Balance of Power

* * *

    In the minute or so it took Fasano to lope from his office to the Senate's swinging door, Chuck Hampton had begun.

    'I can't speak to the President's and First Lady's personal life,' he told the Senate, 'except to say that it's their business, not mine. The President was typically candid and direct, and the line he has drawn is one that we can all respect. Because of this, I fully trust that today's events will not affect his relationship to the members of this body.'

    You have every right to hope, was Fasano's mordant thought—he could hear the strain of the moment in Hampton's voice, detect the shock his counterpart must be feeling. This moment was pivotal to Hampton's leadership. In Fasano's wake, a steady stream of senators was repopulating the chamber— now Vic Coletti and Cassie Rollins—creating the crackle of crisis and drama.

    'Blackmail,' Hampton said in a rising voice, 'is deplorable, and whoever did this is despicable. Whoever did this must not know Kerry Kilcannon.

    'No gutter tactics can cause this President to back down. No blackmailer too cowardly to show his face in public can change the merits—or the demerits—of the Civil Justice Reform Act.'

    Hampton, Fasano realized, was making a credible effort to cauterize the damage and keep his troops in line. Next to Fasano, Macdonald Gage had appeared, appraising Hampton with a cool eye which did nothing to conceal Gage's pleasure at the harsh recompense now visited on the President who had tarnished him so effectively.

    'We can only hope,' Hampton told the Senate, 'that this act of viciousness will not drain further public life of all decency or compassion. For if compassion attached itself only to perfection, there would be little mercy for any of us.'

    'How true,' Gage said with quiet bitterness. 'And how convenient for Hampton to remember that now.' But Fasano heard a moral different from that which Gage intended: Gage had stood too close to the man who had destroyed Chad Palmer's daughter, and Kilcannon had made him pay for it. Fasano had no intention of joining his predecessor in the ranks of the walking dead.

    Hampton's eyes scanned the chamber, almost full now. 'The current Hobbesian state of nature which pervades our political life—the survival not of the fittest, but the most vicious; the use of scandal through the media by groups or individuals bent on destroying their ideological opponents—threatens to drive the higher decencies from public life. It has, and will, cost us the services of good men and women of exemplary public character. And it causes, like the slow, repeated dripping of water on a stone, the erosion of all forgiveness, all ability to value others for the whole of who they are. Martin Luther King was an adulterer, and he taught a nation to be far better than we were . . .'

    'Martin Luther King,' Gage scoffed under his breath. 'Why not Jesus Christ himself? If Chuck's desperate enough to exhume old Martin's tired sins, Kilcannon's beyond saving . . .'

    But Fasano was not yet—not quite—sure.

Leaving the Senate after Hampton's speech, Palmer took the Senate subway through the grey subterranean corridors which traversed the bowels of Congress. His fellow senators and their aides were as grim as cave dwellers uncertain of the environment in the greater world beyond.

    Cassie Rollins sat beside him in the open car. 'What did you think?'

    Chad turned to her. Very softly, he said, 'That I hoped never to see anything like this again.'

    Nodding, Cassie touched his arm. Their quiet lasted until the subway reached its destination.

    Entering the elevator, Chad asked, 'Care to watch some cable news?'

    'Thanks. It might be good to get an initial reading on the echo chamber.'

    The corridor near Chad's office was jammed with reporters, Minicams, microphones. 'What did you think of the President's statement?' someone asked the two senators.

    Cassie shook her head. Sweeping by the swarm of media, Chad snapped brusquely, 'Chuck Hampton said it for me. You can run clips of him in my place.'

    As they reached the inner sanctum of his office, Cassie murmured, 'Frank won't like that.'

    'Fuck Fasano. All he bought was my crummy vote, not the right to turn me into a prick like Harshman.' Palmer grabbed the remote and materialized CNN.

    A half hour of CNN reassured Fasano that, as he had fervently hoped, the SSA was remaining silent. It was left to the Reverend Bob Christy, avuncular head of the Christian Commitment, to set the tone for the right-wing drumbeat that would consume every minute between the President's announcement and the last moment of Nightline and, in the endless frontiers of cyberspace, beyond.

    Christy addressed the interviewer from his office in Charlotte, North Carolina. Paula, he admonished, this is not a private matter. It goes to the heart of the immoral policies advocated by this President and this First Lady.

    How much better, now, do we understand the nomination of the proabortionist Caroline Masters to lead our highest court?

    How much more clearly do we discern the true depth—in every sense of the word—of our President's all-too-personal commitment to the taking of unborn life?

    How much more naked, now, is the contradiction between our First Lady's concern for 'saving lives' when the murderer has a gun, and the taking of an innocent life which God himself had placed into her hands . . .

    There was no turning back, Fasano knew. Not when even a sanctimonious blowhard like Bob Christy could touch the viscera of Fasano's own deepest convictions. Dane had played this brilliantly: the armies of the cultural right—the fundamentalists, the antiabortionists, the avatars of traditional values—were as essential to his party as the SSA and, in their fresh revulsion for Kilcannon, would demand no less than his emasculation. It was now Fasano's unavoidable task to accomplish this while maintaining the aura of a statesman.

    The appalling truth, the Reverend Christy was saying, is that Lara Kilcannon used her own family to promote a cynical, secular, antilife, progovernment agenda, asking us to mourn for her six-year-old niece after killing her own unborn child . . .

Fasano turned him off.

EIGHT

At one o'clock that afternoon, Fasano took a call from Charles Dane.

    The media was in full cry, although not, thanks to Fasano's crisp directions, with the help of a single Republican senator. Nor, as of yet, had any Democrats save Hampton leapt to the President's defense. On CNN, a pro-life woman sparred with the president of a leading prochoice group, personifying the war of ideologies which, Fasano thought, would inevitably diminish the Kilcannons by virtue of its subject matter.

    'It appears,' Dane said blandly, 'that God has smiled on us.'

    The irony held a pointed subtext—the deliberate intimation, in Fasano's view, of their mutual complicity. 'Have you and God been in touch?' Fasano could not resist asking.

    'No need, Frank. He speaks to me through the Reverend Christy. The Christian Commitment is going national with ads calling the Kilcannons morally unfit to lead us. Your political base hasn't been so galvanized since