Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [194]
Phil looked to Charlie on this. “Charlie, you have to talk to your wife and her colleagues at NSF about this. I don’t want to be accidentally nadered by these good people. You tell them, whatever they want out of this campaign, I’m their best chance at it.”
“I don’t want to depress them that much,” Charlie deadpanned, which got a good Phil chuckle, rueful but pleased. His fear that running for president was going to lose him all real human contact (the unconscious goal of many a previous president), was so far proving unfounded. “Thanks for that thrust of rapierlike wit,” he replied. “There aren’t enough people saying deflationary things about me these late days of the campaign. You are indeed a brother, and we are a real foxhole fraternity, shelled daily as we are by Fox. But don’t forget to talk to NSF.” As far as Charlie could tell he was still enjoying himself enormously.
And Charlie did ask Anna and Frank what the plans were for the candidate experiment. They both shrugged and said it was out of their hands, the genie out of the bottle. At NSF they talked to the SSEEP team, who were of course already aware of the historical precedents and the negative ramifications of any partial real-world success of their hypothetical campaign. Until preferential voting was introduced, third parties could only be spoilers.
Frank got back to Charlie. “They’re on it.”
“How so, meaning what?”
“They’re waiting for their moment.”
“Ahhhhh.”
This moment came in late September, when a hurricane veered north at the last minute and hammered New Jersey, New York, Long Island, and Connecticut, and to a lesser extent the rest of New England. These were blue states already, but with big SSEEP numbers as well, so that after the first week of emergencies had passed, and the flooding subsided, a SSEEP conference was held in which representatives of 167 scientific organizations debated what to do in as measured and scientific a manner as they could manage—which in the event meant a perfect storm of statistics, chaos theory, sociology, econometrics, mass psychology, ecology, cascade mathematics, poll theory, historiography, and climate modeling. At the end of which a statement was crafted, approved, and released, informing the public that the “Scientific Virtual Candidate” was withdrawing from all campaigns, and suggesting that any voters who had planned to vote for it consider voting for Phil Chase as being an “electable first approximation of the scientific candidate,” and “best real current choice.” Support for preferential or instant run-off voting method was also strongly recommended, as giving future scientific candidates the chance actually to win representation proportional to the votes they got, improving democracy if judged by representational metrics.
This announcement was denounced by the president’s team as prearranged collusion and a gross sullying of the purity of science by an inappropriate and unscientific descent into partisan politics of the worst kind. The scientific candidate immediately issued a detailed reply to these charges in the form of all its calculations and a description of the analytic methods used to reach its conclusions, including point-by-point comparisons of the various planks of all the platforms, indicating that at this point Phil was closer to science than the president.
“You think?” Roy Anastophoulus said to Charlie over the phone. “I mean, duh. I hope this helps us, but isn’t it just another of those scientific studies that spends millions and makes a huge effort to prove the sky is blue or something? Of course Phil is more scientific, he’s running against a man aligned with rapture enthusiasts, people who are getting ready to take off and fly up to heaven!”
“Calm down Roy, this is a good thing. This is connect-the-dots.”
In public Phil welcomed the new endorsement, and he welcomed the voters attending to it, promising to do his best to adopt the planks of the scientific platform into his own.