“He wants to be president,” Jake told Tami.
“That’s no surprise.”
Tamiko Umetzu Ross had been a news reporter before she met Jake. She ran afoul of one of the most powerful senators on the Hill though, and now she worked for EcoSanity, a public relations firm that represented mostly environmental issues and the organizations that pushed them. “We’re poor but pure,” Tami often joked. Ruefully.
Jake muttered, “He hasn’t even finished his second term in the Senate and he wants to run for president.”
Tami and Jake were sitting side by side in the minuscule first-class section of the Boeing jetliner, heading back to Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC.
Alexander Tomlinson’s funeral had been small, tasteful, with only a small knot of dark-clad family members in attendance at the Unitarian Universalist Congregational Church that Senator Tomlinson’s grandfather had built, almost directly across the tree-lined avenue from the Tomlinson mansion.
“Why shouldn’t he run for president?” Tami asked. “He’d make a good candidate: handsome, rich—with his looks and your brains he could win.”
She was grinning at her husband, but Jake was not amused.
“Yeah, he’s good looking, all right,” Jake admitted, “but he’s almost totally unknown outside of Montana. And being so damned rich might work against him. Another playboy with delusions of grandeur.”
“Don’t sell him short. He’s more than that,” Tami said.
“You know that, and I know that, but the general public doesn’t know him. He doesn’t have a base of voters. The party insiders will see him as an upstart.”
“Like Obama?”
Jake almost smiled. “He was a Democrat. The Republican party doesn’t take to upstarts so easily.”
“Like Reagan?”
“Reagan worked his way up. It wasn’t all glamour. He paid his dues before running for president.”
“Tomlinson got the energy plan through,” Tami said. Then she added, “Your energy plan.”
“Yeah, that seems to be working out okay. Even the Democrats voted for it, in the end.”
“And it’s creating jobs, bringing down people’s electricity bills, isn’t it? That’s something he can take credit for. Thanks to you.”
Jake shook his head. “I just don’t think the time is right for him to throw his hat in the ring. There are plenty of other people in line ahead of him.”
“But there’s one other factor you’re not giving enough credit to,” Tami said.
“Another factor?”
“He wants to run. And he wants to win.”
“Does he?” Jake wondered. “Or is his father still pulling his strings, from the graveyard?”
* * *
Jake and Tami lived on the top floor of a six-story-high condominium building on Connecticut Avenue, not far from Dupont Circle and the apartment Tami had shared with three other women when Jake had first met her. The two-bedroom condo was much more expensive than similar quarters in the suburbs outside DC, but Jake cherished its location, within a few minutes’ drive of the Hart Senate Office Building, where Senator Tomlinson’s office was.
Their flight from Helena arrived at Reagan National on time, and within little more than a half hour they were home.
Jake threw his worn old travel bag on the bed, and while Tami started to unpack her roll-on, he checked the phone’s answering machine.
One call. From the executive assistant of Kevin O’Donnell, the senator’s chief of staff: “A staff meeting is scheduled for tomorrow morning, Dr. Ross,” came the woman’s high, girlish voice. “Ten sharp.”
Why didn’t she call my cell phone? Jake wondered. Then he saw the time of the call on the answering machine’s tiny screen. We were in the air; no cell service. Kevin set up this staff meeting while we were flying in from Helena. Wonder what it’s all about.