Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  Gabrielle was first seen as it narrowly missed Mars, which gave it a speed boost like a gravitational slingshot. This not only accelerated the asteroid, but made its new orbit a mystery. Tracking asteroids with known orbits is tricky enough, but finding one specific black-as-coal rock in the vastness of space is virtually impossible unless it passes in front of a shiny object, like it did Mars. Without that contrast, finding a dark object in the blackness of space is like a blind quadriplegic searching in a dark room at night for a black cat that already ran outside.

  Astronomers detect fast space rocks by taking three sets of pictures to see what points of light in the sky have moved. The stars and the planets stay where they are, relatively speaking, so whatever light moves is an asteroid or comet. Astronomers don’t actually see asteroids, but their reflections, and some reflect far better than others. Finding space rocks, even large ones, can be so difficult that several bigger than Pluto have been found in only the last decade.

  Many asteroids cannot be detected because they reflect sunlight poorly, orbit closer to the Sun so they cannot be seen because Earth faces them during the day, or if the rock is coming directly at Earth. Automated image-search software screens out objects that move less than 1.5 arc seconds per hour to minimize false positives. A space rock that heads directly to Earth or comes far from the plane of the elliptic may not be detected until too late.

  Thus, weeks went by before astronomers found it again. Rogue rocks are rare, especially any this big. Gabrielle became only the fourth NEO larger than 10 kilometers and the largest that crossed Earth’s orbit. Humanity had already landed – well, crashed – probes into the surface of Eros, an S-type, to study its composition, but Gabrielle was their first chance to discover what the C-type asteroids from the Main Belt were made of.

  How ironic if, instead, Gabrielle found out what humanity was made of.

  With hundreds of telescopes trained on the new neighbor, it was determined that after Gabrielle rounded the Sun, it would miss Earth by over 10 million kilometers.

  Gabrielle captivated the astronomy community worldwide because it was so different from any other asteroid: 1) it would pass relatively close by; 2) astronomers had enough time to study it with different types of telescopes – radio, radar, x-ray, gamma-ray, interferonomy, various infrared, visible light; 3) it was bigger than any other space rock that crossed Earth’s orbit; 4) it spun rapidly on its long axis, rather than tumble head over feet; and 5) it periodically shot out a long tail of dust, rock, and gas, which kept bringing it closer to Earth. A comet loses most of its gases from the part most exposed to the Sun, its head and shoulders. Gabrielle was, quite literally, losing her ass.

  But, then, an odd thing happened on its way out of the inner solar system.

  Gabrielle changed course.

  3

  Rays of morning sunlight began burning over the dark Rincon Mountains to the east as the always impeccably dressed Governor Cooper, driving uncomfortably alone, sped down Highway 19 from the Hilton El Conquistador Hotel in Tucson. The Chiricahuas and Santa Ritas Mountains loomed in the darkness behind him as he drove south towards Green Valley, twenty miles south of Tucson. While the freeway going south was empty, families fleeing the coming impact packed the freeway going north.

  Candidates for president are never alone outside of the bathroom. Cooper never liked being alone. Yet here he was, defying his every instinct. He looked into the rearview mirror and again practiced hiding the fear eating him up inside. The day had barely begun, and already he wanted it over with.

  The Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary had been nerve-wrecking. Coming in second both times kept him in the race, but coming in first just once may have knocked out either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Now he had a week before Nevada and he needed to hash things out with his staff. And since that space rock was going to pass so close by, he may as well take some time off to re-group, since he was not going to get any media coverage anyways.

  Not with the Fidel Fragment about to obliterate Cuba.

  Winning or losing either Iowa or New Hampshire would have reduced his stress. But no, God apparently had Groucho Marx’s sense of humor. Seeing Obama come first in Iowa and third in New Hampshire, and Hillary come first in New Hampshire and third in Iowa, made him feel like a meaty sandwich that someone, somehow, someday was going to take a big bite out of.

  A burst of flatulence dampened his boxers and his urge for a bowel movement evaporated. He shifted position while lowering the window, feeling better as cold desert air invaded the car.

  He soon passed signs for the 60th annual Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Showcase meeting at the Tucson Convention Center. He wanted to stop by to get in the local evening news, quickly visit the Tucson Chamber of Commerce at the Tucson Mall, and attend the chili cook-off at Vigilante Days in Tombstone, of OK Corral fame.

  He loved chili, but was afraid to eat it because it once gave him wet diarrhea, which had him pissing out his anus like a garden hose right before a major speech. Projectile vomiting from one’s anus is some nasty shit.

  In two weeks he had to come back to Tucson for the Tucson Rodeo Parade and La Fiesta de los Vaqueros, one of the nation’s largest outdoor rodeos. Texans loved rodeos, and Cooper tried to associate himself with this southwestern sport whenever possible. He didn’t actually enjoy riding horses – like George W. Bush, he was a windshield cowboy -- but voters like rodeos, and that’s what counted. Cooper knew he was going to need all the help he could get to win the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

  This year’s presidential campaign would be historic because whoever got the most votes would actually win the damn thing. That never happened before. The Founding Fathers designed a system that had an Electoral College elect the president because those heroes of democracy didn’t trust the voters. 2012 would be the first time in American history that the national vote winner officially secured the presidency.

  Seventeen states, representing the majority of electoral votes needed to decide an election, passed legislation that gave all of their state’s votes to the popular vote winner nationwide. Called “the Interstate Agreement to Elect the President by National Popular Vote”, the initiative was started in the 1990’s by former Congressman John Anderson (R-Illinois and Independent presidential candidate), former Congressman John Buchanan (R-Alabama), former Senator Birch Bayh (D-Indiana), and Common Cause President Chellie Pingree who, inexplicitly, went around calling herself Chellie Pingree.

  Now, every vote held the same value. Instead of turnout being important in just half a dozen battleground states, it became important in every state. Squeezing a million more votes out of Massachusetts or Alabama suddenly became easier and cheaper than winning over 100,000 more skeptical voters in Florida or Ohio. It was the opposite of disenfranchisement.

  The Founding Fathers did not favor the current statewide winner-take-all system. In fact, only two states chose it in the very first presidential election in 1789. Since then, four elections were lost by the winner of the most votes: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Samuel Tilden in 1876, Glover Cleveland in 1888, and Al Gore in 2000. Tilden actually won over 3% more popular votes than Hayes, yet still lost the election.

  That, like wet diarrhea, is some really fucked up shit.

  The Constitution gives the states exclusive authority to decide how it chooses presidential electors, so there was no need to amend the Constitution. Congress has no oversight authority over presidential elections and did not need to pass any laws. Instead of awarding their votes to whoever won the most votes in their state, seventeen states awarded their votes to whoever won the most votes in the country. That’s all it took. Democracy at last.

  However, to give the new system a moral and financial boost, Congress embraced the popular vote mandate with the No Vote Left Behind law of 2009, which required universal registration when drivers renewed their licenses, made Election Day a paid federal holiday, gave voters a $100 tax credit, made the DMV auto-re
-register those who moved, and rewarded the twenty states with the highest participation. Which happened to all be Blue States. In particular, it gave billions to states that offered vote-by-mail and early voting, while giving nothing to states that used electronic voting machines that could not be audited with a paper trail. With early mail-in voting, “Election Day” now lasted a month. Registration drives, like those done by ACORN, became instantly obsolete.

  America had 210 million licensed drivers, or roughly 80 million more drivers than voters in the 2008 presidential election. Registering everyone with a drivers license as a Democrat, Republican, or Other made it that much easier for those missing 80 million eligible voters to fucking vote. Especially by mail. You didn’t have to vote, like in Australia, but you had to register to vote in order to get a drivers license. Having the DMV automatically re-register those who move made voting both painless and idiot-proof -- two keys to a successful democracy.

  The idea was to minimize the barriers to voting. The easier it was to vote, the more people voted. States mail out personalized ballots that included all local races and voters simply filled them out, signed and returned them, postage paid by the state. First time voters or those who hadn’t voted recently had to include picture ID. Those who didn’t get a ballot in the mail then had time to get on the voter rolls and vote by Election Day. Oregon’s three decades of experience with 100% mail-in voting let state governments know that they would collectively be saving billions leisurely scanning mailed-in ballots over a month rather than frantically fixing machines on Election Day that screwed up voters’ trust in the integrity of the system.

  Democrats loved universal registration because the vast majority of the 65 million eligible voters who did not vote in 2008 were poor, minorities, and/or single women – all of whom disproportionately vote Democrat. Voting in 2008 increased only 4.3%, from 125,736,000 in 2004 to 131,114,000, far less than population growth. With early, no-excuse mail-in voting, experts predicted a 20% increase in voting, which would translate into around 25 million additional votes, most of which would be Democratic. That would make the White House a lock, score Dems several more senators, and a net gain of fifty-plus congressional seats.

  Mandatory voter registration and mail-in voting virtually assured Democrats of super-majorities in the House and Senate, and whoever won the Democratic nomination was almost guaranteed to win the presidency.

  As Thomas Jefferson put it, it is not the majority who rule, but the majority that vote who rule. Or, rather, the representatives of the majority who vote.

  The catch – and there is always a catch – is that few of those 65 million potentially new voters were white men. Against either America’s first black or first female elected president, few Democratic primary voters were rooting for the old rich white guy. So, to solicit whatever sympathy he could squeeze out of an unsympathetic electorate, Cooper cast himself as the scrappy underdog fighting heroically against two political giants. Which had the convenient virtue of being true. And which earned him the silver in the first two contests.

  Cooper adjusted his position in the driver’s seat in search of another fart, but came up empty, although he could still smell the coffee fumes from the last one despite the chilly desert air overwhelming the car heater.

  If either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton won the presidency, Jackson would be immediately replaced as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). If Cooper won, then Jackson continued this thankless task.

  After the 2008 election, instead of appointing himself to John McCain’s vacant senate seat, Governor Jackson decided to become DNC chairman and correctly figured that the best way to win over the DNC membership would be to bash Bush. So he wrote and self-published the surprise bestseller, “The Worst President Ever”, which became so popular that he quickly followed it up by funding a documentary, a joke-site, and a game-oriented website, dedicating all profits to the DNC. He gave away millions of free electronic versions -- a pdf version on scribd, Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s Ipad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, etc. Democratic allies, field offices, and local party groups made millions selling the book, video, and merchandise, especially Worst President Ever t-shirts. YouTube dedicated a special section for the amateur mock-umentaries, mashups, and smack-downs that the book and movie inspired. Jackson thus had the perfect platform to spend 2008 giving speeches, interviews, and fundraisers to boost his popularity among Democrats.

  It would be his last time to make a first impression.

  After winning the chairmanship, he funded the “Worst President Ever Museum” in Washington D.C. whose mission was to document the disastrous Bush years as comprehensively as possible. Every day the museum curators, backed by thousands of volunteer enthusiasts, deepened and broadened the documentation in exhaustive detail. Given that Bush left office with just a 20% approval rating, the museum opened with such success that every Democrat in D.C. gave away free tickets for visiting VIPs, activists, and constituents. The virtual museum was even more popular.

  Jackson used the few hundred million the movie, book, and related merchandising grossed worldwide to expand Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy into a 435-district strategy. Every congressional district now had a permanent professional field office that coordinated virtually every Democratic campaign in their area, whether sheriff, school board, judge, mayor, congress, and especially president. Every campaign in a district could now share expensive resources, from software to technical expertise to media resources to fundraisers and canvassers. A permanent professional nationwide field army staffed by the party’s most passionate believers multiplied campaign effectiveness at a fraction of the cost. Bloggers, College Democrats, unions, issue advocacy groups, local party orgs, and allied associations now had a common vehicle that could drive them all to political success.

  America elects over 500,000 officials. Campaigning is expensive. Having a force multiplier like a permanent field team started changing the partisan makeup from the local school board to congress. The sum became more than the parts.

  And Henry Jackson nominally headed that national field team. Nominally, because Jackson set it up so that every local office elected its own District Coordinator, who chose his or her political director, finance director, field director, etc. The District Coordinators then elected the State Coordinator and collectively they decided what expensive talent they would share – media and consulting experts, pollsters, election lawyers, etc. The bottoms-up nature of the organization gave Jackson more influence than command, especially since he required every field office to do a lot of their own fundraising to make them as self-sustaining as possible. Jackson deliberately raised a monster that could be quickly viable outside of the womb.

  While Jackson did not have total control or complete obedience, he had more influence than anyone else since he controlled the DemZilla voter database. And since both Obama and Hillary had four more years to build their own field teams, Cooper needed all the help he could get.

  A permanent field office could get to know their district like the back of their hands. Volunteers could literally knock on every door (nearly 300,000 households) in a congressional district and build up a detailed database that ranked eligible voters and their voting triggers. Marketers could find out what issues mattered the most to which voters, then micro-target them. A network of field offices that identified virtually every voter in the country was worth its weight in gold. Spending $100 million a year on a huge field army yielded much better results than spending another billion on TV ads.

  And Jackson controlled the voter files. He knew who they were, where they lived, how they voted, what issues influenced their vote, what they watched, what groups they associated with, their age, gender, and race, and how to contact them. It was both several times larger and several times better than what Howard Dean inherited as DNC chair in 2005. Fricking gold.

  Better yet, because Republicans ridiculed the effort as a waste of money, they were out-hustled on the ground. After g
etting their asses handed to them in the 2010 mid-terms, the GOP reluctantly started going through the motions of duplicating Jackson’s 435 district field office strategy.

  There was no way that any presidential candidate, no matter how organized and well funded, could possibly put together a national ground game that was even half as good as what the DNC had spent the last decade developing. Cooper needed that database. He needed those field offices. There was no way to beat his rivals without them. And so he needed Henry Jackson.

  Ever since they formed their alliance, Cooper assumed that Jackson would demand the vice-presidency if Cooper won the nomination. But if Cooper did win the nomination, either Hillary or Obama would make far more political sense. Or he could pick a hero to progressives like Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. But why the hell would he pick another rich white guy? That would be like jumping through hoops to not make this election historic.

  And if he lost, either Hillary or Barack would pick him in order to win Texas. Republicans cannot win the presidency without Texas, so he was practically guaranteed the vice-presidency if he came in second or third.

  That should have been comforting. Except he promised Jackson the moon, and didn’t want to give it. So, now that he was virtually guaranteed to be on the Democratic ticket, thanks to Jackson, he needed to break that agreement. Basically, Cooper had to tell his biggest supporter to fuck off.

  But not until his usefulness ended.

  Light traffic barely improved his mood as he soon passed the Tucson International Airport on his left, the San Xavier Indian Reservation on his right, and then the Titan Missile Museum. Besides that, all he saw was dirt, tumbleweeds, and sagebrush hugging the one-lane highway. He finally exited, swung under an underpass, and then hung a right up the long lonely road to Jackson’s estate. Nearby stood a 50 foot Joshua tree that the city of Green Valley, which has no green and isn’t really a valley, treated like a national monument.