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By Root 676 0

he was secretly more their ally than he could ever say in public. I could sense the antagonism in the room building. White was trying to bullshit a room full of guys whose primary skill in life was to see things as they were and to act accordingly. Glancing away from White, I caught Narimanov looking in my direction. He nodded slightly, and I nodded back, wondering if he knew who I was. One funny aspect of my profession is that you often don’t know the people who are most familiar with your work. In the old days, when I had a broader distribution, I was always meeting people who greeted me as if I were a close acquaintance, and who were eager to resume intellectual arguments I hadn’t realized I’d participated in. Jarring as it could occasionally be, it was an effective icebreaker. It would be helpful if Narimanov turned out to be a closet fan. Like everyone else in my line of work, I was weak on Russia and really needed a top-level source.

“And now,” White said, making an ill-judged attempt at a ring announcer’s cadence, “the esteemed senior senator from the great state of Wyoming and, God willing, the next president of these blessed United States, Senator Joe Simpson.”

White turned to Simpson and began clapping enthusiastically. His applause echoed in the otherwise silent room, and he trailed off after a moment, sitting down, red-faced. You had to wonder about a guy so utterly unable to read his audience, although I gathered White wasn’t unique. I’d heard brutal stories about these lunches over the years—pretense, hypocrisy, and obfuscation were chum in the water, and more than one overly slick or mealymouthed candidate had been savaged.

Simpson rose leisurely and surveyed the hostile faces around the table. A tall man with a weathered, cigarette-cowboy look to him, he was frequently photographed in a string tie with a turquoise clasp and tended to poll well with female voters despite his conservative politics. I had a sudden conviction that things were about to get really ugly.

“Has it occurred to you,” he asked, smiling easily, “that I might not like you, either?”

He paused, the deathly silence that White’s introduction had generated gradually giving way to a ripple of appreciative laughter. Much to my surprise, he’d said exactly the right thing. Straight talk was red meat to this crowd.

“My father was a rancher,” he continued, a barely perceptible down-home twang to his words, “and the only time I ever bumped into financial folk as a kid was when the local bank manager would come around and inquire after our ‘delinquent payments.’ I learned a lot of words listening to that banker—words like ‘delinquent,’ and ‘arrears,’ and ‘foreclosure.’ It was quite the education.”

He paused again, and I took a quick look around. Everyone present was leaning forward and paying attention. Maybe the entire purpose of White’s introduction had been to make Simpson seem sincere by contrast. Either way, there was no doubt that the senator had a knack for connecting with people.

“I wanted to continue that education, so I went off to college and then to law school. And my ultimate objective was to get myself to Washington, where I could persuade the government to work harder for honest folk like my father, and like the neighbors I’d grown up with. So, after I graduated, I took a job with the Bureau of Land Management in the U.S. Department of the Interior, one of thirty fresh-minted lawyers they hired that year alone. And I thought I had all the answers. I had a whole bunch of New Deal ideas about programs the government should institute—about things the government should mandate for rural America’s benefit. But much to my surprise, the day I started work at the BLM was the day my real education began. And what I learned was that everything the government touched became corrupt and bloated and snarled in red tape. I observed it time and again, firsthand, in every conceivable kind of circumstance, and I struggled mightily to integrate what I was seeing with my youthful big-government leanings. And then one day, like Paul on the road