2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [8]
CHAPTER FOUR
Matthew Bernstein woke up at 5:35 A.M. He didn’t need an alarm. No matter what time he went to bed, he still got up within three minutes of the same time every day he was in the White House.
President Bernstein was the first Jew to be elected president of the United States. The election of 2028 had been a contentious one. A woman, Margaret Sandor, was the favorite, but she did much worse in the mini-debates than anyone had predicted, and one time, when she was sure she was out of range, she said, “That’s a Jew for you.” Even though more people agreed with that sentiment than not, the remark revealed a dual personality and that turned off voters, who still would rather have someone they thought they knew, even if it meant that person was a Jew.
Bernstein had always played down his Jewishness. His mother was Catholic, and he was never bar mitzvahed. He didn’t look, act, or seem Jewish in any obvious way. His friends called him Matt, and there was even a time in college where he was going to change Bernstein to Barnes, but he didn’t. In the Jewish religion, if your father is Jewish but your mother isn’t, theoretically you are not a Jew. But if you’re running for president of the United States, even living on the same street as a Jew makes you one, so having a Jewish father was more than enough to get into the history books as the first Jew to hold the highest office in the land.
Before he entered politics, Bernstein had made and lost a lot of money in the private sector. He founded a solar panel company that built new generation panels for home use and did very well for about five years. But he turned down an offer to sell and then watched an Indonesian company come up with a newer technology that overnight made what he did almost obsolete. He eventually sold his business for half of what he had turned down and took what money he did make, then ran for Congress in 2022. He won, rose quickly to chairman of the Finance Committee, and then became the first Jewish Speaker of the House. The first “Jewish” was something he was hearing a lot in politics, so why not try for the presidency?
He met his wife, Betsy, in college. She was an economics major and both of her parents were Jews. Matthew loved going to her house; he loved her mother; she was the mother he always wished he had. “She’s so supportive of you,” he would say. “Are you sure she’s Jewish?”
They married young and both of them went to work. They seemed like the perfect couple, lookswise. Neither was especially attractive. Betsy stood five foot four and had brown hair and brown eyes, which were closer together than she liked. She thought it made her look more ethnic than her friends, but Betsy had a very good instinct about what she could change and what she couldn’t, and spacing her eyes out was not an option.
Her husband had no ethnic features. A very average-looking man, five foot eleven, a hundred and eighty pounds. Before he was president, people always guessed he was an accountant. His hair thinned out early, but he never lost it, and unless someone saw his bald spot first, they would think of him as a man with hair. Bernstein wore glasses, not because he had to—there were all kinds of options to see clearly without them—but because he thought they made him look smarter. And they did. He wasn’t handsome, but he did look smart.
A year after they married they had a child. The baby was born with a rare genetic defect. The little boy’s heart was not fully developed and quit working before he