Senator Tomlinson’s suite of offices was on the second floor of the Hart building. Jake walked through the building’s lobby, past the people waiting for elevators, and hustled up the marble stairs.
DC Formica, Jake called the marble that was so ubiquitous in Washington’s government buildings. My tax dollars at work.
It was only a few minutes past nine when Jake pushed through the door of the suite’s entry, but the lively young receptionist behind the desk there immediately told him, “There’s a staff meeting at ten, Dr. Ross.”
“Thanks, I know,” said Jake as he breezed by, heading for his own office.
Just past the entry hall Jake saw Earl Reynolds filling a steaming mug at the coffee machine. Head of the senator’s media relations team, Reynolds looked like a former college football player who was bloating into middle-aged softness. Yet his fleshy face was still handsome and his dark hair seemed to be natural.
Reynolds raised his free hand to stop Jake. “Big powwow at ten o’clock,” he said, almost solemnly.
“Ugh,” said Jake, as he reached for a coffee mug.
“How was the funeral?” Reynolds asked.
“Quiet. Tasteful.”
“I wonder what our boy’s going to do without his old man prodding him?”
“I think we’re going to find out at ten o’clock.”
Reynolds looked surprised, then impressed that Jake apparently knew something he didn’t.
* * *
“Run for president?” Lee Di Nofrio blurted.
Kevin O’Donnell nodded, his pinched face looking more irritated than usual.
The chief of the senator’s staff always gave Jake the impression that he trusted no one—which was pretty close to the truth. O’Donnell was a rake-thin bundle of nerves, with suspicious dark eyes peering out of his lean, bony face. He wore his thinning light brown hair in a ridiculous flop-over that emphasized his creeping baldness more than hid it. But he was a longtime Beltway insider, keenly aware of the ways of Washington’s intricacies.
“Is this for real?” Di Nofrio asked.
“Unless we can talk him out of it,” O’Donnell said.
“Isn’t it too soon for him to be aiming at the White House?” asked Kathy Ellerman, the senator’s aide for women’s issues. She was a plumpish blonde somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, wearing a conservative dark blue skirted suit.
“Not necessarily,” countered Judine Asmus. “We can position him as the party’s rising star.”
O’Donnell frowned sourly at her. Asmus was slim, tall, and leggy, a young black woman with chocolate brown skin and a Georgetown University degree in statistics. Nominally, she worked under Reynolds in the media relations team, but she was smart and ambitious enough to have earned the assignment of dealing with the national polling services.
Reynolds shook his head. “He’d be facing some damned strong opposition: Morgan and Sebastian here in the Senate, and Governor Hackman in Tennessee.”
Asmus smiled knowingly. “He’d get plenty of women’s votes.”
“He’d get even more if he weren’t married,” Ellerman muttered.
O’Donnell growled, “Cut the crap. What’s our man done that he can campaign on?”
Jake kept silent, but Di Nofrio called out, “He’s chairman of the energy subcommittee.”
O’Donnell shrugged. “So he inherited Santino’s position when the Little Saint retired. So what?”
“The energy plan is working,” Reynolds said. “Electricity prices are going down. So is our carbon footprint. And the U.S. of A. has become a major exporter of oil and natural gas.”
“And the coal lobby hates his guts,” O’Donnell grumbled.
“The environmentalists aren’t happy with him, either,” said Di Nofrio. “They want more cutbacks in greenhouse emissions.”
Di Nofrio was in charge of relations with the various environmental lobbies. He was a smallish man in his thirties, smolderingly handsome, with thick, tightly curled dark hair and a swarthy complexion.
“The environmentalists are never happy,” O’Donnell groused.
“So what are you going to do?” Reynolds asked. “Tell him to forget about it?”
O’Donnell hesitated. Then, “I’m going to give him my honest opinion, and tell him that the staff thinks he should wait another four years.”
“At least,” said Ellerman, in a stage whisper.
Jake finally spoke up. “Wait a minute. This is something pretty close to the senator’s heart. Shouldn’t we take a hard look at his chances, figure out a plan of campaign for him, instead of telling him we won’t support him on this?”
“Who says we won’t support him?” O’Donnell snapped. “We’re his staff. Of course we’ll support him if that’s what he really wants.”
“But you said—”
“I said I’ll make it clear that we think it’s a wrong move. We think he should wait until the next time around.”
“The next time around,” Di Nofrio pointed out, “there’ll be an incumbent in the White House, campaigning for reelection. Not like this time around.”
“Yeah,” O’Donnell admitted, “there is that.”
“So?” Reynolds asked.
Clearly unhappy, O’Donnell answered, “I’ll have to tell him that we don’t think he should get into the race this time around, but if he insists that that’s what he wants to do, we’ll support him like the loyal staffers that we are.”
Reynolds sighed, “Heads he wins, tails we lose.”
Di Nofrio added, in mock Bronx slang, “Dems de conditions dat prevail.”