He knows exactly how to stride out onto the low podium. The lights which I instructed to be dimmed provide so little illumination that the crowd seems to have no end, merging at its edges into the generically beige walls and pale mud carpets of the hotel ballroom. For a moment I am distracted, worried about the choreography of handshakes and microphone adjustments, but I tune back in, reassured, as the candidate thanks his hosts for the invitation to talk, balancing his passionate gratitude with just the right measure of gravitas.
It’s September 2027. When the Vice-President succeeded the incapacitated former President Trump last year, he was forty-two. My guy had his thirty-second birthday last month and the trick is to make him look like an even more vigorous and determined version of President Vance without suggesting that Vance is lacking in either of those qualities. My guy has to look like he is following close behind Vance, completing the shift from Trump’s angry turbulence to a sense that continued change is as smooth as it is inevitable. His dress style is a tribute to the many focus groups that I have commissioned over the last decade. The color of his shirt, blue, was identified by discussions in Minneapolis and Kentucky. The significance of the particular shade, Pantone 2995C to be precise, emerged from lively focus group exchanges in West Virginia and Pittsburgh where the discussants correctly intuited that darker blues resonate with voters’ views of honest manual labor. A political wardrobe disaster was averted when the focus group reviews I set up in Atlanta and rural Arizona concluded that the negatives of button down collars dramatically outweigh the reassuring familiarity they offered for the cubicle office crowd. I was present when a particularly vocal and charismatic woman in Little Rock had convinced others that bold red and blue stripes on a tie suggest adventure and even hint, cheekily, at the candidate’s hollow and cynical offers of bipartisanship. That single, loyal supporter helped me overcome the objections of the party’s video communications directorate who were concerned that the pattern would blur on mobile devices. The testing I procured in a dozen major urban centers has shown her judgment to be accurate to several decimal places.
I insisted that the candidate be introduced at this Town Hall by a local sheriff whose lack of charisma was a significant and positive variable in my calculation about where the event should be held. The sheriff has managed to ensure that the gun at his hip is never obscured by the lectern. As I intended, he is the perfect vehicle for getting a weapon and a uniform onto the stage. As this dreary nobody’s introduction peters out, the candidate’s booming presence is felt as a relief by the crowd – exactly as I hoped.
The candidate starts, as per his training, with the semblance of choosing his words with care. Our team of coaches has shown him how his perfunctory appeal to ‘my fellow Americans’ and his delight at finding himself in the great state of Ohio could appear to be the result of thoughtful deliberations.
I feel nothing but pride as he visibly seeks to contain powerful emotions of solidarity and concern for his fellow citizens within a few honest words. Under my tutelage, conclusions from the party’s lavishly funded analytics and insights from the absurdly powerful Thiel Large Libertarian Language Model have been digested by the party’s researchers and funneled into the party’s speech coaches who have in turn prepared this rhetorical dish of folksy-straightforwardness.
The speech is followed by wild applause, led by the members of the crowd planted for exactly that purpose. After a few innocuous questions essentially seeking reassurance that the candidate would ensure the continuing return of law and order to a morally and socially recovering nation, it is time for some seemingly tougher challenges to be staged. I selected questioners by race, age, height, gender, clothing style, accent and, crucially, weight using data from ground-breaking surveys in twenty states and, at my insistence, deep implicit association testing in Alabama and California. While the entire country’s computing power remains insufficient to identify older people at risk of hypothermia in the winter or to track the ebbs and flows of illegal guns, I feel personally fulfilled that the party’s software has been able to identify the exact demographics which convey the credibility of the questioners and of the candidate’s heartfelt answers.
An earnest young woman duly asks her scripted question. “I’ve got no health care, no job and no income now, other than what I can earn by occasional babysitting. I’m poor, I’m on my own raising my daughter Elsa, what life choices do I have?” The candidate takes a deep breath and adopts the kindly, avuncular tone I have had him practicing. His initial task is to provide this member of the inquiring public with a long list of newly acquired freedoms as if addressing a short term memory problem. “Thank you mam for that question. I’m going to ask my many friends gathered here today to help me answer you. Who decides whether we get health care or not?” A selected few in the crowd respond with a skillful simulation of shy tentativeness “we choose!” “Who decides where our kids go to school – or whether they go to school?” The cry of “we choose!” comes back again, amped up this time. The candidate lists every victory of the party in removing the jackboot of liberal regulators from the necks of hardworking Americans, noting that each reduction in employment rights, service coverage or in benefits is really a long overdue restoration of the individual’s right to choose.
I am thrilled. He has learned to use my signature pattern of call and response to whip up the crowd into an enthusiastic prayer-meeting. “Who decides how many hours we work and how we manage our pensions?” “We choose!” is shouted back. Genetic testing might show that the need to evangelize about freedom of choice and its central place in the American moral universe is not located within the candidate’s DNA. But his intrinsic motivations really do not matter. It is through my nurturing that his need to pontificate about this particular take on liberty has become as fundamental to his being as his carbon-based life-form’s need for oxygen. As with breathing, it would not have occurred to him to wonder if he believed in his espoused ideology, he just knows that nothing is more important than promoting it.
Now he is standing tall. “Now young lady, you’re poor you say. You ask what life choices you have. You think that you can only get badly paid work. You’re a babysitter, you say. Is that all that you are? Why not be a superstar, outstanding babysitter and get paid for a service that people see as valuable.” The crowd love it. They cheer and wave. I love it. The moment when choreography turns to passion always excites me. The questioner looks apprehensive – she has been tutored by my staff to mimic the appearance of someone who doubts their own position. “Choose to tell us about your successes not about your failures. Are you choosing to improve yourself – are you choosing to learn new approaches and to practice new skills? If you’re not then that’s also your choice, but a bad one.”
My heart leaps as my fledgling gathers his strength. “Young lady, I am going to offer you a deal, an agreement, a righteous compact, which many of my friends here in this hall have heard me offer before, and which they know and love. On my side, here, tonight, I renew my pledge to dedicate my life to ending the tyranny of the bureaucratic class, to remove, to cancel, yes cancel, the arrogant regulators, the hypocritical corporate Marxists, who have imposed restrictions on what you can do and are trying to restrict what you and your daughter think. I will help you become free from the brain-numbing socialization of fragility, the Critical Race Theory wickedness, the heterophobic gender obsessions, all these cruel limitations they have been so devilishly forcing upon us. I will get them off your backs, off your necks, out of your schools and out of your churches. I pledge again to fight on the side of righteousness, shrinking Washington down to a size that the founders would recognize, clearing government and the statute books of all the rules and regulations designed to fool us into thinking that someone other than ourselves is to blame. And, young lady. I ask you for something very simple in return. I ask you to match my promise. I ask you to commit to living in our traditional faith and to commit to taking full responsibility for your own life. I will give you the space and I want you to use that God-given freedom to succeed in the way that only Americans can.”
He has not finished but he pauses for two beats. I am impressed – I have not taught him that. And I did not teach him to end with a shout, powerful and with deep and loving pity for those who had chosen wrongly. “For the sake of you and your daughter, Elsa I think you said is her name. For the sake of you and Elsa, I implore you to choose not to be poor!”
I am left somewhere between proud and bereft. Because of me he no longer needs me. He has flown the nest. I have bred many of them. Some flutter and fail, some are prey for creatures with sharper claws, but this one will soar high.
About the Author:
Nick is a clock-mending, stained glass window-constructing, family and dog-loving, British man, living with his husband, dog and, sometimes, stepson in Washington DC and New York. He retired from the World Bank a few years ago. He is the author of a large number of distinctly dry technical books and papers about governments and their dysfunctions, an output which kept him busy for most of my career.
Nick! What a great piece. So of the time. Navy blue! So many good lines and concepts. And trademark excellent writing!
Loved this. Very clever, and plausible too. Your fellow Unleash Lit writer, AM