Chapter Eleven
Thirty-six days to inauguration, and the story had started, without my quite noticing the exact hour it happened, to have a shape independent of me — sources calling back before I called them, a records officer flagging her own unusual facts before I’d learned to ask the right question, a campaign manager who’d once refused to meet me now returning my texts inside the hour.
I recognized the feeling from the other side of my old career, the strange, slightly vertiginous week when a speech stops being a document you’re building and starts being a thing other people quote back to you as though you hadn’t written every word of it yourself.
Trent called on a Tuesday to ask if I’d want to put questions to him on the record, which was, I understood at once, a strategy in itself — get ahead of a story you can’t stop by handing the reporter a version of you that’s harder to caricature than the one she’d write without you in the room.
“I read your records request,” he said. “Nadia Fenwick’s a straight shooter, so I assume you already know more than you’re supposed to at this stage.
I’d rather you have my actual reasoning than whatever version of it gets assembled out of an unlabeled folder and a records officer’s careful silences. ”
“That’s generous of you.”
“It’s self-interested. I told you the first day I contain multitudes. I’d also add: I’d rather be quoted accurately being wrong than quoted vaguely being sinister, and I’ve watched enough operatives choose the second option to know it never actually protects anyone.”
We met at a coffee shop two exits off the highway, equidistant from both our lives, which felt, by now, like the only kind of meeting either of us knew how to have.
He’d brought a folder of his own, thinner than Adaeze’s, thinner than Walt’s, and set it on the table without opening it, the gesture of a man who wanted me to know it existed before he decided how much of it I’d earned.
“On the record,” I said, phone recording between us, “why does the health-care section need to change?”
“It doesn’t need to change in substance.
I want that said first and I want it quoted first, because everyone who reads this piece is going to skip to the part where I sound like a villain, and I’d like the villain part to at least be accurate.
” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, an unconscious tic I noted and did not mention, because everyone in this story, it turned out, had one.
“The four-point-two million and the eighteen-month timeline are good policy. I’ve read the actuarial work.
I believe it’ll pass, eventually, on its own merits.
What I don’t believe is that it should be the specific, checkable number a brand-new governor puts his name on in the first speech of his term, before a single legislative session has convened. ”
“Why not? It’s the truth. It’s what he promised eleven months ago.”
“Because a promise with a dollar figure and a date attached is a contract, and a governor’s first budget fight is the single worst place to discover you’ve already signed one you didn’t negotiate the terms of.
” He said it evenly, without heat, a man laying out a case he’d made to himself many times before he ever made it to me.
“You know the history here better than I do, probably, since you actually live in this county. Fourteen years ago, Governor Sorensen stood on those same statehouse steps and promised the Ashworth plant would reopen within a year. Specific number of jobs. Specific date. He believed it when he said it — I’ve read his own staff’s memos, he wasn’t lying, the deal fell through in the legislature over an unrelated fight about water rights nobody could have predicted in November.
He spent the next three years being ‘the governor who broke his promise about the plant,’ and every real thing he actually did — a genuinely excellent education bill, a rural broadband program that’s still running today — got filed under a footnote, because the first specific, checkable thing he ever said turned out to be the one thing he couldn’t fully control. ”
I let that sit, because it was, I had to admit, a real argument and not a rationalization dressed as one — the kind of case I’d have respected in anyone else’s draft, the kind I might have made myself, in another life, for another client.
“So your solution is: don’t say anything specific enough to be broken. ”
“My solution is: say the commitment in language that survives a legislative session neither of us can predict the shape of yet, and then spend the actual political capital making the specific version true in year one, instead of spending it on day one just to sound brave on television.” He leaned forward, and for the first time in three conversations, something under the careful operative language sounded like a genuine plea rather than a pitch.
“I am not trying to kill the ER, Mrs. Whitlock — Ashby, I should say, since that’s the byline now, and I mean that as a correction, not a jab.
I am trying to make sure it’s still alive as an actual line item after the first budget fight, instead of becoming a talking point the opposition uses to prove the new governor can’t count. ”
“And if the vague version gets ‘streamlined’ again in year two, and year three, the way every vague promise in the history of this state has gotten streamlined, until there’s no specific number left to hold anyone to?”
“Then you’ll have been right, and I’ll have been wrong, and I’ll say so on the record whenever you’d like me to.
” He said it without flinching, which told me something true about a man I still fundamentally disagreed with.
“I’ve watched this specific failure mode too, for what it’s worth.
I just think I’m watching a different one than you are.
You’re watching a promise get quietly murdered by people who never wanted to keep it in the first place.
I’m watching a promise get weaponized by people who never wanted it kept either, but who’ll be delighted to make its author look like a liar the first time reality doesn’t cooperate with a number he committed to before he’d read a single line of the actual budget. ”
“Can I push on something,” I said, “since you’ve been generous enough to let me push on everything else?”
“That’s what the coffee’s for.”
“You keep describing the specific-commitment version as a risk to Pierce. A liability he inherits if reality doesn’t cooperate.
But the vague version is a risk too — to the people in my county who’ve been driving forty minutes with a hemorrhaging kid in the back seat for three years, on the strength of a specific promise, made in specific language, at a specific rally.
You’re asking me to weigh a risk to your new boss’s future press coverage against a risk to whether somebody’s grandmother survives the drive.
Those aren’t the same size of risk, Trent, even if they sit on the same page of your memo. ”
He didn’t flinch from that either, which I was coming to recognize as maybe his single most consistent quality.
“You’re right that they’re not the same size.
I’d never argue they are, out loud, to anyone, including myself at two in the morning, which is when I actually think about this stuff instead of when I’m getting paid to talk about it.
But I’d ask you to consider that a governor who spends his entire first term fighting a rearguard action to defend one specific number he can’t fully control accomplishes less for your county in the long run than one who has the political capital left, in year three, to actually deliver it, quietly, without ever having made it a referendum on his competence in year one.
” He spread his hands, a gesture I noted without comment, the same reflex everyone in this story seemed to reach for when they’d run out of better arguments and had only the truth of their own uncertainty left.
“I could be wrong. I want that said outright, not hedged. I am not certain of this. I am fairly confident of it, which is a different and much smaller thing, and I’ve built a career on knowing the difference. ”
“Did Pierce see the language change? The version with the ER line cut, or softened. Did he see it and sign off, or did it just happen to him the way things kept happening to him for eleven months without his signature ever quite landing on anything?”
Trent was quiet long enough that the coffee shop’s espresso machine finished a full cycle behind him.
“That’s not a question I’m going to answer for you today,” he said, finally.
“Not because I’m protecting him. Because I don’t actually know the honest answer yet, and I’d rather tell you that plainly than give you a version that sounds better and turns out to be wrong.
I can tell you he’s seen drafts. I can’t tell you what he understood he was agreeing to when he didn’t push back on one. ”
“That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s also not the story yet.
” He closed the folder he’d never opened and slid it, finally, an inch toward me.
“Public schedule for the next two weeks. Every meeting where the inaugural language’s on the agenda, dated, no redactions.
I’m giving it to you because I’d rather you find the real story through the front door than have to break in through a records officer’s careful silences, and because some part of me still believes the specific-commitment approach might be right, even though my whole job right now is arguing the other side of it to a room that doesn’t want to hear it. ”
I turned off the recorder, because what came next wasn’t for the piece. “Why tell me that last part at all?”