THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6
WASHINGTON, D.C.
At almost the same time Traynor sits overlooking the Roaring Fork River basin, Richard Bakke is sitting in the Senate cloakroom with his friend Senator Aggie Tucker. It is late in the day, and they are alone.
“You need to make something happen on the outside,” Aggie has just said.
Bakke looks back uncertainly. “Something on the outside?”
Bakke feels almost the same about the last two days of Oosay hearings as David Traynor, though he doesn’t know it. Not only had both hearings been closed, but Bakke is frustrated he’s heard nothing that would be useful even indirectly.
He had found Tucker, the junior senator from Texas, in the cloakroom, and shared his feelings and asked his advice.
Though they were only a year apart in age, Tucker had always been Bakke’s mentor in the ways of the Senate. Now it was Bakke who was becoming more prominent nationally. He yearned for bigger things. Only presidents changed history, he argued. The Senate bored him.
Tucker had no such savage impulses. He actually liked the intrigue of the Senate. And he didn’t think the presidency was worth the price. Run and you’re most likely gonna lose, and you may come away diminished. So he had reconciled himself to the fact that his friend was eclipsing him as the face of the hard right in the Senate. Strategist in chief suited him fine.
“Yeah, Dick, you gotta work the outside,” Tucker says. “Inside a Senate committee you got all those rules and people and voting. The Democrats. And even on our side. Wendy Upton. And, hell, Lew Burke for God’s sakes sticking his nose in, whispering in Susan’s ear. Outside, you got no obstructions. Dick, we’ve talked about this before.”
Yes, they had talked about it before, and Bakke knows Tucker is right. While he had pushed for congressional hearings, Bakke had few illusions about their real purpose. Congressional hearings are not really a form of inquiry at all—not in the twenty-first century. Members face too much pressure from donors to hew to the party line; witnesses are too well prepared to reveal much you don’t already know. Congressional hearings are really just set pieces around which you can focus attention elsewhere—in the old media, in social, and in the new blazing-hot channels of conversation online. Being on the committee gave Bakke standing to shape all that. And he could get as much traction trolling the Web for accusations and then demanding they be investigated as anything he could do inside the committee room. That’s all Tucker was reminding him.
“It’s simple physics,” Tucker explains. “Create an outside action that causes an equal but inevitable reaction.”
“Simple physics,” Bakke repeats.
The other problem inside the committee room, with all its rules and procedures, is that you have too many rivals.
One of them, David Traynor, the dot-com guy from pot-smoking Colorado, has a natural ability to phrase things in a way people find entertaining, and he has a kind of charisma that reminds Bakke of Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a sort of infectious bluster where you know you’re being conned and enjoy it anyway. Traynor is crazy like a fox. Bakke gets it. He understands the man.
Substantively, it is Wendy Upton he is beginning to worry about more. She is more subtle, and more of a puzzle. She is serious and elusive. People respect her—in both parties. Bakke cannot get a read on her.
The first presidential primaries are still a year off. But Wendy Upton, with her military background, her support for women in the military, her good-girl rectitude, could attract serious backing—especially from private equity types, and their money moved in bunches. He will need to watch her. If she did something dramatic, the Oosay hearings could become prologue to a dangerous rivalry he hadn’t entirely seen coming.
“Right, do something to change the dynamics,” Tucker says. “Then you’d be driving that committee. Not just sitting there watching David Traynor and Wendy Upton battin’ eyes at each other.”