On camera, Mandrake was seated opposite Dupont in a musty-looking office, whose walnut shelves were replete with hundreds of impressive-looking leather-bound volumes, most with slips of paper sticking unkempt out of the tops. After introducing Dupont to the viewers, Mandrake leant over the desk separating them and said, with a forced naïveté,
“Professor, until tonight Isabel Diaz believed her father was a Bolivian businessman, but we now know he was a senior Chilean diplomat. What’s the impact of this on her crack at the White House?”
“Absolutely nothing, you big fool. You got the wrong guy,”shouted one of the team in the hall with Isabel and, when he caught the dark look she shot at him, he realised he’d guzzled one drink too many.
“Regretfully,” said Dupont, “it means everything. The wonderful lady’s campaign is over, assuming your information about her father is correct…”
“Which it damned-well is not,” said Gregory. “Sorry,” he apologised, to no one in particular.
“…and I stress, if. If that’s the fact, then our Constitution dictates that I, and you, and all Americans will forever be denied the privilege of voting in Ms Diaz as our President.”
At that moment, the station flashed to an ad for a nasal spray. “All stuffed up…?”
“If we didn’t know this was built on a foundation of garbage,” said a relieved but perplexed Gregory, “it’d be a disaster. But what’s this Constitution thing? Oliver? You pointy heads didn’t come up with anything, right?” He slurped on a silver and red can.
“Not yet, no,” said Oliver. “We’ve got Professor Millie Wilkinson on retainer,” he pointed to the phone he’d put temporarily on mute to answer the question, “but she’s still looking.” Oliver noticed the quizzical eyebrows, “She’s a female version of Robert Dupont, but with better legs. And at Princeton.”
No one laughed, though unknown to those in Detroit, Myron Kowalski was sniggering into his gnarled old fingers.
“Shh! They’re back on,” said Gregory.
Mandrake recapped before asking Dupont to continue.
“Our Constitution, sir, insists that our president is a natural born citizen…”
As Mandrake gravely nodded, the relevant text of the Constitution scrolled up the screen saying pretty much what Dupont had said, but with a lot more verbiage.
“A rule that kept people like Henry Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger out of the Oval Office can’t be all bad,” said Mandrake.
The octogenarian looked as if he was about to rebut Mandrake with a weighty list of twenty or more distinguished and naturalised Americans any of whom he would have been delighted to have seen as president, but pushed on:
“The Fourteenth Amendment, Mr Mandrake, defines who is actually a citizen.”
The precise legalese appeared on the screen.
“But let me simplify it,” said Dupont. “You’re a natural born citizen if you satisfy two tests that most people wrongly read as one: you must be born here AND you must also be subject to our jurisdiction. Are you with me so far?”
Mandrake looked perplexed:
“But professor,” he added, squeezing his bearded chin to emphasise the complexity, “Isabel Diaz was born in Newark, New Jersey. Here’s a certified copy of her birth certificate.”
Mandrake waved a piece of paper, and Dupont responded:
“Yes, Mr Mandrake. But, as I just said, we must consider more than mere birth… not only must a president be born here, he or she must also be ‘subject to our jurisdiction’ as I said a moment ago. The problem for Ms Diaz is that when she was born in Newark, as that paper you’re brandishing certifies, her father was a loyal Chilean diplomat…”
The camera flicked to Mandrake.
“And…?”
Dupont looked imperiously down his nose:
“Please, sir! Any constitutional lawyer worth their salt will tell you that a diplomat owes their allegiance to the country they serve—you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? It means, in the language of our Constitution, that they’re not subject to our jurisdiction. You have heard of diplomatic immunity, yes?”
Mandrake glared back at Dupont as if the old gentleman had severe body odour.
Dupont shook his head, and continued:
“And it’s the same with their children: the children of diplomats are also not subject to our jurisdiction. Mr Mandrake, birth and allegiance have been twinned together for centuries. That was so at the signing of our Constitution and it is still so now.”
“But why is that?” asked Mandrake.
“Why…?” said Dupont, barely concealing a grimace. “Because our founders feared foreign influence over our president. Just imagine if the father of today’s president was a serving Iranian or North Korean diplomat or dignitary.”
Mandrake nodded:
“You’re saying that the kids of foreign diplomats, even if they’re born in Newark or Hoboken or Dallas or Washington, they’re not US citizens?”
Dupont smiled:
“Precisely,” he said.
The eyes of everyone in the hall flicked over to see Isabel biting her top lip.
Mandrake continued:
“Including the children of diplomats who are long since dead, like Isabel Diaz?”
“Like she,” said Dupont.
“So that’s your opinion, Professor?”
He glared. “It’s the law.” Humility wasn’t Dupont’s strong suit.
“Who says so, Professor?”
As Dupont paused to lean forward to answer, Isabel looked over to Oliver Pryor with some admiration, “Your grandfather is a surly old coot.” Oliver’s face flushed with embarrassment.
Dupont snatched up a large tome and levered it open.
“I say so. And if that’s inadequate for you, young man, the United States Supreme Court says so, too.” He almost spat the words out, “I refer you to the Court’s decision in US v. Wong Kim Ark. It’s older than I am. It’s from 1898.”
He slid his reading glasses out of his jacket pocket and perched them at the end of his nose. As he started to read the majority opinion, the relevant text flashed up on the screen together with the case reference: US v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 US 649 (1898). Close-up was leaving no doubt about where this was going.
Oliver was agog. Both his cell phone and Professor Millie Wilkinson who was on it dropped away from his ear. “So that’s why he brought up Orrin Hatch… it was about the Arnie amendment. We just didn’t figure out why.”
Ordinarily, Gregory would’ve been furious at Oliver—the lawyer was paid to understand why—but here in Detroit where they possessed the vital detail of mistaken identity, Gregory was relieved. “Thank God not a jot of this legal crap matters,” he exhaled.
Ed coughed, his craggy face suddenly as grey as a heavy cloud. “I’m afraid it does matter.”
In a single sweep, all present turned toward him like sideshow clown heads.
Ed was walking back in from the rear, holding Isabel’s photo-frame in one hand. Everyone could see he’d pried open the back. The old picture of Isabel’s dad was in his other hand. It had been glued all these years onto a metal backing square placed under the glass—Isabel had seen it herself many times—but with the blade of the knife, Ed had painstakingly peeled the photo off the metal. He passed it to Isabel.
Handling her beloved photo like it was coated with poison, Isabel quickly saw that what she’d devotedly kept with her all these years wasn’t a photograph at all… but a cutting from a glossy magazine cover. The name of the publication had been stripped off, but the caption beneath the face had been folded back behind the backing plate.
Yet another of her mother’s lies.
Isabel’s lip began to quiver as she read the text to herself:
“Lucho Gatica: King of Bolero. His smoke-and-velvet Bésame Mucho…”
That fucking Bésame Mucho, she thought, and slowly looked up at Ed. Her eyes, moist, went round the room, pausing for just a moment at each expectant face. Her shaky fing
ers wriggled into her pocket and locked onto the rosaries from St Hyacinth’s.
Ed wound his arm around her pulling her close, and she tilted her head briefly to nuzzle against him.
The tips of one of Gregory’s hands pressed against his lips and the fingers of the other hand were spread flat against his chest, as if he were palpitating and preparing to scream “oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God” once Ed or Isabel explained what the heck was happening. One thing was for sure: the campaign was not looking good. Nor was The Book.
Isabel straightened up and inhaled. Her eyelids dropped for less than a second and, as she looked back up, her free hand crushed the once beloved picture into a ball and it dropped to the cold, wooden floor.
No longer looking anyone in the eye, but with a smile weakly hanging on to her mouth, she said, “No debate tonight, folks. Not ever, apparently.”
And in the hushed gloom, the approaching noise from outside was all the louder… the long rolling crunch of gravel along the drive by CBS’s outside broadcast van and three other vehicles as they drew up outside the hall doors.
For months, America had been clinging optimistically to Isabel’s lustre like moths to the screen door of a lone shiny, bright room. Yet in fewer than thirty TV minutes, Mike Mandrake had doused those lights with a single flick of his microphone.
From that night, Isabel’s election posters, still beaming her candour, high-mindedness and sense of justice, would curl up into relics for a disheartened nation robbed of a candidate they adored.
And Mike Mandrake, the man to blame, would become a pin-up of a different kind.
TERRIFIED eyes tried to meet through the cigar smoke, and Bill Edwards’ colleagues startled when he stood his entire bulk, thumped the table, and bellowed, “Somebody… find me that damn Bolivian whore!” Myron Kowalski, of course, was snickering since, in their younger days, he’d delivered on many similar requests from Bill.
Bill had done all he could tonight, so he sat back down and puffed on his cigar, devastated, though the others in the room wouldn’t be able to tell it from his rock-hard expression.
Bill was thinking fast. But as quick as he was, his mind kept taking him back to two years ago, when he had the vision to identify Isabel, from among the hundreds, as the best candidate. And how he went after her, chasing her, persuading her, cajoling her, using whatever influence he had to win her over. He’d watched her in action before that, and had liked what he’d seen. To him, she was the one way out in front, and it didn’t matter a squib to this ancient conservative that she was female, Hispanic, Catholic, childless, rich, had a weird scar, or any of the other negative qualifications he could imagine being drummed up against her. It was Bill who, once he got her interested, used his clout and stature to dismiss all the party’s teeth-sucking and hand-wringing—some of which, undoubtedly, was a smokescreen for racism and sexism. In fact, he boldly told his Republican National Committee, with Isabel—he had never been a Sarah Palin fan—the time had clearly come for a female president, let alone a Hispanic, and that he personally wanted the Republicans to have that first honour.
What were they to do now? The ExCom met around Bill’s table till 3 AM, though Kowalski and other non-ExCom attendees had been dismissed at midnight. Bill, as chairman of the RNC, knew that the party rules bestowed enormous powers on ExCom, but filling a vacancy in the candidacy for president wasn’t one of them. Under Rule 8, that had to go to the full RNC in five long days time, the shortest period of notice he could give.
For a brief moment, Bill contemplated substituting Ed as the candidate; the war hero was almost as well-known as his wife and, if Ed won, she’d still be in the White House. But even Bill knew that was an impossibility.
The debate about Isabel’s running mate, Hank Clemens, raged. Only that day’s Washington Post had them cringing over its accuracy: “Henry Samuel Langhorne Clemens III has as much grip on the major political issues as on a wet bar of soap.” The feature on Hank was excruciating, detailing that while the Clemens family fortune was founded on hogs and river boats, he had spent his pre-public life making a hash of managing it. Hank was the classic butt of the old joke, “How can you make a small fortune…? First, you give Hank Clemens a big one.”
Until Bill had pushed him forward as Isabel’s running mate, Hank had enjoyed a richly deserved obscurity, apart from a stint as deputy director of Homeland Security, where the best that could be said was that nothing had happened on his watch. Even the Republican hard-core was underwhelmed, with the Weekly Standard, their bible, painting Clemens as “a shocker with no awe, a man whose very bright future lies behind him. His entire manner is a drawl, having lived his life like a shoe stretching out a wad of gum stuck to the sole.”
But Bill had backed him, as a sop to appease the law-and-order crowd who saw Isabel as too soft. He didn’t expect Hank would actually have to step forward, but so be it.
So, pressed hard by Bill, the ExCom decided four things that night: to convene an urgent meeting of the RNC in five days; to recommend that Hank take Isabel’s spot; to recommend that Perry Patein, a Wisconsin congressman, become Hank’s running mate; and to press Isabel Diaz to stay on the stumps and keep campaigning, despite her disqualification, using her charisma and the nation’s sympathy to back up the new team.
Five turbulent days later, the RNC met, with little choice but to rubber-stamp the ExCom’s recommendations—not least because, at Bill’s insistence, Hank, Perry and Isabel, without missing a beat, had all three gone straight out onto the hustings to try to salvage as much momentum as possible; and because Bill had leaked the recommendations to the media.
This was a brand-new ball game. Bill… everyone… knew that. Like most vice-presidential candidates, Hank hadn’t been taken seriously until now. The most flattering comment that could have been made about his public performances to date was that he hadn’t said anything stupid, which was easy for him since he hadn’t said anything at all; he’d just looked fine standing at-ease in the traditionally respectful spot back and to the side of Isabel at her rallies. And while he filled the minimum technical qualifications for president—over thirty-five and, yes, truly a natural born citizen—the public now needed to know exactly who this low-profile man really was, whereas the key task that Bill Edwards knew faced his Party was precisely the opposite: to prevent people finding out.
According to Gregory, when Hank was handed the nomination form where it said “Sign here,” he wrote “Virgo”.
It was why Bill knew he had to lean on Isabel to keep campaigning, though now for the team, not herself. In the current circumstances, if they didn’t have her up front, the Party’s chances approached zero. They all knew that when people focused on Hank he’d make even George W. Bush and Al Gore seem like they’d been jived-up marionettes dancing on crack. Hank Clemens might have a heart of gold but, as the saying went, so did a hard-boiled egg.
Perry Patein, the new running mate, had been Isabel’s original preference before Bill Edwards had white-anted him in favour of Hank. Though also young, at forty-two, Perry was no dewy-eyed, Republican apple-polisher. He’d started life as a hard-hitting economist working on education policy, for the Democrats back then, as it happened. Isabel met him later when he was seeking funding for education programs that he was developing for Africa. That steered him toward gaining a wider experience in foreign affairs, including a short stint in Iraq, and it wasn’t long after that when he won his seat in Congress.
That fateful night, Bill told his ExCom colleagues that even if Isabel’s heart wasn’t in continuing to trudge the campaign trail, the pressure on her would be enormous. And, when he called her in Detroit at 3:15 AM, it already was. She and Ed were still thrashing around the alternatives themselves. Gregory had just left their hotel suite for bed, Isabel only half-kidding that she’d ring housekeeping to remove the razor blades from his bathroom.
So Bill had an easier task than he expected. After what they’d achieved so far, there was no way Isabel and Ed cou
ld bear even the image of Bobby Foster’s stockinged feet up on the desk in the Oval Office. They’d both known that much even without speaking.
Isabel and Ed didn’t need Bill or even a poll to convince them that without the halo of Isabel’s ongoing presence on the hustings and her strong advocacy, whoever they replaced her with was guaranteed to go down in a screaming heap. With her, they still might not win, but at least they’d have a fighting chance.
And besides, she was going to have plenty of free time—her Representative’s seat in the House had just been pulled out from under her, too. Old Kowalski had contributed that fine piece of news to Bill Edwards straight after Close-up. He’d pointed out that for Isabel to keep her seat in Congress she still had to be a citizen, though unlike with the presidency, being naturalised was acceptable.
“No problem,” Bill had said. “We’ll get a naturalisation fast-tracked.” Bill was already thinking about whose arm he’d be twisting for that.
“No,” said Kowalski, “she’s got to be a citizen for seven years first.”
IN the lead up to the official RNC meeting, almost every lawyer in the country who’d been pumping for a Diaz win had pored over the Constitution and the case law. The Republican National Lawyers’ Association had convened an urgent web conference of its constitutional law experts. The Heritage Foundation asked its legal scholars to opine. Major newspapers and magazines published opinion pieces galore on the subject. TV networks keen to prove Professor Dupont and Close-up wrong, especially FOX, scrabbled around for their own telegenic experts.
The Democratic Party was ecstatic. Bobby Foster was riding an all-time high, and it was with no assistance from unlawful substances.
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