are going to have a baby.'
4
Running for office is nothing like you assume it's going to be, nothing like the discussions of public policy and government ethics that we engaged in during college poli-sci classes. I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.
And yet we have precious little time left, Caroline. We both know that. No time to waste wading through the billion trivial details that make up a modern political campaign: endless debate over what colors to use on buttons and posters ('Since George N- is using
The thing that surprised me most was how little I actually had to do. We were perhaps a little
After a few months of this, you end up feeling more like a product than a candidate, like a toilet cleaner or an especially moist cake, and when the TV lights flicker and the makeup begins to heat up, you can actually feel the talking points and last-minute instructions start to bake in your mind
In fact, I felt a real kinship with Empire. By early 2000, we were both fully funded and fully imagined, yet we were, at best, half realized – sketchy products with limited prospects and very little application in the real world.
I recall only one moment of transcendence during the eighteen months I ran for Congress – one day when my candidacy was about something more than my candidacy. It was early on, a gathering of the four Democratic hopefuls in front of twenty or thirty people at the Spokane Public Library. Eventually we ended up talking about the causes and possible solutions for Spokane's double-digit poverty rate and its fifty-year economic slump. (I wonder: after fifty years, isn't a pothole simply part of the topography?) In the end, this is the only issue in Spokane. Everything else – high crime, the meth epidemic, declining downtown, bad roads and services – spirals out from the one thing about Spokane that no politician in the last fifty years has ever come close to solving: it is poor.
The other candidates each seemed to have a pet cause for this state of affairs, and so we spent some time talking about the long decline in mining and other natural-resource-based industries, the geographic isolation, the inability to transition to other kinds of business, the city's insidious, uncaring power base, and what one candidate called 'an unending cycle of regenerative failure.'
As I listened I had the sense that we were staring at a vast, flooded valley, trying to decide which molecule of water was to blame.
'Those aspects of the problem are valid, of course, and we should do everything we can to address them,' I said. 'But let's be honest. That's not what the voters really want.' I allowed that to hang in the air for just a moment and then I leaned back into the microphone. 'What they want is for this to be a place that their kids don't have to leave. What they want is to stop gathering at the back fence to tell the neighbors how well the kids are doing in Seattle or Portland or San Francisco. I'll tell you what these people want from government – they want us to bring their children home.'
I looked backstage and saw Eli, his fists balled up in front of his face, nodding enthusiastically, as if he'd been waiting for me to say that very thing.
If a campaign can be defined by one moment, then in that one I rose slightly above a mediocre slate of Democrats and stopped being simply a political upstart, the 'New Economy Guy,' the youngest of the four Democrats trying to unseat George N-. In that moment I became the prodigal candidate, the pied piper, and the hard subtext of my candidacy was cast –
In the winter before the election, Dr. Stanton took a leave of absence from the university to come aboard – 'If you're really serious about wasting your money, I want to help' – as my campaign manager. He urged me to loosen up and be myself ('
Our strategy was simple: spend money. It's almost unheard of for a first-time candidate to outspend a sitting congressman, but I sure as hell gave it a run. Ours became far and away the most expensive campaign in eastern Washington history. I spent the little bit I'd raised before the campaign even got going, and the paper-route allowance the party gave me barely paid for billboards and antenna balls, so it wasn't long before I was breaking out my own checkbook to cover expenses. By the end I spent about two million dollars of my money and about $300,000 of Eli's, plus quite a bit directly from – I found out later – the coffers of Empire Interactive. I probably would've spent even more – honestly, I'd have spent every cent he and I had – but at the same time the campaign was draining one end of my bank account, the long-dreaded flameout of the speculative technology market was draining the other end.
I suppose I should mention one other event that occurred during this period and that was connected in its own way to the campaign: I got married. Again, I don't want to derail this confession with my personal mistakes, and I certainly don't wish to enflame my ex-wife's very capable legal team by going into details – which would be in violation of at least one court-issued gag order anyway – and to be painfully honest about it, the entire thing exists in my memory like just another detail of the campaign, managed and measured, without much involvement on my part. So I will simply say this: I had known the woman before, and had even had a short romantic history with her. I can't say how much of my decision to marry her was based on politics, but I will say that as a young candidate in a conservative district, having a wife lent me a certain gravitas that I had lacked as a single man. In fact, everyone saw her as an asset to the campaign – 'You can't go wrong with big-titted arm candy,' Dr. Stanton said – although the thing I found most attractive about her this second time through was that she did absolutely nothing to remind me of Dana and the heartbreaking feelings that I still carried for her.
Unfortunately, though, this woman was accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and that presented a challenge to my financial solvency and led me to a few lifestyle changes (full membership at one of Spokane's two country clubs, for expensive example).
It was around this time that Eli started pulling back, too. What had once been a campaign focused around the two of us was now a huge machine with me at the center and several layers of publicity and press and strategy people between Eli and me, not to mention my new wife, a self-centered snob who'd gone to high school with Eli and who still had no use for him. Eli sightings became scarce around the campaign, and to my deep shame, I did nothing to bring him back into the fold.
And so it was that by the summer of 2000, with the election only months away, I found myself in the troubling position of having done exactly the opposite of what I'd set out to do, what the young visionary Kayla advised me that morning while she ate breakfast:
Instead I chased the weakened version of an expired daydream, formless and without meaning. I became a politician. For someone allegedly seeking self-awareness and redemption, it would have made more sense to have my soul surgically removed and replaced with chipped beef.
I knew I was betraying myself in some fundamental way, but my addiction was in full bloom; I couldn't stop. I became more depressed and scattered as the campaign wore on. I butchered a swing through the small farm towns of the Palouse, south of Spokane. (At the Colfax library I was supposed to deliver the line 'It's time to get
