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  Simmons had become my personal hero when he was a state legislator and introduced a bill requiring every woman in New Orleans to carry a gun. This truly was a different kind of Democrat. The proposed legislation had followed a spate of particularly brutal carjackings of women at red lights. The bill hadn’t passed, of course, but a compromise piece of legislation made it perfectly legal for any citizen to use deadly force against a carjacker. Within the first forty-eight hours, a twenty-one-year-old secretary blew the face off of one carjacker, and an eighty-one-year-old man shot another in the ass as the poor fellow tried to flee down Rampart Street after he saw Grandpa had a sawed-off shotgun under a huge muffulleta from Mandina’s on the passenger seat. The elderly man was considered a local hero until two weeks later, when he walked into his stockbroker’s office and put two twelve-gauge slugs into his young broker for not getting him out of Apple before the Crash. But then a lot of brokers were getting shot right after the Crash.

  When it looked like the Site Selection Committee was leaning toward picking New Orleans, I’d done everything I could to squash the idea. Nobody could figure out why I was against it, and a lot of people thought I was just being modest. After all, I was a local hometown boy made good, the son of a famous civil rights journalist, which had double currency in the Republican Party, which was desperate for some credibility on that front. I’d be returning home in at least quasi-triumph, the guy who had saved Vice President Hilda Smith’s campaign, brought her back from near death in New Hampshire to a few delegates shy of winning the nomination. I was helping beat back Governor Armstrong George and the barbarians at the gate, and everybody agreed my Pulitzer-winning father, Powell Callahan, would have been so proud. If only he hadn’t drunk himself to death. No, they didn’t say that. But I did, that and a whole lot more. New Orleans was the last place on earth I wanted to come back to. Yes, it was my hometown. People knew me there, had known me all my life. And that, of course, is why it terrified me so much.

  —

  It was thirty-six hours before the convention opened. A real convention, like the one everybody had been dying for since Al Smith won it on the thirty-sixth ballot in 1928 and Ford snatched it from Reagan in 1976. That was what a convention was supposed to be—a deliberative body, by God, not a made-for-television spectacle.

  I hated it.

  Any campaign manager would. It was a horrifying idea to roll into a convention and not have the entire process rigged gavel to gavel. This was simply unheard of. Leaving a decision as important as selecting a party’s nominee to the collection of hungover party hacks, weirdo activists, political groupies, and small-timers who comprised the delegates at any convention was an affront to the very concept of modern politics, a process designed to ensure that a powerful few would manipulate a disinterested many. That’s how the system worked; everybody knew that. This was America, for heaven’s sake, where no one was particularly interested in parties—the political type, anyway—and everybody knew it didn’t really matter who won. That was the genius of the American political system.

  But this time, it did matter. The country was in crisis. The Republican Party had watched a president, nominated just four years earlier in a hail of glory and promise, melt like an ice cream cone on a New Orleans sidewalk. Now the party faced what was being called the most fundamentally different choice in its history: Governor Armstrong George or Vice President Hilda Smith. In politics we always like to call each election the most important in generations. This time, it might actually be true.

  Faced with this crisis, the delegates and alternates and assorted hangers-on of the Republican convention were handling their responsibility in the time-honored fashion of conventions past: they took to the bars and clubs and partied like death-row inmates paroled for one night.

  But who was I to complain? It was thirty-six hours before the convention opened and I was up onstage with a bunch of Indians stoned out of their minds. Not Native Americans, but the Mardi Gras Indians, one of those New Orleans bands that never broke big nationally but were local gods. The Indians were singing “Voodoo Sex,” and Tyrone Robichoux, the lead, was leaning into me, sweating like a warm waterfall. He had a blank look in his eyes and I assumed that he was high on heroin. He usually was. Great headline: “J. D. CALLAHAN, CAMPAIGN MANAGER FOR VICE PRESIDENT HILDA SMITH, BUSTED FOR DRUGS AT CONVENTION.” Now that would be just splendid. “Following his much-publicized personal difficulties surrounding the breakup of his relationship with prominent television journalist Sandra Juarez, J. D. Callahan added to his woes by being caught with the Mardi Gras Indians in a drug bust.” Yes, that would be just perfect. I’d have to claim that I did it as part of a community-outreach campaign tactic, like “Building a bridge to the addicted community.” It might work. This was, after all, New Orleans, where the town’s resident cultural hero was a not-very-reformed heroin addict named Aaron Neville, who, when asked about his heroin addiction, remarked, “It works for me.” And God knows the Indians were a diverse bunch. They probably had French, Spanish, African American, even a little Asian bouncing around in their drug-addled veins. And, yes, some Native American blood as well, the Chickasaw tribe most predominantly.

  Appearing with the Indians at Tip’s the night before the convention opened hadn’t been my idea. Blame it on Ginny Tran, press secretary extraordinaire at twenty-seven. “It’ll be so cool,” she’d insisted. “The vice president’s campaign manager onstage at Tipitina’s. You were almost a rock star once, it’ll be fabulous. Show that we’re confident right before the convention. And anyway, you should get out. You look like crap.” So I’d left our war room down at the Windsor Court Hotel and committed to doing something enjoyable for a couple of hours. It had been so long, I’d forgotten what it was like.

  Ginny was lying, of course. At least that part about me being almost a rock star. I’m sure she wasn’t lying that I looked like crap. I’d grown up in New Orleans and been a journeyman guitar player in a not-so-bad blues/funk band, my major distinction being that I was the only white guy in the group. What was really embarrassing—at least it would have been if anybody had known it—was that I’d made it into the band with the help of my father, Powell Callahan, one of the last white civil rights heroes, or so everyone seemed to believe. Powell Callahan knew everybody in town. The lead singer in the band was the son of a lawyer, once a civil rights lawyer, now a corporate hotshot just off Canal Street, an old friend of my father’s from the “movement days.” J. D. Callahan, the only guitarist who networked his way into a black/funk band. It was silly. They dumped me after a year.

  Of course, I knew that a photo op with the Indians onstage at Tip’s wasn’t going to get us a single delegate, but I had gone along with it. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt, and if it made me look a little hip and cool and confident, that was just great. God knows I sure didn’t feel like any of those things. I hadn’t slept worth a damn in months, I had a woman candidate who was on the verge of becoming unglued at any moment, a force of nature called Armstrong George about to devour us like a hungry wolf, and, to top it all off, they had to go and have the damn convention in my hometown. For Christ’s sake, was God spending all of His time trying to screw with me, or just most of it?

  On the other hand, if a woman named Sandra Juarez just happened to see me with the Indians up onstage looking like I had my act together in a big-time way, that was just fine by me. It had been a little over eighteen months since my very public meltdown, which had coincided with Sandra Juarez and me breaking up. No, that wasn’t accurate: my very public meltdown that resulted from Sandra Juarez dumping me. I’d like to think I was over it, focused on the future, all those things you are supposed to do. But I still thought about her more than I liked to admit. Mostly I thought about how humiliated I had been after splitting in such a spectacularly public way, which had been my fault. But also I thought about—and this is what I really hated to admit—how much I had loved being with her, living together for that year and a half.

  S
andra was one of the few really good print reporters who had made the transition from covering politics for The Wall Street Journal to working for television. She was first-generation Mexican-Cuban American, an unusual mix. Her Cuban mother was a doctor and her Mexican father was an auto dealer. It wasn’t exactly the hardscrabble immigrant story, but still, when she looked in the camera and said, “As a first-generation Mexican-Cuban American, I understand…,” few people stopped to point out that she had gone to Groton and then Harvard. We had met when Sandra was covering the Florida governor’s race. She had already moved from the Orlando market to CNN but was back in her home state covering the race. We met in the spin room after the first debate; a less romantic, tawdrier place for a first encounter would be hard to imagine. My candidate was a Cuban American woman running against a wealthy North Florida businessman, and I made the mistake of trying to play the Cuban-and-female card with Sandra. It didn’t go well.

  “Don’t you think Florida would benefit from having a Cuban American female as governor?” I asked.

  She smiled very nicely and then took my head off: “So the best case you can make for your candidate is what she achieved before she was born? That is probably the most pathetic defense I’ve ever heard.” Then she walked off. I did the only reasonable thing in this circumstance: I chased her and groveled. Not because she was beautiful and smart but because it was in my client’s best interest. I told her I was an idiot and she was right and then spilled out all the policy reasons Roberta Bello was the best choice. She listened to all of it with a blank face, then said, “Thanks, not bad,” and left. Her post-debate coverage was okay, not great. I sent her an email telling her I thought it was fantastic and to get in touch if I could help with anything else. Nothing works with any kind of reporters like flattery, since mostly they just get the crap beat out of them, but she ignored it.

  A week after Roberta won, I was at CNN doing an on-air hit about the elections. I’d won every race I’d worked on that cycle and was feeling fairly bulletproof. It was the standard setup, where you show up for five minutes or so and try to sound smart, which for five minutes is usually not that hard. I ran into Sandra in the greenroom and she asked me if I was going to work for Roberta’s administration, or for any of the other clients I’d elected. “God no. I don’t do government. I hate government.”

  “Great,” she said. “So no conflicts. Want to get a drink?” We spent every night together for the next 418 days, at least the nights when I wasn’t traveling for clients or she wasn’t out on the road. Until I was standing in the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and saw the National Enquirer front-page story about her and That Actor Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned. It’s one thing to get dumped by your girlfriend. It’s another thing to get dumped by your girlfriend for a famous actor and hear about it standing in line at the Piggly Wiggly. I bought the National Enquirer, and when the nice lady behind the counter saw the photo, she said, “Lucky girl,” and then I left before I killed her and was the next candidate for the death penalty in Louisiana, a place that doesn’t need Armstrong George’s New Bill of Rights to get the job done.

  God, it was awful. And two days later I was dumb enough not to cancel a scheduled slot on Meet the Press and ended up in a screaming match with some Democratic moron—a screaming match on Meet the goddamn Press, for crying out loud—and walked off the set, all live on national television. That was followed by an entire political cycle in which every candidate in America would have preferred to be photographed in a shirtless embrace with Vladimir Putin than hire me to run their campaigns. So yes, if playing part of a set with the Mardi Gras Indians the night before the Republican convention might make me look a little cool, or at least less pathetic, than the figure storming off Meet the Press, I was definitely willing to give it a go. In the back of my head I had a fantasy that Sandra would be sitting lonely in a hotel room and happen to tune in to some video clip of me and the Indians.

  Right.

  But the big moment, the magic one, would come if we could just get a half-dozen more delegates and pull Hilda Smith back from the dead. Then, at least for a few days, I’d be a genius. For a few days, I could forget about the horror show of Sandra. And on the side, I could finish cutting my deal to have my own political show. That was the plan: make this my last campaign and get famous as a pundit. After months of work, it was all lined up, if I could just pull off this come-from-behind miracle. All I had to do was beat back the forces of darkness and vanquish Armstrong George. Even if we lost to Democratic senator Tommy Aldrich in the general election, at least I would be hailed for doing what no one expected—saving Hilda Smith. The show was going on the new Amazon Channel, and since I’d gone to them with the idea, all neatly packaged, I’d been able to keep partial ownership of the show. That meant quasi-serious dollars if the show worked and we found an audience. The deal was already signed, but they had an out clause if Hilda lost the nomination.

  But we wouldn’t lose. I wouldn’t let us lose.

  The dance floor of Tip’s was a mass of soaking-wet humanity bouncing up and down to the irresistible funk of the Indians. Except for Lisa Henderson, who stood on the side with a cool, detached look, too attractive to be a wallflower but definitely not of this crowd. She was dressed in the same dark suit she had been wearing all day and she looked like a corporate lawyer, which was what she had been before she was chief of staff to Hilda Smith, first as governor of Vermont and now as vice president. She had been a law student of Professor Smith’s, and there when Hilda made her first run for the state house of representatives. And she had been by her side when she was sworn in as vice president, picked by the president after his first vice president became the first veep to resign since Spiro Agnew. Lisa hated me, and I didn’t blame her a bit. She had been Smith’s campaign manager until they came in third in Iowa and I’d made my move, knocking on the candidate’s door in New Hampshire and convincing her she would lose if she didn’t throw over her best friend and campaign manager. She was just terrified enough to do it, and when we won New Hampshire, I was back.

  It was probably a very bad thing I had done, knocking on Hilda Smith’s door. She was exhausted and beaten down in a way you only felt when your chance to become president of the United States was slipping away, but that was how I’d wanted her. Vulnerable. She said she’d give me a half hour, and that was all it took. Me and Eddie Basha—the best field operative in America, in my book—had laid out exactly what she should do to win the New Hampshire primary. We had a simple strategy; it was amazing that Smith hadn’t tried it before. For months Armstrong George had put her on the defensive and she’d responded by trying to prove she could match him in toughness without going down the crazy train of his wacky New Bill of Rights or the bundle of “anti-terror” legislation he was supporting called “Protect the Homeland.” It had been and always would be a losing game. Those who wanted what Armstrong George was selling would never be satisfied with Hilda Smith being a more polite version of George. For once I could tell a client what she wanted to hear and still give the right political advice: she needed to stand and fight Armstrong George.

  There was one more debate in New Hampshire before the primary, at WMUR, the posh TV station built with the fortunes spent on presidential dreams. “No matter what the first question is,” I said to the vice president, while her husband looked quietly on, “you should say, ‘I’ll answer that in a minute. But first I have something to say to my opponent. Governor George, you are a disgrace. You have played to the worst instincts of our politics and tried to bully your way to the Oval Office. Tonight it stops. New Hampshire is better than Armstrong George. America is better than Armstrong George. Now I’ll answer that question.’ ”

  Hilda Smith had looked at me like a dying patient wondering if she’d been promised a miracle cure. “You think it will really work?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think it will. But if it doesn’t, wouldn’t you rather die with dignit
y?”

  That was it. She hired Eddie and me on the spot. By that evening, every news outlet in America was carrying the story that Lisa Henderson had been dumped and J. D. Callahan, the controversial campaign strategist, had been tapped to take over Hilda Smith’s campaign. And damned if it didn’t turn things around in New Hampshire and a bunch of states that followed. Eddie still gives me a hard time about that line: “Wouldn’t you rather die with dignity?” But hey, I thought it was pretty good.

  It had been humiliating for Lisa, and I was a guy who had come to understand a thing or two about humiliation. That she had moved back into her position as chief of staff to Vice President Hilda Smith was hardly consoling. The paths to greater glory were rarely paved with chiefs of staff to vice presidents. Lisa Henderson had cried the night we won New Hampshire. Three hundred and twenty votes, but it was a win. I’ve often asked myself if she was crying because we had won, or crying because we hadn’t lost and she knew I’d been proved right. And now we were only a handful of delegates short. If we won and Hilda Smith went on to become president, I didn’t know if Lisa would forgive me or just hate me more.

  —

  From the stage, I could see the tall Secret Service agent whispering in Lisa Henderson’s ear. The agent’s name was Ernie Hawkins and I knew him well. He was a fanatical triathlete and liked to ask my advice on bicycle equipment and technique. Like most serious bike racers, I was convinced that triathletes were a bunch of idiots when it came to bikes, an opinion I didn’t hesitate to share with him. Ernie was off duty and had come to Tipitina’s to hear the Mardi Gras Indians and pick up women. That wouldn’t be hard for him. Women loved Ernie—a certain kind of woman, at least. The kind who liked a guy who knew several exotic ways to kill people and had enough firepower lying around his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, to start a small war.