He should have won the primary. Greyhill was the first one to label Myers “the Ice Queen” for the pain and suffering her budget freeze proposal would cause.
Greyhill had run against the Democrats in the primary while Myers ran against Congress. Ironically, Greyhill counted many liberal Democrat congressmen as his closest friends and colleagues, but he loathed Myers, never more so than now.
For the last several weeks Greyhill had been completely cut out of Myers’s inner circle and banished to the hinterland of international PR junkets, dignitaries’ funerals, and military base closings to get him away from her. He knew it was because she was hiding something from him. But what?
The banishment had sucked all of the juice out of him. He felt as dry and angry as old kindling. The secrecy of tonight’s speech fueled an irrational rage in him. Greyhill was determined to find a way to run Myers out of office before her term was up.
Senator Diele was forced to wait like the ordinary mortals to find out what Myers had in mind. He feigned a lack of interest to friends and colleagues during the day of the announcement, but when 10:59 p.m. rolled around, his keister was firmly planted on the leather sofa in his luxury suite at the Watergate Hotel, eyes fixed to his big-screen television.
Diele had been desperate to sway her to his way of thinking. He was a formidable ally and an unrelenting opponent. Like all congressmen, his reelection prospects hinged on what he could bring back home to his state, and like a dutiful milkman, he had been delivering the goods for over thirty years.
As any freshman political science major knew, the only way that every congressman could bring home the bacon was to be sure there were enough pigs at the trough to be slaughtered. Every Washington politician—liberal or conservative, urban or rural, Egyptian-American female or eighth-generation WASP—had the same goal: get reelected by giving their constituents whatever they wanted. Period. The cruel genius of the crushing national debt was that it was, in reality, the largest election campaign slush fund the world had ever seen. All of that borrowed money had one singular purpose: to keep incumbents in office. Every politician paid lip service to the crippling effect the escalating debt would have on the future generations who would be the ones forced to pay it all back. But the brutal fact was that most incumbent politicians couldn’t care less about future generations because future generations couldn’t vote.
Congressional constituents were nearly as corrupt as their representatives. All of the voter hand-wringing about the deficit faded once they were confronted with the possibility that their own fat subsidy checks, cushy government jobs, generous federal contracts, or arcane university research grants could all go away if the deficit was reduced by a single penny. Spend less and somebody got less, and that made voters mad, and mad voters scared the hell out of politicians.
Diele was happy to navigate those tricky waters for Myers, but for a price, of course. His state was disproportionately more dependent upon government spending—particularly defense spending—than other states. If she had been willing to preserve his piece of the rice bowl rather than demanding that everyone sacrifice equally, he would have gone to the mattresses for her. But she was a stone-cold bitch and she could rot in hell as far as he was concerned.
Diele took another sip of his Scotch. He kept the talking news heads on mute. They were just rambling about what the speech might be about. Or more precisely, the airheads were reading aloud from the teleprompter the opinions of the real news writers who were expressing what they thought the president might be speaking about but who were too ugly to appear on camera themselves.
The news anchor then ran a clip of Myers at the oil rig platform. Diele had to admit, she was a good-looking woman, even in a hard hat.
Washington, D.C.
At precisely 11 p.m. EST, President Myers appeared on Diele’s television screen. She wore an elegant but understated blue business suit. An American flag was draped prominently behind her as she sat at her desk in the Oval Office. A bust of Teddy Roosevelt was also conspicuously displayed off to one side.
