Storm Front

CHAPTER 8

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Roughly twenty miles away from the Storm ancestral home, just a short trip down Interstate 66 and across Constitution Avenue, Senator Donald Whitmer (R-Alabama) was pacing around his corner office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. And he was fuming.

Ordinarily, there was only one thing that would get Donny Whitmer this mad, and that was if the Alabama Crimson Tide football team somehow lost.

Jack Porter had unwittingly stumbled on a second.

“You’re wrong,” Whitmer roared at Porter. “Goddamnit, that’s impossible.”

Porter was a pollster. The best. A pro’s pro, he had been around for twenty years and had developed statistical methodologies that would be the envy of Gallup, Quinnipiac, and every other public pollster out there — if only they knew them. He had advised the election efforts of sitting presidents — and future presidents — congressmen, senators, pretty much anyone who could afford to pay his rates.

This was the third campaign Porter had worked for the Alabama senator. In the first two his information had been dead-on. Months out, he had identified areas of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses with voters that allowed Whitmer’s campaign to tailor its message and target its delivery. In the closing weeks, he told Whitmer exactly where to put his resources. His final polling had always turned out to be accurate within one percentage point of the actual election results.

He was a good man. A smart man. An honorable man. And he was never wrong.

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Senator Whitmer yelled.

“I’m sorry, Senator,” Porter said. “But the numbers are what they are.”

Thirteen points down. That’s what Porter was trying to tell him. But there was just no way he was thirteen points down. He was Donny Whitmer, damn it. As chairman of the all-powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Whitmer was the kind of man who could turn a cabinet member into a fawning sycophant, have a governor crawling on his hands and knees, or make a lobbyist jump through a flaming hoop.

During twenty-four years in Washington, Whitmer had become known as a legislator who could untie the purse strings of government and sprinkle gold on just about anything. He had delivered for his constituency countless times, the undisputed king of the pork barrel project. There were not only bridges to nowhere in some parts of Alabama, there were bridges from no-where, an even more impressive feat. There wasn’t a pet project he couldn’t get funded, even if it was just relatively small potatoes. Two hundred grand for a children’s museum. Four hundred for some small city park. Eight hundred to preserve some historical landmark.

It didn’t take much, relatively speaking, to make people feel like they owed you forever. And Donny had been doing it for years. Now silver-haired and seventy, he still considered himself at the peak of his powers. He was listed at number nine in Washington Magazine’s “Hundred Most Powerful People in D.C.” He hadn’t been out of the top twenty in years.

So there was no way, just no goddamn way, that he was thirteen points down — in a primary no less — to some Bible-thumpin’ Tea Party asshole.

“But that’s… What in the hee-haw hell is going on down in that state of mine?”

Porter lifted a thick white binder off his lap and turned the pages in chunks until he arrived at the section he needed. “These are your numbers among nondenominational Christians. You’re green. He’s red.”

Porter held up a page in which the red bar stretched conspicuously farther than the green bar.

“Holy Mother of God,” Whitmer said.

“Here are the Baptists,” Porter said, turning one sheet over to reveal a page that looked identical to the last.

“Oh, sweet Jesus.”

“The Methodists look like this,” Porter said. The bars were slightly closer in length, but red still easily outdistanced green.

“And here are the Episcopalians,” Porter finished, holding up another page that was nothing but bad news for the senator.

“Since when the hell do Episcopalians give a crap about religion?” Whitmer demanded. “Oh, Jesus Christ, what about the atheists?”

“Ah… they’re all Democrats, sir.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sick of talking about the damn Jesus freaks,” Whitmer said. “They’re going with that Tea Party sumbitch. I get it. Let’s talk geography. There’s got to be somewhere in the state I’m doing well. Maybe we can build on that.”

Porter nodded, turning chunks of pages in his binder until he reached the right place.

“Okay, we’ve done some county-level work. If you want us to go finer than that, we can, but that’s going to add to that estimate I gave you,” Porter said.

“County is fine,” Whitmer said.

“Okay. You’re doing better in the southern part of the state. Mobile and Baldwin Counties still remember all you did after the BP spill.”

“Damn right,” Whitmer boomed. “And well they should. There’s two hundred thousand people in Mobile. Maybe we just got to make sure they get out and vote.”

“Well, I said you were doing better there. I didn’t say you were winning it. It’s pretty much a dead heat.”

“Oh,” Whitmer said.

“I’d still recommend a strong get-out-the-vote effort there,” Porter said.

“Of course.”

“Now, those are areas of relative strength. Areas of weakness are, well, here. You can see for yourself. Again, you’re the green shades. He’s the red shades. Statistical ties are gray.”

Porter held up a page with a map of Alabama. There was a green patch in Marengo, the senator’s home county. There was some gray along the southern coast. Otherwise, the whole map was awash in varying shades of red. The more rural, the more red. Some areas were practically magenta.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Whitmer said again. He reached in his drawer and pulled out a flask of vodka. He had a luncheon to attend and didn’t want to smell like bourbon.

“Well, it’s interesting you should put it that way, because I have to tell you, some of those Christian voters we polled mentioned your tendency toward blaspheming. You might want to curtail…”

“Goddamnit, don’t tell me how to talk, boy,” Whitmer said. “Just tell me what to do about those thirteen goddamned points.”

“A scandal would do nicely, sir,” Porter said, evenly. “Set him up with a whore, leak pictures to the press.”

Whitmer was already shaking his head. “We tried that before we even knew he was this big a threat. Didn’t work. The sumbitch has too much Jesus in him. He chastised the woman for trying to seduce a married man, lectured her about the sanctity of marriage, then actually got her to pray with him. Last I heard, she was volunteering in his campaign office and going to his damn church.”

Porter absorbed this for a moment. “Well, then there’s only one thing that’s going to do the trick: money. It’s getting late in the game, but it’s not too late. If you were to launch a major advertising blitz — from Huntsville to Birmingham to Mobile to every small town in between — you’ll be able to take the guy’s legs out from under him. But you’ll have to go negative, real hard and real fast.”

“Yeah,” Whitmer said. “Yeah, you know, I like the sound of that. Tell people he’s Jewish. Airbrush a yarmulke on him. Better yet, Muslim. Or gay. How much do I need?”

“How much do you have in your war chest?”

“A million two.”

“Not enough,” Porter said. “You’re talking about a double-digit disadvantage. You’ll need at least five million to move the needle.”

“Jesus,” Whitmer said.

Forget vodka. Whitmer went over to the highball glasses he kept in the bookcase along the far wall. He opened up a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Clyde May’s Conecuh Ridge Alabama Style Whiskey, poured himself three fingers, and downed it in one gulp.

“Want some?” he asked.

“No, thank you, Senator.”

“You got any good news to tell me?”

“No, Senator.”

“Then you best be moving on.”

As Porter departed, Whitmer paced around his office, unable to believe this turn of events. It was six weeks to go until the primary. Whitmer hadn’t even bothered paying for polling before this, because there seemed to be no point — surely, no one was taking this Tea Party asshole seriously.

And now it looked like Whitmer’s political life was at stake. Was his constituency really turning on him like this? Was he really going to have to pack up his life in Washington and head back to Alabama in shame and defeat, a four-term senator whipped in a primary by a some small-town deacon? Was he really going to be another in a long line of victims of this Tea Party nonsense?

No. Not Donny Whitmer.

He gripped the Clyde May, practically ripped off the cap, and didn’t bother with the formality of a glass this time. He poured a long swallow down his throat.

He just had to think of a way to come up with five million dollars.

His mind soon struck not on an idea but a man. He was a man who owed him a favor. A big favor. A five-million-dollar favor, perhaps.

Whitmer was so excited, he sat down and wrote the man’s name down on a legal pad. Lately, he had been getting more forgetful — particularly when he was agitated — and he found that writing things on his legal pad, in neat block letters, helped him keep his thoughts straight, especially when he came back to them later.

He looked down at the name and smiled.