Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [28]
Then a voice came booming midsentence into his brain.
“—you all right, President Taft?” He felt like a diver popping up to the surface amid someone else’s conversation. He realized that he was President Taft. And the voice he heard was that of Pauline Craig.
“Yes, yes, I’m quite all right.” He maneuvered his bulk into the chair, which seemed to have been purposefully designed to be too narrow, to make him look like a buffoon as he wedged his posterior into its tight frame. Knowing Craig even to the slim extent he did, that might well have been the case. “Just having a bit of a problem navigating all these noises and bright lights of yours.”
“Not to mention the chair,” came Craig’s voice.
Taft sensed a faraway hum of what might have been laughter. He tried peering through the eye-piercing veil of light in front of him. The audience. Of course, he knew there would be spectators. But he could barely make them out through all this infernal dazzle. What kind of connection would he be able to make with them? He’d regularly and gladly faced down crowds ten times this size during his campaigns and administration. But he could always see their faces: face to face, like decent, civilized humans. He realized that these people were just the tip of the iceberg; millions more were watching him at home on their television sets. What was this unholy, lopsided manner of addressing people that had evolved since his day? No wonder Americans had devolved into such a vicious, petty, sarcastic lot. They no longer had to look each other in the eye.
And then there was Craig. Her face was most definitely present. High forehead, blond hair, sharp cheeks, a sagging chin that a hen might envy. She looked at him from behind her desk with a mixture of amusement and malice.
“The chair? Now that you mention it, it is a bit on the small side. Perhaps when your program sees some measure of success, you’ll be able to afford proper furnishings.”
The crowd—stocked, as Taft supposed it was, with Craig’s sycophantic fanatics—laughed despite itself, then quickly hushed after a sharp look from the host. “Thank you,” she said, “for that generous observation. If my ratings ever recover from your withering attack, I’ll put a new chair on the top of my shopping list.”
Damnation. He was already breaking Susan’s first rule: don’t take cheap shots. Keep it friendly, no matter what.
Taft collected himself. He grinned, the biggest, toothiest Teddy Roosevelt grin he could muster. “All in good fun, Pauline!” he said in his best approximation of joviality. Susan, as well as the show’s production assistant, had told Taft to address her by her given name. “Pardon an old relic for his nervous jesting. I assure you, I’m quite grateful to be here on your program.”
That seemed to mollify her. She smiled smugly. Taft knew her type. A bully to the core. Ten minutes, he told himself. For ten minutes, for Rachel, I can do this.
“President Taft, it is our honor to have you here. And I’m sure I’m speaking for all of America when I say that.” A light smattering of applause followed. The audience reacted, it seemed, like trained dogs.
“All of America,” he echoed. “That alone is a staggering thought to me. The America I left in 1913 had a few less states than it does now. Alaska, Hawaii … Why, if our current president had been born in my day, he only barely would have been an American!”
The crowd roared. He and Susan had cooked that one up during their week’s preparation. Despite the spectrum of political thought, or lack thereof, that Craig’s viewers encompassed, they all had one thing in common: paranoia, especially when it came to the legitimacy of anyone in power. Of course, he knew it was preposterous to doubt the validity of the president’s citizenship, but he could always play his remarks off as a bit of mild ignorance, as if he were unaware of where Craig’s followers stood on the issue. But now they were listening to him, and he’d bought himself some goodwill in case Craig leapt to the offensive.
And, sure enough,