The Speechwriter by Barton Swaim Read Free Book Online

looked as if he had only about ten.

5
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    LETTERS
    O ne Sunday night in February, Shelby, the governor’s scheduler, called me at home to tell me I would be traveling with the governor on Monday to three small towns. These would not be a day’s round of the usual press conferences, which would have taken place in the larger cities with bigger media markets, but a series of fifteen-­minute “talks” to local businesses. Each stop would involve a small crowd—as many as a hundred, as few as almost nobody—and two or three local journalists. The talk involved three bills the governor wanted to see passed in the legislature: one on drunk driving penalties, one on the amalgamation of two state agencies, and one on the state budget.
    I was to get the day’s schedule from Lewis, who wouldexplain my duties. These sounded complex: Motion to the governor “five minutes” when you have ten minutes before you have to leave. If you wait until you’ve got only five minutes, Lewis explained, it’ll take him ten minutes to get away from the crowd, and when he finds out he’s five minutes late he’ll blame you. Remember, he said, you’ve got to be the bad guy. If someone’s hogging the governor’s attention, he doesn’t want to be the one to break it off. You’ve got to step in and say something like “Governor, I’m so sorry, but we’ve really got to make the next appointment.” I was to shadow him, but not walk too closely, especially if there weren’t very many people around him. Lewis said more than once, “He hates the entourage look.”
    Was anyone traveling with us? It was just me, the governor, and a member of the security detail.
    Richard Mitchell, the comptroller general, I learned, would be at each stop. Mitchell was one of the governor’s allies. “But unfortunately,” Lewis said, “he won’t be in the car with you.” I wondered what he meant by “unfortunately.”
    On the way to the first event, the governor read the Wall Street Journal . When he was done, he folded it up and threw it into the backseat—that is, at me. I had heard that if you sat in the backseat when he was in the front, the governor would throw things at you. Not at you, exactly, just into the backseat. But he wasn’t trying not to throw things at you, either. When he was working, staffers existed—physically, literally—only insofar as they could aid him. In one sense it was impossible not to admire the man’s ability to fix his attention so exclusively on whatever he was doing. Still, it was unnerving torealize that, to him, at that moment, you were a nonentity; you weren’t.
    This was the first of three days of these talks, and first days of anything usually went badly. The governor always needed a few practice runs before he was comfortable with what he was saying. He would thumb through the talking points and inevitably find something he disliked or some question unasked or unaddressed. When this happened he would ask the nearest staffer a question you couldn’t answer. Silence was the worst possible response. It suggested to him that you were trying to make something up.
    â€œWhat was the Second Injury Fund?”
    â€œI don’t know. But I’ll call Stewart and find out.”
    Having talked to Stewart—at that time deputy chief of staff for policy—you would try to tell the governor what the Second Injury Fund was, but he would ask another question you weren’t able to answer, and soon the superfluity of your role as mediator would become apparent and he’d grab the phone from you. Stewart knew everything, and the governor depended on him a great deal, but for reasons I never quite grasped he never wanted to talk to Stewart directly unless he had to. Perhaps it made his dependence on his deputy too obvious.
    The talks that day didn’t go well. Not that the people