He didn’t look at Jacqueline Russel as he said it. He didn’t need to in order to know the kind of look she must be giving him.
“That simple, huh?” said the Washington Post man.
The president smiled. He turned to someone else.
“Elly Meyer, Journal of the American Medical Association. Mr. President, don’t you think the reforms you’ve mentioned strike at the heart of patient autonomy and choice that has been the basis of our medical system for the past hundred years and more.”
“Ms. Meyer, our medical system has failed the American people of the past hundred years and more.” As if Jodie Ames hadn’t anticipated this question and given him a dozen sound-bite options. “It has failed our poor, it has failed our unemployed, it has failed our old, it has failed our young. Just about the only people it hasn’t failed are the people your publication represents. Let me give you some statistics.” He did. They were impressive. He knew it. As an American, they made him feel ashamed, and he said so. American physicians should be ashamed, and he said that as well. He didn’t see how anyone could argue for the status quo when faced with those numbers.
Elly Meyer didn’t have a follow-up.
“Next question. Pete,” he said, pointing to Pete Abernethy from Issues.com.
“Mr. President, why do you think this is going to work? Why do you think you’re going to succeed where so many of your predecessors have failed?”
“They didn’t fail, Pete, they gave up. Over and over, we’ve had good presidents come to this office with good intentions to reform our health care system and one after the other they’ve been beaten down by parochial interests. Well, I don’t think the American people are prepared to see that happen again. I’m not prepared to see it happen again.” Benton smiled. “A previous president once famously said he’ll be with you till the last dog dies. And that still wasn’t enough. Understand this. I’ll be with you not only until the last dog’s dead, but until he’s good and buried too.” There was laughter from the press. “And you know who’s going to be burying it? Me!” There was more laughter. Benton glanced at the group on his right, Jacqueline Russel and Bill Overton among them. “I think we all understand that now.” He looked around. He nodded toward one of the raised hands. “Matt?”
“Mr. President,” said Matt Ruddock, “can you outline the process going forward? You’ve had this summit today, and I wonder how that translates into something more than hot air.”
“This is a step on the path. It’s important to talk. It’s important to hear each other’s views and understand where we’re all coming from. That’s what we were doing here today. So as you’ve said yourself, it’s an important part of the process, and there’ll be more days like this. But the process moves on. Secretary Lawson will shortly release a detailed consultation timetable. This is something we are moving on and will continue to move on so we’ll have legislation on the Hill in the fall just as we’ve planned to.”
“Isn’t that an ambitious program, given everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks?”
“And what would that be?” replied Benton. There was a moment of silence. Then Benton smiled, and he raised his hands helplessly, and more laughter broke out among the journalists. For some reason, the mood in the press corps was good today, and Joe Benton felt it. “Is it an ambitious program? Hell yes. You want some cautious little incremental piecemeal thing, then the American people elected the wrong guy. They elected me to be ambitious. Because they’re ambitious, and so they should be. Is it ambitious? I hope so. You tell me if it isn’t.”
Ruddock grinned. “I will.”
“Okay. I’ll be listening.” The president looked to the other side of the room. “Phillip?”
“I love this idea of taxing fast food companies for the health costs of their product. But what happens if you’re successful, Mr. President? People stop eating fast food, where’s the tax money going to come from?”
“People stop eating fast food, Phillip, and they’ll be that much healthier that we won’t need it.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of anti-business?”
It took all of about thirty seconds for Benton to deal with that one. A reporter from FoxBloomberg asked him why he thought he had the right to tell Americans how to live—what to eat, what to drink, how fast to drive—and he swatted that away just as easily. He was on a roll. He looked around the room again. He took another couple of questions. “I’ll take one more.” A dozen hands were in the air. His eyes stopped on a young woman whose hand had been raised since the beginning. He nodded at her.
“Michelle Kornhaus, Toronto Herald.”
“I’m glad to see our Canadian friends have sent someone along.”
“Is it true, Mr. President, that you have recently received a report showing that sea level rise over the next twenty years is likely to occur at least twice as fast as previously estimated and will require the evacuation of eighteen million people in the United States in addition to those already to be relocated, including the Florida Keys and the cities of Miami, Galveston, and the lower San Francisco Bay area?”
For an instant, Joe Benton’s mind was blank. He glanced at Jodie Ames. Jodie was staring back at him.
He turned back to the Canadian journalist.
He smiled. “That’s like asking a man whether it’s true he beat his wife.”
“I’m not asking whether you beat your wife, Mr. President. I’m asking whether you’ve received a report showing—”
“And I’m explaining there are some things, entirely false, you can give credence to just by denying them. Do I let my dog Bertie pee on the White House furniture? No.” There was a scattering of laughter. “By the way, I don’t have a dog called Bertie.” There was more laughter. “See how that works? Now I’ll take one more if someone has a serious question they want me to answer.”
He took another question on the health program and handled it briskly. “Okay, I want to thank you all, and I particularly thank everyone who participated in the summit today. We’re at the start of a long road, but it’s not going to be as long as some people think, and we’ll get to the end of it successfully.”
He turned, shook hands with the people who had been standing beside him as he spoke, and left, Jodie Ames came with him.
“That was excellent, sir.”
Benton nodded, not replying.
“And that ridiculous question from the Toronto Herald, I promise you, sir, I’ll find out just what the hell she thought she was doing. I thought you handled it very well.”
Joe Benton wasn’t so sure. He wished he hadn’t said that thing about the dog peeing. It had just come into his head. It was condescending and sounded as if he was trivializing the issue, and it was the kind of thing that would come back to haunt him. Someone would drag those words up one day. But the thing that really worried him was the look he had given Jodie. He could remember glancing at her. He didn’t think that would have looked good, a glance to the side like that. It had probably looked shifty. There had been three cameras in the room, and by now there’d be a thousand sites on the Net with the footage, including their own.
“Let’s see it,” he said when they got back to the Oval Office. He tossed the control to Connor Gale, who logged in to the White House site. “Skip to the end,” said the president impatiently.
There he was, turning to the Toronto Herald reporter. Her question. Then he was staring. For an instant. Like he was stunned. Then the sideways glance. Benton’s heart sank when he saw it. “Help me out here,” it was saying. “I don’t know what to say.” Worse. “How the hell did she find out about that?”
It’s the cover-up that gets you, he thought, not the misdemeanor. That was the great lesson Richard Nixon handed down to posterity.
He looked around. Jodie Ames was staring at him, as if she had just seen that glance for the first time.
“Is it. . .” She stopped before she uttered the word she wouldn’t be able to take back. Besides, she d
idn’t need his answer. She could see, from that look. It was true. She didn’t want to make the president lie to her.
“Should we take the footage off the site?” she asked quietly.
Benton shook his head. “That’ll turn into another story.”
News moves fast through the West Wing. John Eales came in. A moment later Ben Hoffman arrived.
“We need to prepare some kind of communication,” said Jodie. “My phone’s going to be running hot.”
“The president gets risk assessments and scenario analyses all the time,” began Eales smoothly, as if he was giving dictation. “Some of them are designed to be purposefully extreme. It’s possible there was an analysis that used assumptions along these lines, but it’s only one of many, and it’s not White House policy to comment on every scenario analysis that’s provided to it because if we did, that’s all we’d ever be commenting on . . .”
Benton stopped listening. His mind was following another line of thought. Someone had leaked. Who?
“Show me what you’ve got when it’s ready,” said Eales.
Benton was aware that there was silence in the room. Jodie was looking at him. “Are you happy with that, sir? What John just said?”
Benton nodded.
“Okay.” Ames threw a last glance at the screen, now showing the White House website home page. “I’ll try it.”
She left.
Benton turned to Eales and Hoffman. “What do you think?”
John Eales threw himself down in a sofa. “Joe, you looked guilty as hell.”
~ * ~
Thursday, March 24
Oval Office, The White House
His day was meant to have started at eight o’clock with the morning CIA briefing followed by a meeting to review communication strategy after the previous day’s events. It started at six a.m. with a phone call from Erin O’Donnell.
Something had happened at Whitefish. It was unclear yet whether some or all of the group had attempted a breakout, or whether they had simply provoked the FBI into a firefight. All O’Donnell knew was that in the predawn darkness, shots had been exchanged.
Katzenberger rang a couple of minutes later. It turned out the firefight was still taking place. The FBI was going in.
From that moment, through everything else that happened that day, Benton was conscious that the final assault at Whitefish was under way. It was as if he could physically feel the shackles on his hands constraining him from what he wanted to do. If the siege ended well, those shackles would be loosened. If it ended in a massacre, they would be screwed tighter than ever.
At 8:15, Ames, Hoffman and Eales were in the Oval Office to go over the communication strategy. Jodie’s face was grim.
“Jodie, it couldn’t be that bad,” Benton chivvied her as he sat down.
Ames shook her head. She wasn’t in the mood to smile.
“What’s happening?”
“The environmental groups are having a field day. They’re saying the figures the Toronto Herald journalist gave out are a good scenario. They’re saying they’ve been telling us this since the moment they took office. Apparently, they’ve sent us these figures.”
The president glanced at Hoffman. “Have they?”
“Probably. You wouldn’t believe what we get. There’s some guy who keeps sending e-mails that the end of the world’s coming tomorrow . . .” Ben stopped in midsentence. “That’s a thought. Why don’t we get some journalist to stand up at your next conference and ask if it’s true you’ve had a report that the world’s ending tomorrow?”
The president stared at him. So did Jodie.
Ben glanced at Eales. “Why not? It might work.”
“Mr. President, the problem,” said Ames, “is it’s becoming a trust thing. You’ve never been doubted on the trust issue. Whatever else anyone’s thrown at you, you’ve always been rock solid on trust.”
The president waited. He knew he wasn’t going to like what was coming next.
“NewsPoll ran a sample last night, divided between those who had seen the footage and those who hadn’t. The question was simply: Do you trust the president? Those who hadn’t seen the footage, seventy-eight percent, right up where you normally are. Those who had seen it, fifty-four.”
“That’s NewsPoll,” snarled Eales. “A bunch of self-selected, self-important respondents who haven’t got anything better to do than sit around doing online polls. We’ll get our own polling. I’ll get Chris Plenty to take a look.”
“John, everyone knows the NewsPoll methodology is hardly scientific, but I think they’re picking up on something here. More importantly, every other press outlet agrees. They’re all quoting the NewsPoll numbers.
“Jodie, what do you suggest?” asked Benton.
“I want to lay out a defense of everything you’ve done. We can show without question that you’ve moved to carry out your major campaign promises in your first hundred days faster and more comprehensively than any other president in modern times. If that’s not a trust issue, I don’t know what is. I’ve had Barry do some research on Gartner.” Jodie glanced at her handheld. “Of the eighteen major pledges during his campaign for his first term, only four of them received any kind of action during his first year in office. And we can show that already a good twelve of your pledges are being actioned. That’s a proud standard and we should put it out there.”
“Comparing ourselves to Gartner is not a proud standard,” said Eales, “no matter what we’ve done.”
“We can check Shawcross.”
Eales shook his head.
“Jodie,” said the president, “I think what John’s saying is we don’t want to fight them on this. And I agree. I don’t want to make trust an issue by responding. If we do that, we’ll be arguing about trust for the next four years. Trust is something you earn by doing, not by talking. If you need to address the issue, just tell them that, and then focus on what we’re doing.”
“I still think—”
“Sorry, Jodie. Maybe we’ll use the comparison some other time. Not now. What else can you suggest?”
“We could bring forward our announcement of the Teacher Support Program. We were planning that for next week, but we could advance it. Personally, I don’t favor that. It smacks of trying to divert attention. The press won’t buy it, and if it doesn’t work, we lose the mileage we could have got out of it.”
The president glanced at Eales.
“Sounds to me that idea works both ways,” said Eales. “It’s a pledge you made back in the campaign, and Jodie, it lets you make your point, we’re fulfilling promises.”
Ames shook her head. “They won’t go for it. We’ll just lose it.”
There was silence.
“And what am I saying on the other thing?” asked Ames. “The sea levels, the evacuation of Miami?”
“What we agreed yesterday,” said Eales. “We get all kinds of scenario analyses, including extremely hypothetical ones, and we don’t comment on them. As far as action is concerned, there’s an established multilateral procedure going on, the planning for the Kyoto 4 round under the auspices of the United Nations. The United States will play its part, and we’ll share what we know with our partners in that process.”
“Can I say the president personally is fully committed to that process?”
“Go with the wording John just gave you,” said Benton quietly.
Ames shook her head. “The press isn’t going to like it. This is just like what we did over the Chinese contracts. It’s a generic response. There’s no specifics. They want something real.”
“You can say I’m going to meet Nleki.”
Eales and Hoffman looked at the president in surprise.
“Ben, let Al know. Let’s not do the meeting too soon, huh? Spin it out a couple of months.”
“You sure you want to meet him?” said Eales.
“There’s no reason for me not to.”
“You want me to let Larry know?” asked Hoffman.
/> “No, I’ll do that.”
Jodie frowned. “So I go with the same line as yesterday, but I say you’re going to meet the UN secretary-general?”
“As part of the U.S. commitment to playing its part in the process. That’s it. That’s as far as you go.”
Jodie still didn’t look happy. “That’s better. It’s not much, though.”
“Jodie,” said Benton, “there’s something else happening that you need to know about. At Whitefish. It started a couple of hours ago. We’re going to finish the siege.”
Now the expression on Ames’s face changed. “Can we leak that?” she asked eagerly.
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