Out of Crisis

by Richard Caldwell

  41

  All across the United States

  The Centrist convention, four months before the November election, eleven months before the day of

  Over three days of intense debate, David watched the Centrist National Convention, the CNC, unfold in a manner unlike anything ever staged by a United States political party.

  Traditionally, Republicans and Democrats selected a host city, then descended on it like a swarm of flies. These events were more akin to a carnival than a forum to formally select and announce their candidates for the highest office in the most powerful country in the world. Even though their picks had been known for months beforehand, the RNC and the DNC had devolved into loud, rowdy displays of hype and bravado.

  Not so the CNC. The occasion was designed and conducted in a distributed, hub-and-spoke virtual format, with smallish centers located in every state, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico linked electronically, via the internet.

  Anyone over the age of eighteen was allowed to physically attend the CNC at any of these locations or by internet access. Remote participants were required to log in to the Centrist Party website and provide basic demographic information and any federally recognized voter-registration identification, such as a driver’s license, passport, or state-issued ID number.

  Each registrant also had to agree to allow his computer’s media access control, or MAC, address to be collected as part of the process. This allowed some, albeit slight, degree of control and security when conducting attendee opinion surveys.

  Adhering to David’s instance that the campaign be squeaky clean and free of any attacks on other candidates, CNC delegates focused their speeches and presentations on the positive aspects of their party’s strategy. Although considerable attention was paid to national issues that required corrective action and changes in policy, not a single negative comment was made about any of the other candidates.

  Instead, David and Mia focused on the Centrist platform and how the implementation of those principles would work to solidify the United States’ position as, quite simply, the greatest nation on earth.

  In support of this theme, significant energy and attention were devoted to the need to get every legal citizen registered to the polls on Election Day. Historically, less than 60 percent of eligible voters actually cast a ballot.

  The Stakley-Lopez campaign was dependent upon high voter turnout and getting a majority of the ordinarily complacent population to take a stand. They were relying on the right-leaning liberals and left-leaning conservatives to coalesce around the Centrist common-sense, middle-ground approach to governance.

  Although David and Mia were the only CNC candidates in this election cycle, they still went through a traditional recommendation process.

  On the second day of the convention, a nationally known and well-respected delegate from Florida delivered the nomination remotely, to thousands of internet attendees across the country. Seconds later, computer “tally boards” started whirring as the yeas were counted and posted on monitors in each state.

  The results were staggering. If these counts were indicative of what could be expected in November, David, Mia, and the Centrist Party were set to make history.

  David and Mia were back-to-back speakers on the third and final day of the convention. As was appropriate, Mia’s remarks opened the session. She thanked her Texas constituents, her peers in the Senate, and current and future members of the Centrist Party. Then she ripped into a blistering, emotion-rousing call for “every US citizen with two X chromosomes to get off their butts, get their neighbors off their butts, and vote.”

  Mia focused on the accomplishments women had made since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1919 and that, in terms of gender equality, they were “just hitting their stride.” She went on to say that the pro-life, pro-choice debate still raged on.

  Most mature, clinically aware adults would agree, a universally accepted definition of when life begins would never, ever come to pass. Mia stated that, as with almost all issues, the Centrist Party would “stake its flag” at a place that seemed to be the most scientifically and morally acceptable to the majority of the population.

  She personally felt comfortable defining this point somewhere after fertilization, around twelve hours following a sperm cell’s surviving an upstream swim and nuzzling itself inside a much larger oocyte, and several days before week twenty-one, when a fetus had a chance, albeit minute, of surviving outside the womb.

  She stated that for the past couple of years, laboratories could pinpoint, within hours, when this time would be for any individual fetus. Mia noted that currently, and for the foreseeable future, it was each state’s decision where, along the fertilization-to-birth continuum, to draw the line on when life began. She was a staunch advocate of women’s rights but found late-term, anything after week twenty, abortion reprehensible, regardless of state or Supreme Court positions.

  When Mia concluded her combined acceptance speech, lecture, and sermon, every attendee in every convention center was on their feet, slamming their hands together. The “like” counters on CNC monitors were spinning so fast they were just a blur.

  Finally, after an appreciative yet humble period, Mia raised her hands and asked for order to be restored. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are indeed blessed to find ourselves at a point in history that allows us to revitalize our great country. To alter its course and direction. We have before us the opportunity to be part of that process, to play an active role. Not just to read about it in years to come, but to look back and tell our children’s children, ‘I was part of that. I helped make it happen.’

  “It’s as if every one of us is sitting behind a monitor at the Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969. You may not be strapped atop that Saturn rocket, you may not get a ticker-tape parade, but by the grace of God, you are part of this great adventure.

  “I am truly honored and take great pleasure in introducing you to our mission commander, the next president of the United States, Mr. David Stakley!”

  As the cheering crowd rose, a beaming David strode confidently across the stage toward Mia. Smiling while looking at the cameras and the cheering crowd, he waved and let the applause, the near pandamonium, continue for a few heartbeats. Then he turned and shook Mia’s hand. “Thank you, Mia. That was an inspiring, motivating speech, and an unbelievable introduction. It makes me wish I had gone to the Navy Flight School instead of Airborne. Neil Armstrong was always one of my heroes.”

  He turned to the crowd. “My fellow Americans, it is indeed an honor to accept the nomination as the Centrist Party candidate, your candidate, for the next president of the United States. To be cut from the herd and, keeping with Mia’s inspiring moon-launch metaphor, to be selected to lead our nation in its ‘giant leap’ forward.

  “As I shared with some of you, I have rarely, and by that I mean never, used a speechwriter. However, I did acquiesce to the suggestions of my campaign manager and agree to have our folks prepare a few talking points for my address today. Yet, after listening to Mia, I’ve decided to put those aside and save ’em for another day. What I’m going to say today is about as ad hoc as I get. Not entirely impromptu, but darn close.

  “Last night during our press corp meet-and-greet a nationally known columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Kellogg, asked the question that every financial type in every company in every city always asks: ‘How are you going to pay for it?’

  “We do have several initiatives in our strategic plan that will require new funding. Our vision for a federal identification system and a national gun registration and database are two such examples. Both of these are new initiatives. Each will cost a substantial amount of money to develop, implement, and maintain. Neither, even when combined, will come close to costing as much as we wasted on that thankfully aborted attempt to build an ineffective barrier‍—the wall‍—along our southern border not that many y
ears ago. That fiasco, the eyesore that can be seen from space, serves only as a good bad-example.

  “However, this doesn’t answer that standard CFO question, so let me give just two examples of policies that I plan to initiate during the first thirty days I’m in office. The first, in addition to providing a substantial sum of divertable revenue, also helps alleviate our illegal immigration problem.

  “Currently, state and federal governments provide over twelve billion dollars in subsidies each and every year to illegal immigrants. They, and ‘they’ is ‘we,’ shell out twenty-two billion in food stamps, three billion on Medicaid, thirteen billion for education, and, get this, nearly ninety billion dollars on welfare and social services. I’m no math whiz, but these add up to just north of a hundred and twenty-five billion dollars. Every. Single. Year.

  “The vast majority of Americans, our party, and I personally are empathetic when it comes to the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves. We are compassionate to a fault. But the keyword here is ‘illegal.’ We will do everything within our power to provide aid and comfort to those who enter our country legally. However, we cannot and will not spend another dime supporting, caring for, or educating invaders. And that’s exactly what anyone who enters our country illegally is.

  “I already have an executive order to immediately halt these expenditures drafted up and ready for my signature. I’ll sign it within forty-eight hours of being sworn in as president. That single item, the stroke of that pen, will itself pay for the development, implementation, and support of our FID system and our firearm registration database. It will leave enough money left over to begin the design of a national power grid, another of my pet projects.

  A less lucrative and perhaps equally, if not more, controversial option we have on our drawing board is a federally managed national lottery. Modeled loosely around the EU’s EuroMillions transnational lottery, we estimate that the United States, with its population of three hundred and twenty million, will net, that’s after payoffs and expenses, over ten billion dollars a year. That money will be congressionally earmarked to help fund several national initiatives we have identified, which are designed to place the United States back into the world’s technological and social driver’s seat.

  “What I have just said will be made available, word for word, on the Centrist Party website no later than close of business tomorrow for all to see, along with our strategic plan and information about the projects I’ve touched on or alluded to. I’ll close by mentioning those that I feel are the most important, the most urgent, and the most progressive.

  “If you think about it for just a few seconds, you will realize that Americans live by the grace of electricity. Just a few hours’ disruption at our homes is an inconvenience, but a regional or statewide outage can be devastating. A nationwide shutdown would be a disaster, the stuff of science-fiction novels.

  “Very few of us understand how fragile our power distribution grid is and, as such, how vulnerable we are. And this is just from conditions posed by a natural disaster, or as happened in the Midwest only a few years ago, when a local overload effectively shut down the entire grid in four states and part of Canada.

  “If that’s not bad enough, the threat of an intentional nuclear electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, strike would literally cripple our nation. The Department of Defense estimates that a medium-sized fission weapon detonated between two hundred fifty and three hundred miles above the state of Kansas could destroy much of the electrical infrastructure across the continental United States. We are literally living under the sword of Damocles. We’ve got to build a redundant, shielded national electrical grid. I don’t want to sound cliché, but this is a national disaster waiting to happen.

  “While we are rebuilding the electrical grid, we will install a nationwide internet backbone with sufficient bandwidth and speed to carry us into the next century and which is upgradable even beyond that date. As with the electrical grid, our internet backbone will be what our techies call ‘massively redundant,’ including NSA-level hardware and encryption security. It will also include physical connections for our neighbors in Canada and Mexico.

  “Again, following the path blazed by JFK, I will challenge our government and private industries to work together to eliminate our use of fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine by the end of the next decade. This may well be my most ambitious goal. It would also be one of the noblest achievements in human history.

  “We will not just participate; we will take the lead in combating human-accelerated climate change. We will take the lead in stem cell research and genetics. We will begin the development of a plan to transition to digital, perhaps eventually a global, currency. This will require a previously unimaginable paradigm shift. But so did the cell phone and thousands of other innovations whose time had come. We will be the foundation and lead the establishment of a North American Union, along with our staunchest allies and trade partners, Canada and Mexico.

  “The keyword here is ‘lead.’ Change and social evolution are inevitable. We can fight it and die, accept it and survive, or lead it and prosper. And by God, we are going to lead!”

  The applause was deafening. The giant monitors flashed images of CNC centers across the country. They were all the same. People were on their feet, clapping and hugging each other. The excitement and pure joy were nothing short of electric. Their time had come.

  David raised his hands to still the applause and continued: “Finally‍—and by finally, I don’t mean to imply that is all; I just want to acknowledge that I know it’s time for me to close and for all of us to go home, back to our districts, our neighborhoods, and start working to turn our vision into reality. But in closing, allow me to share one last inspirational thought. In 1968, then-Senator Robert Kennedy paraphrased a quote from the author George Bernard Shaw. ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not.’ Ladies and gentlemen, thank you and good night.”

  42

  All across the United States

  Eight months before the day of

  The other two parties held their national conventions during July and August in the traditional manner. The party of incumbent President Phillips met in Baltimore, and the party of soon-to-be-nominated Sheila McCray met in Las Vegas. As usual, there were placards, music, and endless speeches hyping their candidates and deriding the opposition. There were also protests and riots. Ironically, neither of the delegations focused much of their vitriol on the Stakley-Lopez campaign. They mainly went after each other.

  Sheila McCray and her running partner, Tyrone Brown, had emerged out of a field of twenty-four other nominees. Most analysts attributed the wide playing field to a lack of party unity and the absence of a robust platform or political agenda. If the party had a strategic plan, it wasn’t communicated to the voting public. The result was, at best, a fractionated mob mostly held together by their disdain for President Phillips. This may have blunted their effectiveness, but it didn’t dampen their ferocity.

  Following the two mainstream conventions, both parties came out swinging at each other.

  Sitting in the meeting room of the Maryland Centrist campaign office, his eyes glued on one of four seventy-inch HDTV monitors, each displaying a different national news channel, David barked, “Siri, Facetime Mia Lopez.”

  Seconds later, a picture-in-a-picture screen appeared on all four monitors.

  “Hola, señor Presidente! Oops, there I go, getting ahead of myself again. Let me start all over. Good afternoon, David.”

  “And good afternoon to you as well. You’re forgiven. Actually, I’m kind of getting used to it. And you know what? I like it!

  I suspect this may be something of a rhetorical question, but are you watching Fox News? Or CNN? Jim Phillips just called Sheila McCray a damn liar on national TV.”

  “Yep, I just saw the interview. McCray may take a few l
iberties with the truth, but being called a liar by President Phillips is like being called ugly by a toad.”

  David chuckled. “I can’t get enough of your Texas aphorisms. Of course, now I can’t unsee that image. We’ll let ’em fight it out. They’ll be after us soon enough, but their little feud will give us more time to get our owls in a row, so to speak.”

  “Now look at who’s spouting aphorisms,” Mia replied, smiling.

  “Well, I didn’t mean to totally derail your afternoon, Mia, but I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss the little catfight. I’ll call you later tonight and we can review our next move. David out!”

  As David had noted, both the Phillips and McCray campaign staff were paying only scant attention to the Stakley-Lopez Centrist ticket, blowing them off as just another doomed third-party, Ross Perot–style lost cause. That is, until the first poll numbers following their respective conventions hit the press and social media.

  The results stunned both of the established party campaigns. President Phillips held the lead but not nearly by the margin traditionally associated with an incumbent‍—even one so arrogant and polarizing. And the McCray-Brown camp was in near panic. The sheer number of candidates in the fray before the convention would splinter their effort, at least initially. They had expected the resulting factions to regroup and coalesce immediately following McCray’s nomination, but this wasn’t happening. In fact, they were in second place, but only by a Saran Wrap–thin margin.

  Things were starting to unravel on the traditional fronts.

  Meanwhile, David, Mia, and their rapidly swelling army of supporters were ecstatic. Their level of voter popularity had never been experienced by an independent party. And they continued to chip away at the establishment. But these gains weren’t coming as the result of happenstance. The Centrist movement was on fire.

  Working independently, David and Mia covered five or more rallies in major cities each week, hitting every state, Puerto Rico, and DC before the election. In addition, they made multiple stops in California, Texas, Florida, and the industrial sections of the country.