The iCandidate

by Mikael Carlson

  I reach into my laptop carrier on the floor and pull out a small stack of papers. I hand each student a sheet and wait until they read them.

  “Permission slips?” Chelsea asks incredulously.

  “Of a sort, yes. If your parents don't sign it, you don't participate. Do not pass go, do not collect two-hundred dollars.”

  “You can't be serious,” Xavier says.

  “I’m dead serious. Name an extracurricular activity you participate in that doesn’t require one.”

  “This isn’t school,” Amanda states.

  “No, it’s worse. It’s a political campaign. Your parents must be okay with you being involved in this. Not to mention this is going to take up a lot of your time that could be devoted to academics and applying to colleges.”

  “What’s this part about maintaining a B average?” Peyton asks, pointing to the permission slip.

  “Self-explanatory, Peyton. You are all honors students so I know you can handle it.” Most of these kids are straight A students, or at least close to it. I didn’t think that would be controversial. They continue to read through the permission slip, making various faces at parts they don’t like, but saying nothing.

  “These are the rules of the game, guys. You are all volunteering to do this, so if you don’t like them, don’t play.” And that’s when it hits me. “If you don’t like the rules, don’t play,” I mumble to myself. The idea washes over me like a tsunami of pure inspiration, and I suddenly know how we can do this. The students pocket their slips and wait for me to say something more, but I’m lost in thought.

  “So, now what?” one of them asks. I am not really sure who.

  “Get those signed and meet me at nine a.m. tomorrow at Briar Point. Try to be on time,” I say as if on autopilot.

  “We’re not starting now?” Chelsea asks eagerly.

  “Not yet. I have to work something out first.” With that I open my laptop and start typing like a madman. They all talk amongst themselves for a minute, but I am not acutely aware of what they are saying. I look up just in time to see them heading for the door.

  “Hey guys,” I call out to them, causing them to turn. “Thanks for coming.” I smile, a gesture that is returned, and I get back to work. After all, if you want to change the rules, you have to understand them first.

  .

  -SEVENTEEN-

  CHELSEA

  It is a beautiful mid-June day. We should really be hanging out with friends, or baking on a beach. Instead, we are poring over notes at a picnic table, trying to figure out how to start a campaign. We decided as a group to get here early, so when Mister Bennit showed up we could present something resembling a plan. After all, I think that’s what he’s expecting. But after an hour or two, the only thing we manage to accomplish is increasing our frustration. And now I have reached my limit.

  “There is no way we can make this work,” I exclaim to Mister Bennit as he walks up.

  “Good morning to you too, Chelsea,” he replies, much too cheerily for any Monday morning. Summer vacation or not, we know he is well-caffeinated from a trip to the Perkfect Buzz to be in this good a mood. “Hit a little snag in the grand plan have you?”

  “That’s, like, a major understatement,” Peyton opines.

  “We have no money for advertising, no experience in, well, any of this, and unless you plan on quitting teaching, no time to meet voters,” Brian sums up with dissatisfaction.

  “We can’t run a campaign like this,” I state. And we can’t. There is no possible way to compete against a sitting member of the House with nothing. And the fact Mister Bennit is smiling at this makes me even more frustrated and annoyed. My head is starting to hurt.

  “It is far worse than you think, guys,” Mister Bennit says, claiming a seat at the picnic table. “You also have to look at who we are up against. Winston Beaumont has been in politics about as long as you have been alive. From what I’ve read, he’s ruthless, and the only person in Washington more politically savvy than him happens to be running his campaign. He has millions of dollars to spend on everything from advertising to opposition research. He has the resources to do a ton of polling and an army of people to customize his message into something every voter wants to hear.”

  “We really need to work on your motivation skills,” Amanda deadpans as we all remain silent, struggling for something to say.

  This is hopeless. Even if Mister Bennit were the world’s greatest motivational speaker, nothing could change that feeling. I’m sure that’s the emotion all over my face because it is over all our faces. After a moment, Vince, of all people, speaks up.

  “We can’t beat him.”

  “No, Vince, we can’t. At least not at his game,” Mister Bennit says with a hint of a smile.

  “What do you mean?” Emilee asks.

  Mister Bennit pauses, takes a sip of what is sure to be a gazillion-shot latte, and looks at each one of us. “Tell me, how do you beat Bobby Fischer at chess?” We all look at each other. Who the hell is Bobby Fischer?

  “No, don’t say it,” Vanessa tries to warn.

  “Who’s Bobby Fischer?’ Amanda asks at the same time, beating me to the punch.

  “Cue this morning’s lesson,” Vince laments.

  “He’s a master chess player who ... Okay, you know what, it’s not important. If you were to sit down and play a game with a chess master, how would you beat him?”

  You can’t beat him unless you are really, really lucky. Not likely though. You simply don’t beat a chess master at chess.

  “You don’t. Unless…” I stop mid-sentence.

  “Unless?” he says, encouraging me to finish my thought.

  “Unless you are playing Candyland.” I smile, enjoying the rare moment when I get his point before he makes it.

  “Huh?” Vince asks, dumbfounded.

  “I don’t get it,” Peyton adds, even more frustrated now.

  “I do,” I say. “If you can’t beat them at their game, make them play ours.”

  “Exactly. There are two conventional wisdoms in campaign politics. Spend a lot of money and smear your opponent by going negative early and often. Well, we can’t compete in the money arena and I won’t go negative. We need to change the game. Don’t play chess with Winston Beaumont the chess master…”

  “Play Candyland with him,” Vanessa finishes, now getting with the program. She smiles along with me, but the others are not sold.

  “But that’s a child’s game!” Vince announces, exasperated and still unconvinced. “Why would a chess master play anything other than chess?”

  “Because he has no choice,” Brian says, now joining the ranks of the enlightened. “If we refuse to play his game, he has to play ours.”

  I’m not completely sold on that being the case, but I go with it. Most likely he would ignore us, unless we give him a reason not to. And I am having a hard time coming up with a scenario where a powerful sitting congressman would bother.

  “But what’s our game? Do we even know?” Xavier brings up a good point, prompting us all to look to the soon-to-be candidate for support.

  “We run the first modern-era front porch campaign.” Mister Bennit looks at each of our faces, all caught in expressions ranging from baffled to thoroughly confused. “Let me explain,” he adds.

  “Now here comes today's history lesson,” Emilee says wryly.

  “In 1896, William McKinley ran a campaign with the help of an Ohio business tycoon named Mark Hanna. While his opponent traveled 18,000 miles by railroad, McKinley gave most of his speeches right from his front porch.”

  “Do you ever stop teaching?” Vince asks, exasperated.

  “Do you even have a front porch?” I ask rhetorically, or not.

  “Didn't McKinley get assassinated?” Amanda asks, grinning.

  Mister Bennit exhales deeply. “No, Vince, I don’t. No Chels, I don’t have a porch, but that’s not the point. And yes, Amanda, he did. Let’s hope we have a better result. My point is, we
don't need to travel, or campaign, or make big speeches. We get the people to come to us.”

  We all look at each other and fall into a fit of laughter. A little later in the summer and I might think Mister Bennit had spent too much time in the sun or something. “Gee, here I was thinking this going to be hard!” I say, exercising my sarcastic streak.

  “I may be having a blonde moment, but like, how do we get people to come to listen to speeches when, on a good day, only like fifty percent even vote?” Peyton asks innocently.

  She brings up a good point, and we all look up at our teacher for an answer once again. He obliges with that smile we all love to hate. “It's the twenty-first century. There is more than one way to reach out and touch someone. Right, Brian?”

  “The world has the iPhone, iPad, and iTunes,” Brian states with a knowing smile. “Why not give it the iCandidate?”

  I watch as Peyton reaches for a yellow legal pad and jots down iCandidate. It is not a horrible idea. But not a completely unique one either.

  “Okay, I get it. You want to run a campaign on the Internet, but every other candidate does the same thing,” I add.

  “That’s true, they do. So let’s take it a step further. We’re going to campaign exclusively using the Internet and social media. No speeches, no fundraisers, no shaking hands and definitely no kissing babies. This will be the country’s first virtual campaign.”

  “The new front porch,” Vanessa states.

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, that’s unique. But how will anybody notice us if all we are running is a campaign online?” Emilee asks.

  “We make it go viral,” Brian offers.

  .

  -EIGHTEEN-

  MICHAEL

  Of course, wanting any effort to go viral takes more than just a desire to. If that were the case, every corporation, charity, student organization, and attention-seeker in America would be household names because of what people see on You Tube. While such things may work for a Marine trying to land a date with Mila Kunis, dynamite surfing, or even something called planking, the only politician anyone can remotely say it worked for was Obama in 2008. But I let the students figure out how to do it. I had a good feeling whatever they came up with would work.

  “Faculty don’t report back for another four days, Michael. I hope you’re not working on lesson plans already,” a sweet voice says from in front of me.

  “Chalice!” I get up and give her a big hug. While I am not eager for the summer to be over, I do miss seeing her and my other colleagues. “And, just for the record, I don’t believe for a second you hope I’m not working on lesson plans. How was your summer?

  “Short, like always. Yours?”

  “Oh, flew by like a movie montage.”

  “Does that have something to do with following through on your ill-advised bet?” she says, grinning.

  “How did you know?” I ask, mystified. Not that I should be. Chalice seems to know everything about her faculty, whether it is summer or not. I offer her the seat across from me, which she accepts.

  “Facebook, I think. Or maybe it was from some website called The iCandidate.”

  It figures that was where she picked up on it. As the resident computer guy, Brian was the mastermind behind the digital launch of the iCandidate. Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and Pinterest accounts were created, as was a You Tube channel. He even created a website called www.icandidate.org.

  Enlisting the help of some friends, they created one database to track volunteers and another to track donors, should we ever get any. If that wasn’t enough heavy lifting, he organized every tech geek in the school to create a means to host web chats, answer emails and do essentially everything else an online campaign would be expected to do. The whole effort has been run from the cozy confines of the Perkfect Buzz. Thank God I’ve been one of Laura’s best customers for years.

  “I swear, nothing ever gets past you,” I tell her with a laugh.

  “So you actually made it on the ballot?”

  The most pressing concern following our staff’s Briar Point meeting was getting on the ballot. It required 7,500 signatures and a completed application be submitted to the Connecticut Secretary of State. The application was the easy part. The signatures, well, not so much. Chelsea got the nod as the campaign manager, so it fell on her to organize the effort and make the magic happen.

  “Yep. I really wasn’t sure Chelsea could pull it off, but she doesn’t do anything half-way. Something she was quick to remind me of that when she slapped 7,737 signatures down in less than a week.” Lucky, because when we met in June, we only had two weeks to get everything in. We still wouldn’t have made the deadline if some administrative error hadn’t forced Connecticut to change it from the second to the fourth Tuesday in June.

  “That’s impressive,” Chalice says sincerely. “What do you have the rest of them doing?”

  “Well, Amanda was appointed the Minister of Campaign Finance.” While trusting a teenager with accounting responsibilities that will land a candidate in prison if they go wrong may sound insane, well, it probably is. But Amanda is a numbers girl and can tell you the balance of any of her bank accounts to the penny.

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “She was less than thrilled when I told her donations were restricted to $100 from donors, and even more so when I placed a $10 maximum for students.”

  “I can’t imagine this virtual campaign of yours will need much money anyway. Who else?”

  “I have Emilee, Vanessa and Xavier in charge of marketing.” They are in charge of the message, which I admit contains nothing of substance. That was the source of a lot of frustration as the summer began to fade and now that our announcement date looms closer.

  “Did Vince sign on?”

  “Media relations,” I say, eliciting a raised eyebrow from Chalice in response. I gave Vince the most ambitious responsibility of all the students. He may come across as a goofy slacker, but he’s a spin artist, very articulate when he wants to be, and in my estimation, the best person to be the face of the campaign for the media.

  “That’s a little crazy, but crazy has always worked for you. When is your official announcement?”

  “We scheduled the online press conference for tomorrow, actually.” A late-August date was my choice, and I still think it was the right one. If we can build up a viral social media campaign for Congress, it has to be sustainable. Start too early and it fizzles before Election Day, even in a non-presidential election year. Too late and you don’t have enough momentum to make a dent against the incumbent.

  “Well, Howell ought to love that,” she says with a wry smile.

  “Eh, he hates me anyway. Howell’s objections I can handle, but I want to know what you think, Chalice.” I have always found her hard to read, and today is no exception.

  “I think I admire you for following through on this. You are a man of your word, and nobody can say otherwise. I’m in awe you inspired a group of students to give up their summer to work on this with you.” She hesitates, taking a moment to look down at her tea.

  “But?” I ask, knowing the other shoe is about to drop.

  “But,” she says with a slight smile, “you’re a teacher first. I don’t worry about this impacting your performance in the classroom, but I will be the minority. You are also opening yourself up to a lot of grief from parents and the administration once you make this announcement. I hope you’re ready for that.”

  All I can do is nod.

  “What does Jessica think about all this?”

  My face gives away my answer. While Jessica has been somewhat understanding about the time I have spent on this over the summer, she has been far from my biggest cheerleader. She never wanted me to follow through on the bet, and that hasn’t changed one bit over the past two months.

  “I thought so,” Chalice says, rising from her chair. “I wish you the best of luck on your announcement tomorrow, Michael. You know you I will s
upport you and have already earned my vote, but please, be careful with all this.”

  .

  -NINETEEN-

  CHELSEA

  The whole approach we laid out this summer was a gamble, and the source of the moment’s frustration. It is also the reason why we are huddled around our cars in the parking lot of the Perkfect Buzz right now. Vince was never cool with Mister B making him responsible for dealing with the press, and his meltdown once we logged off from our online announcement showed everyone his confidence hasn’t grown any.

  As we all stood silently in search for something to say, I decided to try to break the long silence. “Well, at least there wasn’t too much media actually covering that.”

  “Two months of work trying to get noticed. I’d hardly call that a bright spot, Chelsea!” Vanessa fumes in frustration.

  “How do we get our message out if we can't even get people to listen? We can’t make this go viral if nobody has seen the website and no real press showed up at the announcement which was a train wreck anyway.” Emilee is on the reserved side for a teenage girl, and even she is outspoken right now.

  Train wreck may be one of the most overused statements in America. Very few people have seen one, and I’m not one of them. But it may be the best way I know to describe what happened.

  “Look guys, nobody said this would be easy,” I console, feeling as campaign manager I am supposed to stay optimistic.

  “Nobody said it would be this hard either,” Vanessa snaps back.

  “So much for making a difference. We’re only kidding ourselves,” Emilee laments quietly.

  “Is anybody else getting the feeling we like, just completely wasted our summer?” Peyton’s observation hangs over the group.

  Nobody agrees with her, but at the same time, they don’t disagree either. I look at Mister Bennit, hoping he will launch into one of his motivational talks, because I can’t come up with anything. I know as bad as things were for the announcement, they are only bound to get better. He looks as if he is about to say something when Vince comes storming over to the rest of us.