Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “What changed?” Liu asked.

  “The Internet happened,” Ellen Wiley, the computer sleuth, chimed in. “Oppo became easier and cheaper to do. There was a lot more information you could get, and it didn’t cost much to get it.”

  “Culture changed, too,” Maureen Conner said. “Voters stopped being offended when an opponent dug into someone’s life. The Clinton years made a difference. Tolerance for this has just gone up from there.”

  “And then there’s the money,” said Robinson. “There’s a hell of a lot more of it to spend digging up dirt on your opponent.”

  “Why?” asked Liu.

  “Because campaign finance reform backfired, like it always does,” Robinson said. “People found new loopholes. And then the Supreme Court opened the floodgates with decisions that allowed independent groups to spend any amount they wanted—decisions that equated money and speech.”

  Brooks, the good lawyer, apparently felt a need to summarize. “So the Web made oppo easier. The culture got meaner. And the courts opened the money gates. There’s no stopping now.” That seemed to take the air from the room.

  “In 1990,” Brooks added, “there were maybe a dozen firms doing opposition research in the whole country. By 2000, there were about fifty. Today, there are hundreds—probably 150 in D.C. alone.”

  That was enough school for now, Brooks thought. She broke them up into their teams—one for Upton’s early life through college, law school, and the military. A second on her move into politics and her policy positions as a congressperson and senator, looking for enemies. A third would look at her campaigns for the House and then the Senate, looking for clues of enemies there.

  It was a little after three in the afternoon. They would work all night. Those who needed to would make arrangements at home.

  “We’ll reconvene at nine tomorrow morning,” Brooks said. “Grab whatever sleep you need to put in a very long day tomorrow. And the next few days, too.”

  As people filed out, Rena and Brooks stayed behind.

  “You okay with this?” he asked. He meant helping a Republican.

  “Hell, yeah,” she said. Something about Upton’s story energized her. “Upton wants to fight back against this kind of blackmailing crap? We need to make these fuckers pay.” It was a game effort. Her smile faded quickly. Something about Upton’s story also depressed her. “You?”

  Rena had complicated feelings about doing political work that steered too close to campaigns. Those feelings were made more complicated by his relationship with Vic Madison in California, who found politics ugly and degrading. Rena didn’t love politics the way Brooks did. He worked in it ambivalently, and he disliked the term fixer. But the more Vic pushed him, the more Rena realized he was drawn by the work they did for public officials, the work Vic wanted him to stop doing. Vic’s pressure was having the opposite effect than she wanted, and Brooks wondered if now this assignment would draw Rena further into politics and perhaps pull Rena and Vic further apart, even break them up. Rena had never wanted to be a consultant or a fixer. He had wanted to be a soldier, married to Katie Cochran, the sister of his West Point roommate. He wanted to have a family and to command soldiers and defend his country. He was forty-two and very little in his life had turned out as he had planned. He was confused by that, and by people admiring and praising his skills for something he wasn’t sure was a job at all—cleaning up the messes of powerful people in a dirty town. “Sweeping up after the circus,” he sometimes called it.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “If Upton wants to fight, let’s fight for her.”

  That earned him a Brooks smile.

  “You know she’s a Republican,” he teased.

  “These days? Barely.”

  “And if we find something that disqualifies her?”

  “What disqualifies someone for public office these days?” she said.

  Rena raised a bottle of water. “To the wisdom of the public.”

  “We toasting it?”

  He shook his head. “Just betting the future of the country on it.”

  Ten

  Georgetown

  Bill McGrath’s office in Georgetown was hard to find and inconvenient to get to.

  Georgetown offered the best views in the city. But a half century earlier, residents here had refused the subway, and now traffic was so thick, it was usually faster to walk here than drive. Most Washingtonians kept their distance, leaving the neighborhood to tourists, commuters, and residents. Having your offices in the maze of colonial alleys and limited parking was a signal you didn’t need to be easy to find; clients would get to you anyway. Georgetown was an attitude.

  The offices of McGrath, Garrity, Cashen, and Dunne offered only initials on the door: MGCD. There was no expensive art on the walls to impress visitors, nor pictures in the lobby of the presidents, senators, governors, and foreign dictators who’d been clients. There was only the bustle of people, mostly young and attractive, hurrying from one apparently urgent meeting to another.

  A head-turning young blonde with Ivy League poise greeted them from behind a teak reception desk. A first job out of Yale or Brown, Rena thought, the child of someone with connections.

  They were there to see Bill McGrath, Brooks said. The young woman spoke into a headset.

  A few minutes later another blonde, a little older but just as striking, met them in the lobby, introduced herself as McGrath’s personal assistant, and led them to a corner office down the hall. The view was breathtaking, the Kennedy Center and Watergate through one window, the knot of high-rises in Rosslyn, Virginia, through the other.

  A big man in an open dress shirt and cowboy boots rose from behind a messy desk. “Peter Rena! Randi Brooks!”

  The bellowing voice was exhausted and hoarse.

  A political consultant in season, working nonstop and sleeping little.

  Brooks extended an uneasy hand in greeting: she and McGrath were not friends but old antagonists, back when she helped Democrats get their appointees Senate confirmed and McGrath tried to block them.

  He was an ad-making political consultant, which was different from a general campaign strategist, a pollster, or a get-out-the-vote technician. Ad makers specialized in “messaging,” distilling ideas and arguments into simple language that could be delivered in fifteen or thirty seconds and, more important, might convey subtextual messages that went much deeper and had the power to persuade. Properly shot, a soldier or a salute or a flag could be a trigger for long-held political feelings in a voter’s mind that lingered long after the ad was over. It was a scandalously profitable game, usually a 15 percent commission on top of “the buy,” the amount a campaign spent placing a given TV “spot.” The system encouraged candidates to buy far more TV spots than anyone wanted to see.

  McGrath’s real gift, however, was his knowledge of the American voter. A blue-collar kid from California, he’d worked on local campaigns since high school. He was nearly finished with his Ph.D. in political science from Michigan when he decided he knew swing voters better than any scholar he’d ever met. He’d grown up with them in San Jose, pored over the data about them in his campaign work, talked to them in focus groups, sat in their kitchens, messaged them in ads, and then watched their reaction show up in the numbers. They were as familiar to him as family.

  “We appreciate your seeing us,” Rena said. “We know how busy you must be.”

  McGrath waved his hand as if it were nothing. “You said I would regret it if I didn’t. What could I do?” A mischievous grin. “You’re a manipulative bastard, Peter.”

  He pointed them to visitors’ chairs in front of his desk, not one of his couches—a sign the meeting would be brief—and moved back behind his desk.

  Now in his late fifties—no longer the boy genius of the GOP—McGrath wore a graying goatee and his blond hair, thinning, long in back; he was loud and brash and charming and always moving—hands fiddling, eyes dancing. It was hard to take your eyes off him.

  Rena
waited until McGrath had sat down and begun to fidget again before saying anything:

  “Bill, will you promise that nothing we talk about leaves this room, including our ever being here?”

  That earned a sly smile from McGrath, followed by a shrug.

  “I want a verbal commitment,” Rena said. “Because we need your brain to help us stop something terrible from happening. Something that could distort who becomes the next president.”

  McGrath leaned back and folded his arms. No more smile.

  Rena had just set a trap. McGrath could tell them to leave, but that would mean he wouldn’t learn their tantalizing secret. Or he could keep listening, which would mean he had tacitly agreed to Rena’s condition of confidentiality.

  McGrath’s eyes held Rena’s. “I heard you were the most dangerous fucking interrogator in the army in your day.”

  “I’ll take that as partial consent,” Rena said. “Do you have any commitments in the presidential race that prohibit you from helping us?”

  For consultants, presidential campaigns were aggravating and messy. There were too many advisers in every meeting; almost every campaign ended in failure; afterward blame got sprayed around like Agent Orange. A young consultant could help make his or her reputation in a presidential campaign, but veterans like McGrath tried to avoid them.

  “Not for money,” McGrath said. “Just offering free advice, if anyone asks.”

  “Then if we pay you, do we have your counsel in confidence?”

  McGrath leaned forward. “Tell you what. I’ll give you the lay of the land. And you have my word whatever you tell me remains in confidence. Just because I’m intrigued and amused.”

  “I need to pay you or we’re leaving,” Rena said. “We’re not here for your amusement.”

  “I don’t really do anything anymore unless it amuses me.”

  “You should worry about that,” Rena said. Then he took a notebook from his pocket, wrote something on it, tore out the page and handed it to McGrath.

  It read: “I, Peter Rena, hereby hire Bill McGrath to help me with an assignment that neither he nor I can ever discuss. I will pay him X for these services. If either of us violates this contract, the violator will pay the other ten million dollars.” The X had a space next to it where McGrath could write in an amount.

  Rena had signed it.

  “Do you have ten million dollars?” McGrath asked.

  “You do.”

  Another impish smile. “I’ll charge you a dollar for my services,” McGrath said. “More than they’re worth.” And he signed his name.

  Rena leaned forward and asked: “Who would want to destroy Wendy Upton?”

  Eleven

  McGrath smiled like a leprechaun.

  “So Upton’s being courted to be vice president,” he guessed. “And someone has threatened her. Already.”

  He looked down at his hands as if he just discovered he had stopped fidgeting. “That means whoever’s threatening Wendy is afraid she could help someone win the nomination.”

  It had taken McGrath only about fifteen seconds to intuit from Rena’s question what was going on.

  Always having been on the other side, against him, Brooks had never seen McGrath behind the scenes like this. She was impressed.

  “Jesus, she’s a person who commands real respect, isn’t she?” McGrath said. “Even fear.”

  He was puzzling out the implications. “That’s such a rarity. Genuine respect in politics, it’s like uranium. It can be used for power or destruction.” McGrath turned to Brooks. “She’s hired you to find out who’s threatening her?”

  Rena ignored the question and repeated: “Who would want to destroy Wendy Upton?”

  McGrath popped out of his chair and walked over to a wall of opaque glass that doubled as a whiteboard. On it, he drew two lines in the shape of an L, the axis lines of a graph. Inside the L he drew five circles.

  “This is the modern Republican Party,” he said.

  Rena made a skeptical face.

  “Vertical line is where people are on social issues. The higher you go, the more liberal folks are. Lower, more conservative.”

  He pointed to the horizontal line he had drawn at the bottom of his rough graph. “This is where folks are on government regulation vs. free markets. Further right, the more distrust of government. Closer in, the more tolerant they are of it.”

  He had drawn circles in every part of the graph.

  “So you can see, Randi, the GOP is a lot more diverse than you liberals think. We’re not all white, or working class or racist.”

  “How does this help us, Bill?” Rena asked.

  “This graph will help you find your blackmailer.”

  “How?” Brooks asked.

  “No one of these circles is big enough to win the nomination by itself.”

  The biggest group McGrath had drawn he’d labeled “Die Hard Conservatives” and written “30%” inside.

  “To win the nomination, a candidate must win their base, vanquishing their natural rival for that group, and also win big chunks of other people’s groups. That’s the trick of the primaries. Win your circle, and enough of other people’s, to make a coalition.”

  “How is this helping us?” Rena asked again impatiently.

  “If we walk through which campaign is fighting for which circle, you will have your suspects and your motive,” McGrath said.

  “The blackmailer may not be a campaign,” Brooks said. “It might be a PAC, or even some donor who hates Upton.”

  “Oh, I’m almost certain it isn’t a campaign,” McGrath said. “Not directly. It might be some crazy asshole inside a campaign going rogue. Or inside a PAC. It might be some insane donor.” He paused and looked at his whiteboard. “But these circles, these voter groups, will give us a motive.”

  “We need names, Bill,” Rena said. “Not theory.”

  “We’ll get there,” McGrath said.

  He moved toward his five circles. “Dick Bakke and Jeff Scott are fighting to win this group.” He pointed to the bottom right, the circle labeled “Die Hard Conservatives.” “They’re the core of the GOP, small government and socially conservative. The religious right is in here.”

  A glance at Rena. “Scott and Bakke are splitting this group. So they both need to pick up big chunks of other circles. Wendy Upton could help either one of them do that. And then the other one would be highly motivated to stop her.”

  That meant, Rena and Brooks both knew, that Michigan governor Jeff Scott, or someone backing him, would be a prime suspect. But so might Bakke if he heard about Traynor.

  McGrath’s eyes twinkled. “But Wendy can help other people, too.”

  He pointed to the circle at the top right, which meant socially liberal but also wary of government, and wrote “Free Market/Libertarians.”

  “This is what’s left of the old liberal northeastern Republican party. Small government, fiscally conservative, but pretty tolerant on social issues. They’re not gone, but they’re geographically dispersed, so people think they’ve vanished. They’re about 25 percent of the party.”

  McGrath said: “Jennifer Lee is fighting with Tony Soto for this group.”

  Lee, the governor of Georgia, was the niece of former president Jackson Lee and the new great hope of the old GOP.

  Soto was the young Latino governor of Nevada, who, if he could win the nomination, some Republicans hoped might woo Hispanics to the GOP and give the party a new direction.

  McGrath said: “If Upton joined with either Bakke or Scott, then Lee and Soto would both be threatened by it. Because Wendy has real appeal with these libertarians. Or if she signed with Soto, let’s say, then Lee would be threatened. And vice versa if she aligned with Lee.”

  “You think Jenn Lee would go that far? Blackmail Upton?” Brooks asked.

  “Not her. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it. But there are a lot people who’ve given her a lot of money, and they’d pay even more to stop Scott and Bakke. Thes
e folks, a lot of them on Wall Street and even some Silicon Valley folks, worry their party is being hijacked by populists. They hate Bakke. And they fear Scott.”

  “That include Steve Unruh?” Brooks asked.

  Steve Unruh was the political guru who had built the Lee dynasty and now financed Jenn Lee through his super PAC. He’d raised a lot of money, but he wasn’t getting much for it.

  “Maybe,” McGrath said.

  He turned back to his graph. At the top, which meant socially liberal but to the far left, indicating tolerant of government, he had written “Angry Anti-Elites.”

  “These folks here are pretty liberal socially and don’t hate government. They just think it doesn’t work for them anymore. They’re not rich like the free-market libertarians. They’re suffering. They believe the system is rigged against them, and they hate the modern Democratic Party because it abandoned them.” He stared at Brooks. “They’re middle class. They’re my parents.”

  McGrath took a breath. “Scott and Bakke are fighting over this group, same way they’re fighting over die-hard conservatives. They’re the angry candidates, and these are the angry voters. But Wendy has real appeal among these voters, too, because of her renegade biography. So if she aligned with anyone—Scott, Bakke, Soto, even Lee—she would be a threat to all the others.”

  That gave Soto and Lee as much reason to fear Upton as it did Scott, thought Rena.

  In the circle at the bottom left McGrath had written “Nativists/Preservationists.”

  “These folks down here are pissed, too, but they blame immigrants and the global economy for taking away their jobs rather than the government. They’re angry about political correctness and feel like people of color get too much of a break. They’re close to what liberals think of as the white working-class stereotype, but hey, these people used to be Democrats. They live everywhere, and they make up about 20 percent of the GOP vote. When liberals say the GOP is racist, this is who you elitists have in mind. But it’s a crutch for liberals. You disagree with me. You must be a racist and a misogynist.”