Scott Reed thought he was finally going to get his old boss Jack Kemp to endorse Dole. “Quarterback’s coming on board,” Dole said He needed some good news. The polls showed that Forbes was coming on dangerously strong. Nabbing Kemp, the big flat tax advocate, would take some of the wind out of Forbes’s sails, Dole hoped.
Reed had found that nailing endorsements was tricky because Dole would not ask anyone for help outright. That meant Reed had to work out the logistics before the pledge was sealed in a face-to-face meeting between Dole and the endorser. Though Kemp had cautioned Reed that he was not yet committed to Dole, he had dropped enough hints so that Reed felt comfortable proceeding. His plan was that Kemp would announce the endorsement in New Hampshire, where Dole really needed help against Forbes. Without Kemp’s knowledge, Reed arranged through Kemp’s staff to clear Kemp’s schedule for Thursday, February 1, later that week.
Kemp had asked to meet personally with Dole, repeating that he was still undecided about an endorsement. Reed set up a meeting for Tuesday night, January 30. That afternoon Kemp called and said he wanted to bring along Senator Robert Bennett, the Utah Republican who had already endorsed Dole.
Reed was delighted. This was a good omen. Bennett, 62, a tall, wealthy Mormon known for his calmness, was a confidant and friend of both Dole and Reed. That evening the four—Dole, Reed, Kemp and Bennett—met in Dole’s office.
“Let me tell you what bothers me about your campaign,” Kemp said, correcting himself intentionally, “your campaign team. They’ve criticized Steve Forbes for a flat tax.” Kemp was probably the nation’s best known advocate of a flat tax. “You can disagree with the flat tax, but you can’t say it’s going to destroy the home building industry or cause the collapse of the economy because I think the economy will boom. But put that aside, you’re also attacking him for trying to privatize a portion of Social Security for young workers, which I support.” Kemp also repeated his criticism of California’s controversial Proposition 187 that would call for the suspension of government services to “suspected illegal aliens.”
“I don’t want children kicked out of public schools because their name might be Gonzalez or Fong,” Kemp said. “Bob, let’s reform the welfare state, not turn America into a police state.”
Reed couldn’t keep quiet. This was incredible. “You’re not running for president,” he said tersely. Senator Dole was the candidate.
But Kemp had more complaints. “The next thing I know you’ll be attacking Steve for the gold standard.” Kemp favored the gold standard. “What’s left for Jack Kemp?” he added, laughing.
Dole and the others laughed also.
“Jack,” Dole said, “I’m with you on the racial side. You have always wanted the Republicans to reach out to blacks and other minorities and not pull up the drawbridge. I have always tried to keep the party open.”
Bennett said that he thought Forbes was damaging the flat tax by making too many extravagant claims about its impact. “If you eliminate the mortgage deduction overnight, you render about a trillion dollars worth of capital wealth moot,” Bennett said.
Reed said that they wanted Kemp to come to New Hampshire on Thursday to make the endorsement. He defended their attacks on Forbes. Forbes had started the negative advertising, driving Dole’s favorable ratings from 80 percent to 50 percent. “And we had to respond.”
“You have to pull the anti–flat tax ad,” Kemp insisted.
“We have,” Reed said. “We pulled it today.” Would Kemp come to New Hampshire?
Kemp said he was going to have Gingrich write him a letter saying he ought to continue his work on the tax commission and not endorse anyone.
“Jack, you don’t need a letter,” Dole said. “I mean, if that’s what you want to do, that’s what you ought to do.” Kemp was always looking for a way out, Dole thought.
“I promised Steve Forbes I would not endorse you until I gave him a chance to talk to me,” Kemp said to Dole, “and I have to honor that promise. I’m going to meet with him tomorrow night, then we’ll talk again.”
Dole thanked Kemp, who then left with Bennett.
Reed stayed behind with Dole. Time for Dole to stop personal attacks on Forbes, let the advertising and others level the criticism, Reed said. “The campaign’s going to do the job on him,” Reed said. “You don’t need to talk about him anymore.” Dole had to be positive. “Let the campaign do it. It doesn’t look presidential. You’ve got to get back to why do you want to be president.”
Dole agreed.
On Wednesday night, January 31, Forbes met with Kemp in Washington. Forbes was still looking for some reinforcement for his campaign, and he was worried that Kemp might go with Dole. Sitting on one of the blue sofas in Kemp’s office at Empower America, Forbes did not invoke Kemp’s earlier promise of support. He just said that he wanted Kemp’s formal, public endorsement.
“You’ve got my undying support for the ideas,” Kemp said.
“Jack,” Forbes said, “these are all your ideas.”
“Thank you,” Kemp said, “and you answer questions about them better than I ever did on my best day.”
Forbes waved off the compliment.
“I’m troubled by two or three things,” Kemp continued. The Forbes campaign ads were not worthy of the Lincoln wing of the Republican Party, Kemp said. The harsh, negative advertising would make it harder to unite the party, which was splintering into factions like the Balkans.
“It’s a necessary evil,” Forbes replied. He was running on ideas, Kemp’s ideas—tax cutting. Nothing in the ads was inaccurate, he said.
“Look,” Kemp said, “if you’re accusing Bob Dole of voting for a bicycle path in an appropriations bill for Florida, you know maybe I voted for it too. Who knows? I may have voted for my own pension plan at one time. I don’t even know. I can’t remember, but I voted for 1,000 appropriations bills.”
Forbes tried not to get defensive. He was aware that Kemp identified with at least a part of Washington, and that he didn’t like Forbes’s implied criticism.
“I don’t like calling politicians dinosaurs,” Kemp said. “To me it’s ad hominem, and it’s not like you. You’re a man of ideas.”
Forbes insisted it was the reality of trying to get the nomination. His campaign also had to run the ads to keep other people from rising in the polls.
“Let me ask you a question,” Kemp said. “What if the amigos”—Gingrich, several others from Congress and Kemp—“came to you, and you had won the nomination, and we say we think the party platform has to be a little broader than just a pure flat tax? We’ve got to get working men and women into this mix.” Suppose they suggested that working people be allowed to deduct their payroll Social Security tax? “What would you tell us?” Kemp asked, smiling.
“I would tell you all that I got the nomination on the flat tax and that I was going to run on it,” Forbes answered.
“I admire that,” Kemp said, “but these are not impractical politicians you’d be talking to.”
Forbes held his ground. Even if the legislative mill changed his plan, if he couldn’t defend the flat tax and explain it, his campaign would be lost before it started, he said. And if he won the nomination, how the hell did he win millions of primary voters if his idea was so bad?
The session ended inconclusively.
About 9 P.M., after the meeting, Kemp and Reed spoke.
“I’m not ready to go,” Kemp said.
“We need you now,” Reed said. “We don’t need you in two weeks, we don’t need you in three weeks.”
“Don’t force me to do this,” Kemp said, “you’re trying to force me.”
“Jack, I’m giving you friendly, sound advice. This is the time to do it. Any other time, it’s not going to be important.”
“Well, I’m not ready to do it,” Kemp said. He said he had a commitment to attend the National Prayer Breakfast the next morning.
“You can miss the prayer breakfast,” Reed said. He had a Federal Express plane chartered to take Kemp to New Hampshire. “We could go up at 8 A.M., put together an event?”
“This would be a real feather in your cap,” Kemp said.
“I don’t need a feather in my cap,” Reed replied. “My cap’s fine right now. This is to help you.”
No, Kemp said, he wasn’t going.
Reed reported to Dole that it was no go.
“Last time we’re dealing with the Quarterback,” Dole said harshly.
Without Kemp, the Dole campaign needed something. A Boston Globe poll just out showed that Forbes was 9 percentage points ahead of Dole in New Hampshire, 31 to 22, though Dole remained ahead in several other polls. Reed and Lacy had Governor Steve Merrill, the most popular politician in the state, cut a 30-second television ad attacking Forbes. “The Steve Forbes income tax plan increases the deficit and raises our taxes,” Merrill said in the ad. “The typical New Hampshire household will pay $2,000 more in taxes.” Lacy and his research department had got it wrong again. Because of the exemptions for adults and children in Forbes’s plan, families with low incomes—the typical New Hampshire household mentioned in the ad—would actually pay much less tax. This was pointed out in the news media.
Reed was left again to wonder why the ads were so screwed up. “Our advertising has sucked,” he said. “It has been wrong.” He again, however, knew that pulling the ad would draw more attention to the screw-up. Merrill was calm and willing to stick to what he had said, and he cited the statistics that many people would pay higher taxes under the Forbes plan.
Dole also wondered about the ads. Why was the research so poor? “I don’t think it’s spectacular,” he had said of even their best ads. He hadn’t seen any that just knocked him off his feet. “We’ve got to do better,” Dole said. “We need the world’s best people.” He thought he had made that request 50 times.
Kemp read about the flat tax ad. Instead of his endorsement, Dole was running an attack ad. He talked to Reed.
“Oh, man,” Kemp said, “I’m glad I wasn’t in New Hampshire because I would have said ‘Pull the ad’ in public.” The ad again put Dole on the side of defending the status quo, opposing change and new ideas.
“We had to do it,” Reed explained. “We were getting hammered by Forbes, and we had to take him on frontally.”
“You guys have made a mistake,” Kemp said. They ought to take the suggestion that Dick Morris had made in the leaked memo about the popularity of a budget deal.
Reed was growing increasingly worried. Every morning he and Lacy had a conference call with their media consultant Stuart Stevens and the pollster Bill Mclnturff. The call often lasted an hour or an hour and a half, and the pollsters were constantly asking: Now what ad do we have in rotation? It hit Reed. Why didn’t the pollsters know what ads were on TV? How could they analyze the impact of the ads? Reed decided to act on his own without Lacy’s knowledge. He contacted Tony Fabrizio, a pollster doing some work for the campaign and an attack specialist who had had a hand in the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ads that helped George Bush win the presidency.
“Go in and take a snapshot in New Hampshire for us,” Reed told Fabrizio. He didn’t trust the babble he was getting. “Don’t tell anybody. I’ll pay you as a consultant; no one will know it was paid for survey research so it doesn’t cause alarm.”
Reed had to face it. His team wasn’t working. He did not have confidence in his own guys, and the realization made him sick. Fabrizio’s results came back a few days later: Dole and Forbes were tied in New Hampshire 26 to 26.
Pat Buchanan was not getting on the radar screen enough, and he didn’t have the money for much television advertising. He was running in single digits in Iowa polls. He decided to make a virtue of necessity and take Phil Gramm’s strategy and try to beat him with it. They were fighting for the same hard-line social conservatives. For some time Gramm had been working his neighboring state of Louisiana, which had decided to get ahead of Iowa with the first caucus. Dole, Forbes and Alexander had declined to participate in Louisiana. Buchanan decided to take on Gramm there and began campaigning hard in search of attention and momentum.
On Tuesday, February 6, Republicans voted. Twenty-one delegates were up for grabs. In the worst-case scenario, Gramm figured he would get 15 of the 21. But when the voting was complete, Buchanan had won 13 and Gramm only 8. Though only some 5 percent of the registered Republicans had voted, and the margin of victory was only 2 percent or 1,000 votes, Gramm had been hit hard.
“Well, hell, I’m out of the race,” Gramm said privately to an adviser. “Can we come back from this?” The newspapers used words like “devastating,” “crushing” and “near-fatal.”
Dole held his tongue on Forbes for a while. But soon he started bashing Forbes on the campaign trail as the rich guy trying to buy the presidency. Nelson Warfield tried to cool Dole down.
“Senator,” Warfield said, “that was a great speech we gave on the issue, but what they’re going to write about is the Forbes attack.”
“Well, he deserves to be attacked,” Dole snapped.
Warfield called his 911, campaign headquarters, knowing there was only so much police work he could manage alone on the campaign trail. “The only goddamn news we made was attacking Forbes,” Warfield reported, “frequently in very class-conscious terms.”
Governor Merrill talked to Dole about the importance of leaving Forbes to others. Mari Will was sent out to try to help redirect Dole to the positive. Warren Rudman phoned in, “Now, Bob, all I can say is just stay totally positive and let us take on Forbes.”
The Dole campaign set up an operations center on the third floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Iowa the weekend before the February 12 caucus vote. On the night before the vote, Reed was sitting around in the staff room throwing a fit about their failure to move off the defensive. “We have to do something,” he yelled.
Mike Glassner, Dole’s personal aide, opened an envelope he said had been handed to him by some man earlier in the day. It was a copy of a 26-page confidential polling memo done for Forbes months earlier that suggested a road map for attacking Dole, and it included some polling questions that were negative about Dole. “What do you like least about Bob Dole?” was one question. Forbes was currently generating a lot of press by attacking Dole for similar polling, and Reed was very worried that their campaign was looking too negative.
Reed was ecstatic. “Beep the King,” he said, referring to John King, the chief political correspondent for the Associated Press. They invited King over. He was the favored avenue of tips and leaks because his stories disseminated at once on the national wire to all newspapers, radio and television stations. They got a couple of six-packs of beer and tried to figure out the meaning of the memo.
King soon had a 1,000-word exclusive story on the wire suggesting Forbes did exactly what the Dole campaign had done. Reed and Warfield pushed the story hard to the network reporters late into the night, figuring they had hit gold. But the story had no legs.
Forbes was furious and felt helpless against King’s story about the old memo. To make what the Dole campaign was doing days before the caucuses the moral equivalent of a seven-month-old poll to gather information was outrageous, Forbes felt. But he had much bigger problems. He was in a freefall.
The final Des Moines Register poll had Dole at 28 percent, with Forbes at 16 and Buchanan at 11. Dole’s Sunday overnight polling came in showing that Dole had nearly 35 percent, with Forbes, Buchanan and Alexander all at about 12 or 13 percent each.
The numbers were too good to pass to Dole, Reed concluded. But the staff was feeling cocky. They had killed Forbes. Buchanan and Alexander were going nowhere. Gramm, once thought formidable, seemed dead. No one had traction, and they were going to hit in the mid-30s or better.
Dole went to bed about 10:15 P.M. Sunday night and was up at 7 A.M. the day of the caucus. He made a number of campaign stops, and later in the afternoon I interviewed him for about 45 minutes. He was in a great mood. He knew Forbes was dropping. “He had money and message,” Dole said, speaking of Forbes in the past tense as if he were gone. “And not a bad message,” he said, adding with a twinkle, “but I think the message has been muzzled a little bit.”
The television networks polled people as they were going into the caucus meetings, and right after 7 P.M. Iowa time, the first numbers appeared on the computers. The Associated Press story by John King hit the wires at 7:03 P.M and began, “Bob Dole won a clear-cut victory…”
Dole was riding up in the elevator at a school where he had dropped by for a precinct caucus meeting. King reached Warfield by cellular phone with the first numbers from the exit polls—35 percent for Dole, 19 for Buchanan and all the others less. Warfield repeated them to Dole.
Sounds pretty good, Dole said, and then he was very quiet. His first reaction was to call his sister Norma Jean, who was in the hospital, and tell her not to worry. He was at 35 percent.
Immediately, Warfield drafted a statement for Dole to issue. Dole edited it. “Please do include ‘if these polls hold up,’” he said. They all went back to the Hotel Fort Des Moines and up to Dole’s suite where there was lots of happiness, smiles, back slapping, even euphoria, though by this time he had dropped to 33 in the exit polls.
A pleased Elizabeth gave her husband a big kiss. She was proud of the way he had weathered the attacks. All the negative ads would have made her pretty livid, but he had been steady and had handled the criticism very well.
Lacy said these numbers were early and Dole’s 33 percent would probably go down even more.
Dole nodded. He turned to the television but there were no results on TV yet.
Warfield phoned for more numbers. Dole had slipped down to 29 then 28, and Buchanan was rising to 20 then 21, then 22 and closing, all within an hour. Will watched as Dole’s face grew darker and darker and darker. More and more tension. Fewer and fewer people were hanging around Dole’s suite.
The Doles ordered dinner from room service.
Television was still offering no results, but Dole began surfing with the remote control. The other candidates were on the air criticizing Dole. At one point Lamar Alexander was on Larry King Live, and Dole hurriedly snapped him off. Lacy knew Dole well enough to see that he was in a minor rage, though visibly keeping the cap on his emotions.
Now the numbers showed Buchanan up to 23 percent and Dole at 27 percent, still dropping. John King’s AP stories had pulled back from the “clear-cut victory” to “shaky.”
Mari Will too could see Dole was upset and angry, was thinking and brooding. She knew that at such times he was capable of doing anything. She worried about what he was going to do next, what he was going to say.
“It’s a win, Senator,” she said, trying to lift his spirits.
Dole looked up. He was not going to let Will or anyone be happy about it. She realized they had to find a way to get him out of this funk. He was going to have to go downstairs to the ballroom and make a statement. She had reminded him many times that his face was an open book. He could wage the war of his emotions on his face for all to see. “Use your words to control your thoughts because otherwise everything that you’re feeling is going to be on your face,” she had told him. That’s why Will was always careful to remove harsh words from written speeches because Dole’s face would reflect and even amplify the harshness. Tonight he was going to have to put on a brave face before the television cameras. How could they loosen him up?
Earlier in the day, Dole had appeared on a radio show and the host had played the famous song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from the musical Carousel. Dole had wept on hearing the song, which he had played 30 to 40 times a day when he was recovering from his war wounds. Will figured the song might soften him up a little bit if it was played as he walked to the podium to make his statement later that night. Better tears than anger. Elizabeth thought it was a good idea.
Warfield proposed they allow TV cameras in the suite to show Dole watching the results of his victory, which were now on television.
No, Dole said. He went into the bedroom with Elizabeth. “This may be bad news,” he said, “because if Forbes continues to spend heavily, he may succeed.” Though Buchanan was clearly the big winner of the night with a second-place finish, Dole was blaming Forbes for his own poor showing. Forbes wouldn’t win, but the barrage could drive Dole down further in the coming primaries.
“Oh, come on,” she said to her husband, “we’ve won. Come on. Let’s go.”
The vote stabilized with Dole at 26 percent and Buchanan at 23 percent. A win by less than 3,000 votes, no 10- or 15-point victory. They were separated by 3 percent. In 1988, Dole had beaten Bush 37 to 18, and Bush had gone on to win the nomination and the presidency.
Will wrote out some remarks making a reference to the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and went over them with Dole. He finally agreed to go downstairs after 9 P.M. The master of ceremonies had worked the crowd up and they were cheering, “We want Bob! We want Bob!”
The song was playing as Dole walked on stage, and he kept his composure. If tension could be bottled, he would have kept a bottling plant busy all night. Stiffly, he read a five-minute speech. “Thank you, Iowa,” he said, trying vainly to drum up enthusiasm. “It’s twice in a row. We withstood a barrage of millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of negative advertising and came out on top.” Loud cheers from the audience.
Afterwards Elizabeth told him, “A victory’s a victory, you know, upward and onward and move on.”
Scott Reed was astonished that the surge had come from Buchanan. The undecided Christian conservative voters apparently all had gone to Buchanan. They had expected a two-man race out of Iowa but not with him. Okay, Reed figured, it was going to be a race against Buchanan now. It could be worse. It was time to hunker down. They had planned a tight thematic schedule for Dole the next week before the New Hampshire primary, which should answer the criticism that Dole didn’t have a message. Reed didn’t want an out-of-control candidate wandering around New Hampshire, showing up at shopping malls, saying whatever came into his mind, as Dole often did.
On the plane that night for the flight to New Hampshire, Dole and Elizabeth sat in the front. There was a big competition among the rest to see who could sit in the back of the plane.
What did it mean? Dole asked himself. He had wanted to go into New Hampshire with a big head of steam, and now he wouldn’t. In his view, Buchanan was never going to be the nominee. His base was not broad enough. Dole was worried about someone from the center like Lamar Alexander breaking through. Alexander had finished with 18 percent in Iowa, only 5 behind Dole.
Tom Synhorst, the genius of 1988, had predicted 45,000 to 65,000 votes for Dole. The actual vote for Dole had been only 25,000. Overall voter turnout had been much lower than expected, lower than 1988, and the negative advertising had no doubt turned many people off and kept them from the polls. But that wasn’t a good enough explanation. What had happened? No one had a very good answer. What was with the crazy overnight polling showing Dole ahead 35 to 12? Again no good answer.
Dole asked for the speech Will had drafted for his address the next day to the New Hampshire legislature. He read it for about ten minutes.
“Any other speeches back there?” he said, throwing the draft over his shoulder. He was tired of getting the speeches so late, almost as he was walking to the podium, it seemed. This speech was too partisan to deliver to the legislature, which included lots of Democrats.
Mari Will was insulted, upset that he would treat her so badly.
On the plane Dole began to take the speech apart. What about that speech he had given to the legislature in one of the Dakotas? It was about trusting state legislatures. He wanted a copy of that now. Kerry Tymchuk, an aide in the Majority Leader’s Office, was rousted out of bed at 1 A.M. A copy was finally faxed to Dole’s hotel in New Hampshire at 4 A.M. and an alternative draft developed. That seemed to pacify Dole for a while. But he didn’t sleep well.
Reed had been working to bring Don Sipple into a more central role in the campaign. Sipple had met with Dole several months earlier to get the chemistry straight, and it had been okay, but Sipple was a fifth wheel. Reed wanted Sipple to conceptualize a general election. But the Dole team, Sipple judged, clearly was not ready to frame the issues on the evening television news each day—a necessity for the coming general election. He deemed them tactical and defensive. They needed to find out what the country and the voters thought were Clinton’s weaknesses, and begin systematically to underscore them. But this campaign didn’t seem to have an overall strategy. Lacy was spending most of his time discussing individual television spots. Issues for the ads seemed to be selected from a Chinese restaurant menu, without any overall strategy.
“Let’s not think of a spot,” Sipple told the others, “let’s think of a plan.” They had to talk about all the spots and work backwards to make sure they had assembled the strongest possible case for Dole. Dole was coming off as old and stale and dull—not strong and fresh as Reagan had. In reply to his suggestions Sipple received blank stares, or was told by Lacy that decisions had already been made. Governor Merrill privately called Sipple “the campaign’s mistress.”
Finally, Sipple told Reed, “Until I have some responsibility or authority or I’m empowered to do something, I can’t emotionally invest in this campaign. It’s too maddening to me. I mean, you give them an idea, they screw it up. These are children.”
Reed said he wanted some wins under his belt before he made any changes in the campaign team, and Iowa wasn’t a real victory.
The day after Iowa, February 13, Sipple wrote a one-page memo to Reed. “I am very concerned that our campaign is making a strategic and tactical mistake vis-à-vis Buchanan. It is my view that Lamar is our problem…. The last plausible potential nominee is Lamar. We need to nail him and nail him in New Hampshire.” Sipple had looked at the Iowa exit polling, which showed that Alexander had drawn from Dole’s natural voter base. By contrast there was a limit to Buchanan’s base. A two-front war on both Buchanan and Alexander would not be possible in the remaining week before the New Hampshire vote. “We’ve got 12 hours to make the right call,” he said in the memo.
Reed took the memo to Lacy. “Is this right?” he asked. “Maybe he’s right.”
It took Lacy several days to agree, and even when he did, there was no negative ad ready to attack Alexander. It took another day to come up with one.
Dole had reached the same conclusion as Sipple about the real threat coming from Alexander, but he and Sipple weren’t in direct contact. Dole’s speech to the legislature the next day, Tuesday, February 13, was routine, some of it new and some old, as he mentioned his life story, his war wound and his values. Phil Gramm’s campaign was leaking word that Gramm, after his fifth-place finish in Iowa with only 9 percent of the vote, was going to drop out the next day.
Gramm told his advisers that he realized why a candidate had to run at least twice before getting the Republican nomination. There was too much to learn in one try.
“I’m going to follow the philosophy of Gus in the novel Lonesome Dove,” Gramm told Charlie Black. “The best way to handle death is to ride away from it.”
Gramm later told his staff, “People are either Greeks or Romans. Greeks look death in the face and go on. Romans are romantics and have to think there is hope.” Amid the tears and doubts, Gramm said, “I’m one of the Greeks.”
Nelson Warfield felt special malice for Gramm. More than any of the others, Warfield thought Gramm had been the assassin, gleefully lining up the crosshairs to squeeze off a round at Dole’s head and heart.
The next day, after Gramm dropped out, Dole phoned Gramm. “You did a good job,” he said, “gave it your best shot. I’ve been there. I remember back in ‘88 how I felt, and I just wanted to let you know that I’m thinking about you today.” Dole continued to commiserate and attempt to console Gramm. As he talked about defeat, what it meant, how the loser was tested more than the winner, Dole suddenly broke down. His voice choked and his body started heaving.
Gramm was obviously touched, and he said something about possibly endorsing Dole.
“I’m not calling to solicit you,” Dole said, still teared up. “I just want you to know I understand. I know it’s really tough. Isn’t much I can say.”