Reagan represented the opposite of what the Republican base wants today – on national security, taxation, foreign policy, spending, and social issues. Reagan couldn’t get elected today. So for a Democrat to both dismantle Reagan and discredit his opponents for not being sufficiently Reagan-ish was too much.
Cooper didn’t claim to be Reagan-like, although he died his hair and imitated his mannerisms to come across like Reagan. No, he simply used Reagan to paint Bush and his hand-picked successor as anti-conservative. It didn’t even have to be true as long as it got him in the news.
Cooper now acted Reagan-like for so long that it was a natural part of him. His likable personality radiated confidence while his considerable personal charm won him friends and disarmed enemies. He proved that Democrats could win even in Texas. In 2011, Cooper drew crowds that rivaled Obama and Hillary. He wooed the national media like an ugly chick.
But the thing that struck Jackson the most was how presidential Cooper looked. Palin may have charisma, but Cooper had gravitas. Cooper was too superficial to make a great president, but he would look like a great president.
Just like Ronald Reagan.
12
Jackson arrived just in time to see his daughter yell out, “Uncle Dan”, then jump up and give Cooper a big hug as if she were still ten years old, when they first met.
The surprised look on Cooper’s face made Jackson realize that Cooper had not seen Lisa since the boob job. Cooper, damn him, could not look happier, as Lisa took Cooper’s other arm and pressed her bra-less breasts against him. The three of them were still laughing when Jackson reached them, trying to catch his breath. Today was going to be one of those days.
“Good morning, Henry!” Cooper greeted him. “You look like you haven’t eaten your Wheaties today.”
Henry blocked their path, bent over with a hand on the wall while he calmed his heaving chest. Red faced and perspiring, Jackson realized what a contrast he made to the dapper Cooper, with beautiful women clutching each arm.
“How are ya, Dan?” he got out between heaves.
“Why, Henry, I’ve never been better.” Cooper was not just enjoying his female company, but also Henry’s discomfort. “You know, if you told me what a great welcoming committee I’d have, it would have been a lot easier to get me here.”
And wasn’t that the truth.
This observation only made Jackson feel worse. Jackson wasn’t a natural politician, and it irritated the hell out of him that he still missed a trick after a decade in the business. He had worked hard to master politics, yet still fumbled the basics, like using beautiful women against your closest friends. If their positions were reversed, Cooper would never have missed such an obvious trick.
“Dad,” Lisa exploded breathlessly, “Uncle Dan wants me to sing the national anthem at his campaign rallies -- maybe even at his presidential inauguration!”
In 2008, Governor Jackson hosted the XLII SuperBowl at a newly built next-gen stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Which turned out much better than when the Steelers beat the shit out of his precious Arizona Cardinals at the SuperBowl the following year in Tampa. Lisa, who began singing the national anthem at his 2006 re-election campaign, later sang before games with the Arizona Diamondbacks (baseball), Cardinals (football), and Suns (basketball). With her father backing her up on guitar, she belted out that tune literally hundreds of times, but really hit it out of the park at the 2008 SuperBowl. Pre-boob job, she cut a cute figure, innocently charming the audience, just like she practiced thousands of times in the mirror. The local media loved it. The Arizona Republic even put her on their front page, which triggered her addiction to fame.
In just seconds, Lisa not only put the next possible president in her debt, but reminded him what a big media splash she made singing the national anthem at the SuperBowl in the 3D movie Regolith. Right before the impact incinerated her, which left audiences weeping.
The 3D visuals were compelling: a mountain punching through the atmosphere, the scorching heat, the sonic boom, the blast from the pressure wave that made viewers in 3D theaters jump out of their seats, as a stadium full of football fans looked up at what would soon vaporize them. All interspersed with Lisa, post-boob job, belting out the national anthem. To get free publicity, the studio quickly turned that scene into a popular music video that frequently played before sporting events. Thousands of public school replaced their national anthem with Lisa’s. That scene and movie had such an emotional impact, amid all the asteroid hysteria, that some people couldn’t look at Lisa and not re-live the trauma of seeing her character kill. So Lisa singing the anthem would turn audiences putty in Cooper’s hands as he wound them up with his stump speech.
The movie only came out on Thanksgiving, but within days she had a big label record contract. The hours she wasted shopping, blogging, and twittering Lisa now spent in a Tucson music studio or modeling photo shoots.
Watching Lisa become the next Kardasian horrified her father, who reacted like the world was coming to an end. She was even getting movie parts from studios who didn’t yet know her acting sucked.
So of course Cooper would love her to sing the national fricking anthem at his campaign events -- she could double his crowds. Lisa could make even a presidential candidate look cool. Ask Barack Obama or Bill Clinton -- it’s not easy. More importantly, it associated Cooper with the movie and all the disaster preparation, in contrast to Palin and the Republicans who ridiculed the hysteria. For once, Democrats tapped into fear while Republicans tried to reassure. And Dems won hands down.
Lisa would be forever associated with President Cooper, and she knew exactly how to play that card: frequently and forcefully. Just like she often heard her grandfather the astronomy professor open an argument with, “Well, according to Einstein…”, so, too, could she say, “Well, the president of the United States told me that he, like, totally agrees with me on this.”
Anything that raised her profile gave her an edge over more talented actresses. Most actors become famous because of their acting; Lisa wanted to become famous in order to break into acting. If Paris Hilton could get acting, singing, and clothing-line gigs, then there was hope for her.
And, unlike Paris, Lisa had tits. Bought and paid for.
Lisa got into singing the anthem in the first place because that was one of the few songs that her father mastered on his electric guitar. Jimmy Hendrix inspired him to learn the song when he was just a kid. Aside from easy numbers like Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, the anthem was one of the few songs that stayed with him over the years. When he ran for DNC chairman, the sight of billionaire Governor Jackson playing guitar while his teenage daughter sang her heart out at the SuperBowl made a huge impression on the 400 members who elect the chair of the national party. The national anthem is hard, yet Lisa picked up some notes and carried them to the heavens, wowing critics and the audience alike. And the sight of an eccentric billionaire letting his adorable teenage girl shine won him sympathy from a lot of women. Something he traded on ever since.
Jackson noted that she said nothing about him playing with her. As usual, she excluded him. Feeling old and obsolete, Jackson used an old politician’s trick and changed the subject.
“Dan, if you like your morning so far, just wait til you see what I got waiting for you in the garage,” directing Cooper’s attention to the open door. “Just go down the ladder while I have a quick word with the girls.”
Down the ladder? In the garage? What the fuck?
Neither Cooper nor the girls, however, seemed eager to disentangle themselves, which pissed Jackson off. The girls began to complain, which made his bad mood grew worse as the long sleepless night caught up to him. As he finally extracted Cooper and pushed him towards the garage, he quickly rushed the girls around the corner in the opposite direction.
Then Jackson spoke quietly in French. Monique was related to him through his Belgium mother, so they all spoke French.
The beauty of French is that you can sa
y anything, no matter how vulgar, and it sounded like music to someone who didn’t understand the language. “I just shat so hard I fried some neurons”, in French, can sound like, “It’s so wonderful to meet you”. So, keeping his tone light, Jackson let the girls understand his position. Jackson was not a natural at clever deception, like most politicians, but he was a master of declarative sentences.
“You can’t fuck him,” Jackson bluntly told Monique. “At least not for another decade.”
He then turned to Lisa or, rather, turned on Lisa. “What the fuck are you thinking? If the media picks up any hint of a sex scandal, I will lose billions. Caesar’s family, like Caesar, must remain above suspicion.”
Monique turned cold before his eyes, and Jackson realized that he just made her feel like a prostitute. Which was not true. Monique never fucked for money. She fucked for kicks, and powerful -- usually married – men provided those kicks. Along with corporate jets, expensive presents, and exotic resorts. The reference to Julius Caesar, the biggest over-achiever of all time, who used the line to justify divorcing his third wife, also innocent of infidelity, soared over their heads.
Lisa, used to going head-to-head with her father, grew hot. She used her left arm to gently push Monique away from her father and then stepped into the gap, protectively putting herself between them. Then, even though he towered over her, Lisa quietly fired back in French with a full artillery barrage.
“You said we needed leverage over him, that he wasn’t flying in formation anymore. You said his campaign manager was out to use you for money while cutting off your access.
“I know better than to jeopardize your precious plans. We’re not trying to seduce him. You wanted leverage, we now have leverage. Monique greeted him as if they were longtime lovers, giving him a big hug and kiss, while David worked the video cameras. All so that you could get the leverage over him that you have been constantly complaining about!”
Silence filled the room like tear gas. Lisa was livid. Monique looked flush and felt like a cheap whore. But at the same time, she felt incredibly grateful to Lisa for sticking up for her. Women were usually the ones sticking it to her, not protecting her.
Jackson looked at his daughter for what seemed like hours, feeling very stupid. She was such a better politician. Manipulating people came second nature to her. Which was just one of the many reasons he was going to miss her so much when she got married and moved away.
He also immediately understood why she did not tell him – deniability. If things turned to shit, as they tended to do, he needed to get in front of cameras and say with a straight face that he had nothing to do with it. Which is much easier to say if it’s true.
Another of Jackson’s many political weaknesses is that he was a lousy liar. He was getting better, as he was with evasive hair-splitting and subtle blame-shifting, but he knew that he was not a natural liar.
Lisa watched her father shrink in front of them. His shoulders crumbled and his head grew heavy with shame. If David worked the angles and zooms right, then he now had the leverage he needed over Cooper. And he owed it to his foresightful daughter and eager-to-please cousin.
It’s not every day you thank your half-naked teenage daughter for entrapping the next possible president of the United States with a fake sex scandal. But Jackson did so now. Barack Obama, who had a beautiful daughter Lisa’s age, probably never had this problem.
With sad, apologetic eyes, Jackson turned to Monique, who still refused to look up at him. He then unexpectedly pushed past Lisa to wrap Monique in his world famous bear hug, while apologizing in French over and over again in her ear. He literally picked her up and twirled her around like a doll, something that he would never have done if they were alone.
Monique finally looked up at the huge man holding her, the same guy who melted an eight year old’s grief, and found him smiling apologetically. She still was unsure how to feel. It suddenly dawned on her that she needed to convince David to carefully edit the video to omit the finger fucking and beating Cooper off. Otherwise, she would never feel comfortable in his house again. It horrified her to imagine what his family would think of her, much less her own status-conscious family in Europe.
She knew that he would keep holding her until she forgave him, so she hid her shame and smiled back.
Jackson quickly let her go to turn on his daughter, tickling her sides, which he knew she hated. Which was why he did it. Lisa fought back, her anger dissipating. Then Monique turned on Jackson and tickled him, something that she never would have dared before. Soon all three of them were on the living room marble floor, laughing until David triumphantly walked in, a smile on his face and a DVD disk held high in his hand.
13
Jackson was off-balanced and Cooper could not be more pleased. This would make his job so much easier. With Jackson’s back now to him, Cooper casually put Monique’s business card in his jacket pocket as he walked to the garage. He planned on checking out her pictures on this website. He often checked out porn online, Googling “gay facials”, “cuckold”, or “cum snowballs” to get his fix. He wondered if she had nudes. If so, with so many image hosting services (like photobucket.com, flickr.com, imageshack.us, smugmug.com, allyoucanupload.com, picturetrail.com, mac.com, webshots.com, and editgrid.com), he would find them.
Hmmmmmmm. Today may not turn out so bad after all.
Unclear why Jackson wanted to meet him in the garage, Cooper’s jaw dropped when he opened the door and saw a hole in the floor. And instead of two cars, Jackson had filled the entire garage with boxes. Cooper walked over to the hole and found an aluminum ladder leading to a big hole in the ground.
A basement? In Arizona? He didn’t know anyone in Arizona who had a basement. At least in Texas they had hurricanes, tornados, and Texans.
He quickly stepped down the ladder into what looked like a tornado shelter. Or a panic room. Or the beginning of a really bad horror flick.
As soon as his head got below ground, he saw two metallic boxes in a hole the size of a garage, with used tires squeezed between them, around them, beneath them, and on top. Both were partially open like shipping containers.
Eager to discover Jackson’s secret panic rooms, Cooper followed an electrical extension cord down the long ladder. One of the metal rooms was half full of pressurized gas canisters, five-gallon water bottles, and boxes of food.
He immediately entered the empty one and saw a laptop sitting on a foldable card table at the other end. It had the stale air of a tomb. Nothing hung on the walls or ceiling except battery-operated lights and fans that stick via suction cups. No heating or air condition vents.
He knew what it was, of course. A shed. Cooper was in a fucking shed. Under the garage of the former governor of Arizona.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” he asked himself.
The problem with Jackson building his fish farms in the middle of the Pacific was having to import literally all the building materials: metal, wood, glass, gravel, sand, and cement (which humidity dries quickly). So, instead of building actual buildings, he bought large refurbished WWII-era cargo ships. But these rust buckets developed ever larger leaks and wouldn’t float forever.
Jackson needed to replace them. Yet anything on the sea made of steel eventually rusted, so he hired material scientists who just recently discovered how to make the world’s thickest amorphous metal by mixing large atoms with small ones.
Their first product was very simple in order to work out the wrinkles of the tricky manufacturing process: a warehouse made out of eight very large pieces -- four walls, three floors, and a roof -- that could be easily snapped together onsite like legos. With a special salt-resistant sealant, they became air and watertight. String a bunch of them together over huge air-filled tubes, and he had a bunch of floating warehouses in the middle of the ocean.
Making a large building out of smaller pieces would make transport easier, but weaken it structurally. Jackson needed buildings that would not collapse in t
he worst’s storms, which meant each wall and roof be made in one single piece. Just like a table made of one piece of oak is stronger than one made of several pieces glued together, so too was one wall forged at the same time structurally superior to many.
Since the ground floor weighed the most, its weight determined the size of the warehouse. Jackson had long used a civilian version of the Russian Hind M-24 helicopter because its seven titanium rotors gave it the greatest lifting capacity of any helicopter in the world -- twelve metric tons. So they made a twelve ton floor, which determined the size of the warehouse. Because amorphous metal is so light and strong, a twelve ton floor turned out to be the size of a high school gym.
The warehouses solved several problems. They offered great shelter, storage, and housing, while they protected his aircraft from the salty, humid air. Yet their roofs, coated with organic solar and fitted with twelve residential windmills, generated lots of electricity. Even better, to transport them he could stack hundreds of them like a pile of paper on one ship. Shipping their equivalent in steel, cement, sand, gravel, and wood would have cost several times as much and taken several times as long. Stringing two lines of warehouses back to back solved his storage problems.
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