around. “No, I don’t think so.”

It had been a long time since he’d been back to Frenchman’s Bluff, overlooking the Coosoomahatchie River. Gideon Payne was attended by several campaign aides and the crew of 60 Minutes . The producers had even found a 1955 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with red leather upholstery.

“Will you be sending the car off the cliff?” Gideon inquired. The answer, thankfully, was no.

“It is a bit eerie,” Gideon told the reporter who was doing the segment. “Most eerie.”

“You’re a sport to do this,” the reporter said.

“My pleasure.” Gideon smiled faintly. “Well, perhaps that’s not quite the right word.”

“Okay,” said a cameraman, “we’re rolling.”

“Mother was sitting right where you are now, in the passenger seat. We often came to this place on our Sunday drives. We’d stop right where we are now. On that day, I put it in park, just like…so. Set the parking brake, so. I left the motor running. We never stayed very long. Got out of the car…” Gideon opened the door and got out, reporter, cameraman, and sound technician following. “And walked over to this spot here. There used to be a bush. So you see, I had privacy. I was standing here, facing away from the car, taking care of what had to be taken care of, and that’s when I heard this dreadful sound.”