Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley Read Free Book Online Page B

hadn’t stopped since.
    Once, famously, on his way into a state funeral at the National Cathedral, a reporter for one of the smaller cable TV new channels stepped forward to ask for a brief comment. One hour and fifteen minutes later, Senator Mitchell was still talking as the casket emerged, carried by the honor guard. One of his fellow senators was heard to remark, “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ask him to deliver the eulogy?” The tape of the interview is a cult classic and plays three or four times a year during the wee hours. Some consider it the best argument around for 24/7 cable TV.
    Dexter was now in his midfifties, at the age when men begin to take cholesterol-lowering and penis-elevating medications. Now in his third decade of public service, he had a solid career behind him: prosecutor, congressman, three-term senator from the great state of Connecticut. For the last four years, he had been Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, generally referred to as “the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.” And true enough: if you wanted to wield a federal gavel, you first had to get past his.
    He was good-looking, in a shiny sort of way. He’d had his front teeth capped. They were now so blindingly white that when he bared them, you could almost hear a little
tingg!
and see a star of light reflect off the incisor, just like in the commercials. He cheerfully admitted to having Botox injections, and even had a nice line about it: “I need all the help I can get. My job involves a lot of frowning.” He had an attractive wife named Terry, attractive children, and an attractive beagle named Amtrak. (Senator Mitchell sat on the Transportation Subcommittee and fought fiercely for subsidies for America’s railroads, especially the one that ferried him from Stamford to Washington and back.)
    If a computer were programmed to design a president of the United States, it might very well generate Dexter Mitchell. Everything about him seemed, indeed, calculated. And yet for all his qualifications, Dexter somehow added up to less than the sum of his considerable parts. His epic loquacity was not an asset. Successive campaign advisers had tried without success to get him to give briefer answers, but nothing had stemmed the logorrheic tide, the tsunami of subordinate clauses and parenthetical asides, the inexorable mudslide of anecdotage. His campaign “listening tours” were occasions of mirth among political reporters, since it was the people he met who did the listening. Dexter Mitchell would happily express himself on any issue, at any time, at any place.
    He had run for president three times. The first time, he raised $ 12 million and came in third in the Iowa caucus. * The second time, he raised $ 20 million and came in fourth. The third time, he raised $ 22 million and came in seventh. He was undeterred. Somewhere over the rainbow he heard the people chanting,
Mit-chell! Mit-chell!
But by now he had begun to acquire a slightly used feel; “certifiably preowned,” as one pundit put it uncharitably.
    When he declared his intention to run a fourth time, his wife, now working as a K Street lobbyist representing—as it happened—the U.S. rail industry, replied in no uncertain terms that she would not spend one more weekend, one more day, one more hour, one more minute at some coffee shop in Iowa, pretending to care about ethanol, or indeed any biofuel; or for that matter about the price of wheat, corn, soy, or anything that emerged from the loamy topsoil of the Hawkeye State. Dexter sulked off to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to drown his sorrow in feverish multilateral panel discussions on climate change and globalization.
    Contemplating his thwarted presidential ambition, Dexter decided that a more sensible—and permanent—avenue to greatness would be to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And why shouldn’t he? He was ideal for the job. In fact, he asked himself, why hadn’t he