Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [174]
He watched Phil squeeze Diane’s hand. Test the limits, make an experiment in politics, in history itself. Just how far would Phil go? And how far could he get?
EVERYONE WAS A LITTLE SHAKEN in those first few days after Phil got shot, although as it became clear he would recover, people tended to return from out of that briefly glimpsed bad alternative history to default mode, to the world they had inhabited before, without any lingering sense that things could be different. Because they weren’t different, and it was too hard to imagine what things would be like without Phil Chase there. So it was just something that had almost happened and on they went.
But not everyone. To Frank’s surprise, one of those who seemed to have been shaken the most was Edgardo. In the immediate aftermath his saturnine face had been set in a murderous expression all the time, and the first time they went out for a run afterward, with Kenzo and a couple of guys from the OMB they had met in the White House men’s locker room, he had run around the Mall twice without saying anything at all, a thing of such rarity that Kenzo and Frank looked at each other, uneasy, even a little frightened.
“What’s up Edgardo?” Kenzo finally said. “Cat got your tongue?”
“You people are idiots. You are always killing your best leaders. You might as well be some banana republic in Latin America! You’re just as bad as all the juntas you set up down there, I suppose it has to be that way. The good ones you kill and the bad ones you give all your money to. Call them good and kiss their ass.”
“Geez. Remember, this time the guy only wounded him. And it was a crazy guy.”
“It always is. They are easy to find here. Pick anyone.”
“Well, gee. Maybe we should change the subject. Have you thought of a new bestseller to write?”
For a long time Edgardo had entertained them on their runs with accounts of the nonfiction books he would write for the bestseller list, popularizing recent findings in the sciences. “Come on,” Kenzo encouraged him, “what was that last one? Why We Fuck Up?”
“That would be too long to write,” Edgardo said. “That is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, at the least.”
The OMB guys floated back within earshot. “Edgardo, are you talking politics again?”
“Am I talking politics? What kind of a redundancy is that, when are any of us not talking politics? When you talk, you’re talking politics.”
“I didn’t know that. I don’t think of it that way.”
“It makes no difference what you think. It’s all politics. You people in this country don’t even know how good you’ve had it, to be able to just talk politics all this time rather than shoot it. So you do these kinds of things and don’t even notice how dangerous it is. Someday you will unleash the furies of la violencia down on your idiot heads, and only then will you know what you have lost.”
Phil started sending to Congress a new volley of legislation, all kinds of bills that pressured members of Congress to either vote for his programs or be revealed as obstacles, which would then initiate high-profile midterm election campaigns to remove them from office. It was not that the public would necessarily notice but that the party pols would and then they would direct the attack on obstacle representatives. So there was a lot of leverage there and the balance of the parties in the House of Representatives was close enough that Phil was already getting a lot of things through. If these got any momentum and results then by the time the midterm elections came it might be possible to build a solid majority and then accelerate even further. So: judicial appointments, executive actions, all were intensified and coordinated in a single larger campaign, coordinated by Roy and the brain trust. Fuel-mileage efficiency standards of seventy and eighty miles a gallon. A doubling of the gas tax. A return to progressive tax rates. An end to all corporate loopholes and offshoring of profits. Heavy financial support for the World Health Organization’s population stabilization efforts. AIDS and malaria eradication funds. Gun control