The Sore Loser
A well-heeled businessman is running for a seat in the
United States Senate. His entire campaign consists of a
seemingly endless barrage of attack ads on TV. For a while
the technique seems to be working and he mounts a sizable
lead in the polls over his opponent, a liberal with a
checkered past. Each ad features the same ghoulish, grainy
photograph of his opponent looking like Wonderland's Red
Queen, and each week the charges against her mount: her
junket to Fiji, her husband's philandering, her campaign
manager's conviction for check kiting (which was overturned
on appeal, but still . . .). From twenty-five points down in
April, he climbs to fourteen points ahead in late September.
In the heat of the battle, though, he
finds equally ugly charges being leveled at him -- a
uniquely horrible experience for a low-profile businessman
who has inherited and husbanded his enormous fortune in the
obscurity of privilege and the finest connections. Every few
days another skeleton is yanked brutally from the darkness
of his closet -- the expulsion from the Boy Scouts, the
hasty mid-term withdrawal from his college Ethics course,
the way he deposited his mother in a hellish "Retirement
Home" after the untimely death of his feared and imperious
father. At first he can parry or finesse most of the
charges, and meanwhile he steps up the sleaze assault on his
opponent. With only weeks to go before the election, though,
he sees his lead beginning to shrink. He underpaid the lawn
boy -- twelve points falls to eleven. His wife once pled
guilty to possession of a "controlled substance," and eleven
falls to nine.
The destruction of his carefully
crafted person proceeds with a numb, oppressive ticking. His
son stole and broke a classmate's skateboard. Tick. A
disgruntled former nanny is paid to talk to the tabloids
about his fondness for "extra discipline." Tick. Tick. Seven
falls to four falls to three falls to the statistical
purgatory of a dead heat. Tick. Less than a week to go.
Tick. He once knowingly sold a car with bad brakes to a nun,
who less than a month later plunged to her death from a
mountain road. Tick. Tick. Tick --
At no point in the campaign -- for that
matter, at no point in his life -- has he ever considered
the possibility that he might lose. He has never lost
anything before. And yet by election day everything is lost:
his reputation, his fortune, his family, his soul.
Everything is gone.
He does two things on the Wednesday
after the polls close and the networks declare his candidacy
three percentage points behind and therefore legally dead.
He directs his attorney to the State Election Commission to
file a pro forma complaint against the winner, and then he
writes a check for a little less than twelve million
dollars, half his remaining fortune, to the state's largest
television station, paying them to run one of his smear ads
every night at exactly six o'clock for the six-year duration
of his opponent's term. The station accepts his terms,
explaining that business is business and the public has a
right to know. He watches every night, with the lights out.
Sometimes he recites along with the script, and sometimes he
munches quietly through a bowl of popcorn perched on his
knee.
© Michael Fleming
Berkeley, California
November, 1994
|