A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [147]
The result? Startling! Quinn Patrick O’Connell polled more votes than five other Democrats combined and went head to head with the Vermont governor, running as a favorite son.
Less than a month after the Iowa caucus he had established a legitimacy, even though his insistence on populist financing barely kept the campaign running. The day after New Hampshire was a good day for collections. And, well, it had to be, for there was no time for a pit stop. Quinn and his staff suddenly stared at Fat Tuesday, a few days off.
Fat Tuesday was a coast-to-coast twelve-state primary and caucus with American Samoa thrown in. Quinn might have a foot in the door, but the phone bill had not come in yet.
Quinn needed a strong showing in the Southern states of Georgia and South Carolina and the quasi Southern state of Maryland. Unable to visit even a sampling of states, he chose to deliver his message at Emory University in Atlanta.
Through great civic pride, entrepreneurship, leadership, and a migration, the city had become the power center of the South, sophisticated, dancing far into the night, ambitious, and a wonderful place to raise a family.
In the very beginning of his career as a young Colorado state senator, Quinn had been shy as a speaker, but buoyed himself through self-deprecating wit. By the time he won the governorship he had grown into a strong and confident—but measured—speaker.
All things seemed to come together when he arrived in Atlanta as a growing national curiosity. Quinn sensed that the people were longing to hear what he would say. He felt, for the first time, he had the power as an orator to grip his audience.
As Quinn spoke, softly at first, he felt the vibrations, and he fell into a rhythm, dancing a ballet, endowed with a grace, aware of what was happening to him.
Determined not to be labeled a dog with one trick, Quinn set aside the Second Amendment issue and wrote himself a visionary political essay.
Quinn’s staff held their collective breath.
“…we have nurtured a mighty forest of law and values and decency. We are trashing it without planting new trees. Under the disguise of freedom of expression, our boundaries of morality are pushed so far twelve-year-olds know the vulgarisms of our language, or of the explicitness of sexual behavior, or of crime and of drugs. So, have we shed the old hypocrisies, or are we caving in to the claptrap foisted on us by people who are really out to make a buck and will push and push until our sense of disgust is finally stilled?”
Ka-boom! Quinn knew the speech was flying.
“A decade ago, the American people were subjected to listening to a president forced to give a discourse on oral sex. We swore, never again. But it has happened again and again and again. The nation can no longer afford this prurient blood lust, which is already robbing it of brilliant candidates who no longer want any part of public service.
“The world prays for us, waits for us to get out of the gutter. It is incumbent that each citizen have a long, quiet talk with themselves and not succumb to mendacity.”
Ka-boom! The vibrations from speaker to listener trembled in the air. Quinn departed from the rostrum, microphone in hand and went from side to side of the stage.
“Are we closing out personal relationships, and have we grown distant from one another? We surge on great waves of billions of bytes…but do we know each other anymore? We bank, shop, vote, play the market, purchase groceries, fly, vacation, read at the whim of an electronic device that, despite all its miraculous wonderment, has no heart, no soul, no compassion.
“When salvation comes, it will not come in the form of a computer printout but from the Word brought down from Sinai. We must go back to one another and establish the rules of decency.”
It was a strange speech. It hardly seemed political, but more from the pulpit. How did Quinn realize the public’s thirst for a moral direction? Still in mourning over the Four Corners Massacre, they needed a spiritual direction.