Politician by Piers Anthony
I concluded that this must be the fundamental evil of the system: the pervasive influence of special-interest money on the governmental process. Stop that flow of money, and much of the inherent corruption would lose its motivation. Some campaigns had solved the problem by providing for public funding; the campaign for the highest office, the Presidency, was that way. But those for Congress were privately funded, and the purchase of elective offices was chronic.
Campaign finance reform—there was my special project. That was the starting place, for the government and for me. I familiarized myself with it. I commented on it in Triple-Gee meetings. I made contact with and developed associations with those who had a similar concern. I became known as a campaign finance reform activist. There were tax-reform activists and racial-integration activists and defense-freeze activists and education-upgrade activists; in this I was one of the crowd. But I was learning about the political system.
That system was worth learning about, from the grassroots vantage. Structurally, the States of North Jupiter were collections of floating bubbles in the currents of the mighty atmosphere, linked by systems of physical travel and networks of communications. It was a mighty and amazing system of colonization, impressive in its concept, execution, and technology. But the social politics comprised a similar network, as intricate in its fashion as the physical one. In fact, it was a seething cauldron of special interests—the fount from which the moneyed interests drew. In the circles I moved in, the people tended to be active and liberal, politically, but I perceived that there were equivalent circles of opposite persuasion. It was all part of the mix. Jupiter truly was a melting pot of political dissension, which most of us agreed was one of its great strengths.
Columnist Thorley had another comment in print:
Captain Hubris, he who tightened the Belt, has been delving into the arcane lore of Campaign Finance (his caps, not mine). Could he be interested in something of the sort himself? Stranger things have been known to occur in the murky by-paths of the liberal establishment.
I was improving; it took me only five minutes to get my temper back under control. I even managed, after Megan’s strenuous urging, to refrain from buzzing out a nasty rejoinder about the murky conservative by-paths of the wealthy.
Time passed. I don’t mean to imply that what I have summarized occurred in a day or a week. I was three years in the undercurrents of the social maelstrom. I assumed the chairmanship of a committee to monitor the campaign finances of the elected representatives of our locale. Theoretically all campaign finances were open; in practice we had to struggle to get our hands on some of the records, which were treated like classified material and kept from the ordinary citizen. We managed to get printouts of the lists of all their contributors, and we checked the names and amounts against the requirements of the law. We did not discover any significant violations, but the patterns of contributions emerged.
One office holder was known to favor increased price supports for milk, which was, in space, an inefficient industry. Foliage had to be grown, fed to cows, and thus converted to milk, when the original foliage would have fed many more people than the milk did. The dairy industry contributed strongly to that office holder, and his position became even more favorable to that industry, despite the expense to the government. He preached economy, but he did not practice it in such cases. I saw how a number of employees of a particular farm-bubble gave identical and significant gifts of money, though they were themselves low-paid. How could they afford this? Why didn’t they use the money for their families? Megan explained it: “Their employer is making one large gift. Since that amount violates the legal limit for an individual, he splits it up into legal-sized segments and donates them in the names of his employees. The recipient understands and knows whom to thank.”
“But why should the employees agree to this?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they rather have the money themselves?”
“Would they rather lose their jobs?” she asked in return. Then I understood. I had, after all, once been a migrant laborer; I remembered the problem of earning a living. I saw, now, that the law limiting the size of individual contributions was being circumvented. Still, it was better than nothing.
Tri-Gee decided to make a planetary campaign about the campaign finance issue, coordinated with other civic-minded groups. I got to work on the liaison. I went from group to group, asking them to join with Tri-Gee in sponsoring a public presentation on the subject. This turned out to be another education for me. Some organizations welcomed such a joining of forces; others did not. One example of each will suffice: the Female Electors Membership, whose acronym was, of course, FEM, supported the effort instantly and lent attention, time, and money freely; in fact, they became the mainstay of it. In contrast the Legal Arts Wing-LAW whose interest was in representing necessary but sometimes unpopular causes that could not otherwise afford to take their cases to court, and who had run full-page newsfax ads condemning the abuses of political payoffs, hardly gave me the time of day, and refused to participate.
“I don’t understand,” I complained privately to Megan.
“They prefer to do their projects alone,” she explained.
“But by joining with others they could make much more progress!”
“And lose control. Some groups are jealous of their prerogatives.”
There was the lesson. Even among civic groups, there were rivalries and imperatives. The members of the grass roots had their own turfs to defend. They would do good work alone, but their sense of individual identity and control was more important than their impact on the issues. If this meant that their efforts did not win the day, then so be it. Better to lose the battle alone than to win and have to share the credit.
But in fairness I must admit that once I had been the route and had thrown my effort into the program of promotion for the cause and had seen how the end result differed from what I had envisioned, I was frustrated. My input had been diluted by the consensus of others, and it seemed to me that the resulting program had been less effective than it should have been. But I was no dictator and had had to go along.
In addition, FEM cut me and Tri-Gee dead the moment its interest had been served, and so did some of the other organizations. I had naively supposed that all of us were working selflessly for a common cause; I found that each was serving its own cause. I could not protest openly because the job had been done and the other organizations had contributed, but I resolved that next time I would keep it within my own organization, GGG. LAW’s somewhat insular attitude now made more sense, though I still did not like it.
Megan only nodded. She understood. “Even the most bleeding of hearts becomes a trifle cynical,” she observed.
“You knew I would discover this,” I accused her.
“I knew you had to experience it for yourself, as every politician must. As I did. It truly is a jungle.”
It truly was. Not good, not evil, just a tangle from which it was difficult to extract anything truly enduring or worthwhile. An anarchy of good intentions and insufficient compromise. I was further disappointed because, although we had put on a good program in the name of a score of civic organizations, I had perceived that the attendance had been composed of members of the sponsoring groups. It had looked fine, with rousing speeches and applause; but, in fact, we had been talking to ourselves. Only those already committed to campaign finance reform had bothered to attend. The larger public remained indifferent. What, then, had we really accomplished?
“Damn it, I have wasted my time!” I exploded.
“By no means,” Megan assured me. “You have been learning the grass-roots realities and making valuable contacts. You are now recognized as a concerned citizen; you have a base. Now you are ready to run for office.”
For a moment I was taken aback. Of course, I would run for office. That was why I had started all this. My involvement in the campaign finance reform effort had absorbed my attention completely. Certainly I had not tried to curry favo
Megan took my hand and kissed me gently on the cheek. “You may have done better than you know, Hope,” she said. “It is time.”
I should clarify that our marriage remained one of convenience, and I honored the understanding we had made at the outset. But I loved Megan, as I had always known I would. She was a truly lovely individual, outside and inside, the perfect woman. Now I was thirty-four and she was thirty-nine; we were not children. But it was as if there was a radiance about her, to my eyes. At first she had commuted, in a manner, between Golden and Sunshine, but after a year she had joined me permanently, sharing my apartment while Spirit took another. Megan had not been married before, and acclimatized to it slowly. She never acted precipitously. For a year she had slept in a separate bedroom. Then she had shared mine, in a separate bed. There is a distinction between love and sex, and I had known from the outset that Megan was a creature of the former, not the latter. I had never seen her unclothed, and she had not seen me. It was enough to have her presence. Oh, we did interact. We went out to entertainment functions together and to restaurants and civic meetings, where I discovered she was much better known than I in these circles. Who was I but a former military hero whose fame had been eclipsed by the following week’s sports headline? She had been an office holder. I’m sure our associates assumed that our marriage was more intimate than it was.
At the same time she gravitated steadily toward me, as if her gee-shield were being damped. When she understood that I really was honoring our pact, she became more relaxed. She would kiss me at odd moments, as if doing something naughty. I neither solicited nor extended such intimacies; one might have thought that my interest in her was casual. It was not, and she knew it; all that Spirit had said about my orientation toward Megan was true. We were not children, and this was no kingdom by the sea, but I did indeed love her with a love that was more than love. I knew that if I forced her, however subtly, in any way, I would lose her. She had to come to me. It was as if she were a delicate flower that would wilt if touched by human hand, if plucked before its time. I did not even look at her inappropriately; the look of a man can be an aggressive thing. Those who had known me as a Navy man might have found that hard to believe, but only Spirit had been with me in the Navy and she understood.
Megan and I had been married three years, together two, and sharing the bedroom one. I knew that her respect and fondness for me had been growing. Megan took time to travel her way, but she was not coy. A month before, she had let me see her in her slip, and she remained a fair figure of a woman; I had of course given no overt signal of awareness, but she had known I was aware. I knew that, to her, physical nudity was tantamount to sexual contact, indeed was a form of it. Her gradual onset of familiarity was no striptease but a measured silent statement of her sentiment. So now, when she said, “It is time,” I knew it was no casual thing. That statement was fraught with commitment.
“I love you in whatever way you would be loved,” I said carefully.
“I know that, Hope.” She looked about the room, as if searching for something, but it was nothing physical she sought. “I believe we are entering your area of expertise.”
My expertise being, in the symbolism that existed between us, sexual. I had served in the Navy; I had made love and/or sex frequently, and to a number of different women over the years, in accordance with the military mandate. I knew what I was doing, in that respect, far better than I did in politics, despite her tutelage. By the same token I knew that Megan was afraid; she had no experience in the physical aspect of love.
I never wanted to cause her the slightest discomfort of any kind. There are those who ridicule what they call the Madonna complex, the attitude of a man toward a woman he deems to be untouchably perfect. This is not precisely the way I viewed Megan, but there might be a parallel. “There is no need.”
She smiled tremulously. “You have been extraordinarily patient, Hope. I thought at first—forgive me—that you would tire of a sterile marriage and take a mistress. It has taken me time to believe that a handsome and talented man like you could actually love an older woman. Yet I see that it is so.”
“It is so,” I agreed.
Again she looked about, and again found nothing to fix on. “I am not good at this, Hope, but I have been impressed by your— your dedication to the cause that you have chosen. I have come to appreciate the qualities that you have. So let me just say, I am ready to be yours. Do with me what you will.”
But she didn’t mean it, quite. What she really meant was that she was ready for me to take the initiative in our private relationship. It was a most significant turning point.
I did so—cautiously. For the first time since our ceremony of marriage, I kissed her at my behest, rather than hers. I touched her lips with mine. I held her for a moment, savoring her, and let her go. “Sing for me,” I told her.
Surprised but relieved, she went to her piano and played and sang an operatic aria. She was, of course, a very fine singer, a former professional, and I had always been enraptured by her melodies. When she finished, I joined her, singing a folk song. We made a duet, and it was very sweet. And that, for now, was as far as it went. It was as far as it could go without impinging on her nature.
• • •
The state of Sunshine had a unicameral legislature. In the archaic days on Earth, most states had had divided assemblies, but over the centuries these had given way to the more efficient single-house situations. It was time, Megan decided, for me to run for state senator, in my local district.
“First, you’ll need an executive secretary,” Megan said. “She must be as competent, intelligent, and loyal as it is possible to obtain in today’s inferior market. You can use your talent to select her; it may take a while.”
“Just to type letters?” I asked.
“I said executive secretary. She will become your right hand and be empowered to act for you in routine matters.”
“But Spirit already—”
“You cannot fire your sister,” she said, a trifle firmly.
Oh. Well, I had married Megan to set me straight on the political scene; now she was doing it. We went in search of a secretary.
First we checked the employment agencies, public and private. There were competent women, but they lacked the intelligence Megan required. There were intelligent ones, but they lacked the capacity for loyalty that I required.
“Are you sure I need such a fancy secretary?” I asked.
“I’m sure. She will be with you throughout your career; she must have the potential to rise with you.”
“Maybe a male secretary.”
“No.” Megan was conservative about such things, oddly enough. “We’ll check the schools.”
We checked the schools. Still nothing perfect. I wondered whether Megan was concerned about my getting a very young, impressionable, pretty girl who was desperate to hold her position and therefore ripe for sexual advantage, but that did not seem to be the case; she knew exactly what we wanted and refused to settle for less.
After the trade schools we tried the colleges and then the high schools. There we discovered Shelia.
“Sheila?” Megan asked.
“Shelia,” the girl repeated firmly. “My father never could spell very well, but he made sure I could. By that time it was too late to correct the name.”
Megan was looking at the girl’s record while I looked at the girl, judging her with my talent. Shelia was coming across with an intensity I had not observed in other interviewees, despite her youth. She was seventeen, in her last year of regular schooling, and she had extraordinary nerve and drive. I could tell by the way Megan was nodding that the school record was excellent. This was the one we wanted—except for one thing.
Shelia was a cripple. She was confined to a wheelchair. It was all in her records: an attempted shakedown of her family, and when her father refused to pay, they had beaten her to cow him, and
Did we want to be saddled with a wheelchair wherever we went? Most employers would not hesitate to say no. Yet we knew Shelia was ideal in the other respects, and both Megan and I had sympathy for those whom life had wronged. Had Shelia not been crippled, she could have obtained a much better job; she was actually overqualified for the position I offered. So we hired her, as of graduation, which was to be a few months hence.
In retrospect I consider this to have been one of the best decisions I have ever made. Shelia, when she came to us, was a very quick study and a dedicated worker. Soon she had a clearer notion of my campaign strategy than I did. I had supposed she would be relatively immobile, but she wheeled about as rapidly as any normal person would have walked. In fact, it took only a few days before I lost any awareness of the distinction; Shelia was normal in my office and soon became indispensable.
I ran for state senator. Immediately I discovered the value of my grass-roots years. I knew, personally, just about every person who was anyone of distinction in the Ybor area. That did not necessarily mean that they all supported me, but it helped considerably. They knew what I stood for: campaign finance reform. Some were curious how I would finance my own campaign. Would I set a good example and lose the election, or would I succumb to the lure of easy money and become a creature of the special interests? Their curiosity encouraged them to welcome me to their various meetings so that I could address them. I was an effective speaker, and the audiences were generally friendly. Oh, yes, Megan had seen to it that I was properly prepared.
I set the good example. I accepted contributions from the public and refused those of the special interests. Consequently I ran a lean campaign. Spirit was my campaign manager, Shelia my secretary/treasurer, and Megan my strategist. Of these, only Shelia was paid, and not enough for the job she was doing. Fortunately Spirit had served in a similar capacity in the Navy and was good at it, and Megan’s political experience guided us safely past shoals we might otherwise have foundered on.