Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [193]
And Phil Chase blew through all the president’s claims with a laugh. “The salt fleet is an international project, coordinated through the UN. The part of it we’re paying for comes from an appropriation Congress made because of a bill I wrote. The president tried to hamstring this great project up and down the line. Come on! You all know which candidate will work to protect the environment, and it’s me, me and my party. Let’s turn it into a big party. We can make things better for our kids, and that’ll be our fun. That’s the way it’s always been until now, so you can’t let the fear and greed guys scare you ’til you cut and run. The new climate is an opportunity. We needed to change, and now we will, because we have to. What could be more convenient?”
This played well too, much to the pundits’ private surprise (in public they always knew everything), and now Phil’s numbers went up. He was polling neck and neck with the president, and doing particularly well among the boomers and their children the echo boomers, the two biggest demographics.
The president’s team continued to transpose what was working for Chase into the president’s campaign. They began to proclaim the bad weather to be an economic opportunity of the first order. New businesses, even entire new industries, were there for the making! The bad weather was obviously another economic opportunity for market-driven reforms.
However, since he had been elected with the help of big oil and everything transnationally corporate, and had done more than any previous president to strip-mine the nation and use it as a dumping ground, he did not appear to be as convincing as Phil. It was getting hard to believe his assertions that the invisible hand of the market would solve everything, because, as Phil put it, the invisible hand never picked up the check.
So the election campaign wallowed along in its falsity and tedium, and surprise surprise, as the summer passed it became an ever-tightening race, just as all media hopeful for interested customers might have wished. These summer months were full enough of new weather anomalies and extreme events to keep Phil in the chase, as he liked to put it.
So his campaign was doing well, and he kept it up with campaign events all over the world, including a return to the North Pole a year after announcing his candidacy. It was a bit of a throwback to his old World’s Senator mode, but he claimed its effect was good, and his team could only follow his lead. “I have to run on my record, there’s no other way to do it. I am what I am.” He started saying that too. “I am what I am.”
“And that’s all what I am,” Roy always sang when he said it, “I’m Popeye the sailor man! Toot toot!” Phil was in fact like Popeye in enough important respects that his staff started calling him that.
And Charlie had to admit that since the climate problem was global, campaigning everywhere made a sort of sense. It made Phil and his career and his campaign all of a piece. Meanwhile the president remained resolutely nationalistic, it was always America this and freedom that, no matter how transnational and oppressive the content of his positions. Patriotism as xenophobia was part of his appeal to his base, and it worked for them. But Phil’s people had a different idea: the world was the world. Everyone was part of it.
One unexpected problem for his campaign was that the “Scientific Virtual Candidate” was polling pretty well, up to five percent in blue states, despite the fact that the candidate was nonexistent and would not appear on any ballots. And this of course was a problem for Phil. Most of those potential votes came from his natural constituency, and so it was accomplishing the