As a senator, Tom Corcoran hadn’t sponsored many bills, didn’t spend much time at committee hearings—unless they were televised, of course—didn’t even worry about constituent service. Virginia had another senator to do that, along with 11 House reps. He was the siren call, there for the debate, the verbal jousting, the thrust and parry with his liberal foes and, on occasion, the moderates in his own party. For the most part, the work of Congress is done behind the scenes, in committee rooms and mark-up sessions where the nitty-gritty of language is crafted, in conference committees where deals are struck and compromises made so government can move forward, incremental inch by incremental inch. Major change does sometimes emerge, but that is the exception, not the rule.
Tom Corcoran had little patience for such tedious work. His role was that of prophet, seer, preacher of the political Right, moralist for a new century. His stage was the media—especially the evening news, social media and the Sunday morning talk shows—that loved his short, cutting sound-bites. And no one on the Right was better than he in coming up with them. With a scandal-tarred Democrat in the White House, there was no shortage of topics to throw verbal poison darts at. And throw them he did.
He could denounce Hollywood and free trade in the same sentence and make it sound like the Ten Commandments. The social welfare state and Planned Parenthood would become extinct if he had his way. And the Russians—the Russians were plotting a comeback, he warned. Their pseudo-democracy would not last, the arms race would start again and America had better be prepared. Forearmed is forewarned, he would bellow, and his partisans would rush for their checkbooks. And the Chinese—if they so much as breathed ominously in the direction of Taiwan, well, the United States should put its forces on alert as if it were Def Con 4, the second most serious state of readiness the military has.
His speeches—blustery, fiery, pugnacious—were also tempered with ridicule of the left, ridicule that never failed to produce giggles and hoots from adherents. He was a show, an evening’s entertainment. Except the audiences were no longer obscure college crowds anymore, but the Big Tent — the networks, the national papers, the top blogs — and the more they paid attention, the more people heard his voice.
Still, there were audible guffaws when, during Clinton’s second term, Corcoran allowed that he could be persuaded to run for president. He had barely won his Senate seat and proceeded to alienate anyone who wasn’t a true-blue right-wing believer. How could he be a credible candidate for president?
Some Republicans feared he would tear the party apart. The GOP needed to reach out, not make more enemies, according to the moderate counsels of reason. Besides, the party’s gender gap would become a chasm if Corcoran were ever the nominee.
He paid no heed. Winning was secondary, it was the cause that was important. Besides, he knew the party’s nominating apparatus was controlled by the Religious Right. The Right knew how to get their people out. Moderates didn’t. They were pseudo-Democrats anyway, Corcoran thought.
And he was correct. When the presidential season came ’round, the race was flush with moderates eager to run and right-wingers who paled in comparison to Corcoran. He ambushed the supposed front-runners in Iowa, won the New Hampshire primary by a hair—just over 30 percent of the vote—and couldn’t be stopped. There was a momentary stumble when he lost a string of Northeast primaries. But those states always voted Democratic in the fall anyhow. Victories in the Midwest and Mountain states put him back on top of the delegate count and he was on his way.
Republicans wailed that he would drive the party back 30 years and insure a generation of Democratic rule. Corcoran only laughed. His stage was getting bigger all the time. And things kept breaking his way. The Democrats—fools, Corcoran thought—nominated the vice president of their scandal-tarred president. The left, angry that welfare reform had flooded the streets with homeless and cut off many of their cherished social welfare programs, ran a candidate of their own. Perot was also on the ballot somewhere. It was a four-team tag race and the only one with a committed following was Corcoran. He got just 39 percent of the popular vote, but he swept the South and the West and won just enough Midwestern states to claim a majority in the Electoral College and the presidency.
Only Lincoln had gotten fewer votes, percentage wise, and won. I’m in good company, Corcoran thought.
So New Hampshire was friendly territory for Corcoran. The state party had asked him to speak at their summer fund-raiser and of course he obliged. Some moderate governors—mostly losers from the last presidential campaign—had scheduled summer “vacation” hiking trips to the state, so Corcoran was anxious to stamp out potential insurgencies before they got too far off the ground.
Raising lots of money and co-opting issues—that is, moving toward the center—were the usual way to scare off intra-party challenges. Money Corcoran had. Co-opting, though, was not his style. Other presidents may reach out to those with whom he disagreed. Not Corcoran. He was just as liable to bop you over the head in a speech. But he had enemies in the party who believed the Right had hijacked the party of Lincoln and now the president’s health could give them strength.
Meanwhile, Bernie Elsner had endorsed the idea of jogging, as long as it didn’t wear the president out. He began to run in private, only 10 or 15 minutes a day. But he had gotten up to 30 minutes—2 miles a day according to the treadmill odometer—and he was ready to go public. New Hampshire seemed the ideal place.
The summer had brought a respite of sorts to the Corcoran presidency. There had been no new embarrassments and nothing had seeped into the press. McCord was nervous about two reporters—tabloid reporter Schwartz and biographer Kramer—but so far neither had broken his elaborate cover-up. Schwartz was still trying to find a link to Sally Winters and her friends from college, but had gone nowhere. And Kramer, well, Elsner doctored the FOIA requests for the physicals to look innocuous. No more had been heard from him in weeks. Maybe, McCord told the president before the New Hampshire trip, maybe if you health remains good, they could keep on the lid on this after all.
The public schedule for his day in Concord, the state capital, began with a 6 a.m. run. Clinton had done these all the time, but Corcoran had never been seen in anything but a suit and tie. His jog would get a full media turnout. The course was up and down Main Street—level ground, an easy run, since going any other direction involved hills, down to the Merimack River or up the hills overlooking the river valley, and Corcoran wasn’t up for that yet. The run only lasted 15 minutes. But Corcoran’s shorts fluttered in the morning breeze and the image of a healthy president enjoying an early morning jog brought relief to McCord and the White House staff. There was even a hint of a gut, enough to suggest that Corcoran’s healthy appetite for midnight snacks was not diminished.
As Corcoran neared the hotel, reporters began to shout questions at him.
“How are feeling?”
“Just fine,” he said, huffing noticeably.
“Is this run to show you don’t have any health problems?”
“No, the doctors just said I should do more to keep in shape. Gotta tough race next year, you know. That’s all. Have a nice day.”
And with that, Corcoran disappeared into the private entrance to the hotel.