Page 35 of Primary Season
I opened the door, gestured to the rest of them, and got out, a plastic smile on my face. We had five stops scheduled for that day, and a luncheon at a local school district to talk about education funding. I’d be damned if I was going to let the last few tumultuous days get the best of me, or them. We’d come too far and worked too hard to just give up at the end of the line.
By the end of the night, though, even I couldn’t lie to myself any more. Whatever momentum I’d thought we had during the last week, whatever chances I thought we had in the bag were over. Epically, deeply, tragically over. More than that, I’d lost the one person I actually cared about—Alex.
Doug confirmed my suspicion that we’d lose South Carolina with one texted photo of a semi-full conference room off the hotel bar, a room that the staff had set up as the site of the “Patrick Blanco Victory Party.” Minutes after the polls closed, that party had maybe fifteen people. Seconds after I saw that photo on my phone, CNN showed a wide-view live shot of Howard Sayers’s victory party at a restaurant in Spartanburg. It already had one hundred people.
“We lost,” I told Kathryn, even though South Carolina only had 2 percent of the precincts reporting. “We’re finished.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, but her voice broke. I wondered if she was disappointed in me, herself, or both. “We don’t know for sure.”
“We know,” I said. “We know.”
A half hour later, as I sat on the bed drinking a bourbon laced with Diet Coke, CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC all called the race for Howard Sayers. Seconds later, CNN cut to a shot from Spartanburg, and a goddamn net full of balloons dropped on top of Sayers and his family. I had lost. Lost.
Goddamn it.
I had lost South Carolina by two thousand votes. Just over eighty thousand people voted, a record for the primary, but no, they didn’t vote for me. The scandal played that high and that loud. And in the end, it pushed them over to Howard. Howard-fucking-Sayers.
“We need to go down there and say something to the few people who’ve bothered showing up,” I told Kathryn as I stared at the TV screen. CNN showed a large map, called the “Path to the Nomination,” and a silver-haired anchor who looked like a bad imitation of Anderson Cooper wildly gestured back and forth about how Sayers had a likely path to the nomination, and I had a small one, even if I maintained Dwight Jameson’s support. “They’ll want to hear from me, I guess.”
She stood from the other end of the bed. “This campaign is dead. A waste of time.” She sniffed. “Waste of money.”
My phone buzzed, and I grabbed it from the duvet. When I saw the name on the screen, my shoulders slumped. “Dwight, I was just thinking about you,” I said into the receiver.
“Wanted to call with my condolences.” He cleared his throat. “But we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t see how was this was going to go ahead of time, Patrick.”
“Alex and I—” I glanced over at Kathryn, who glared at me, then got off the bed and began pacing the room with the phone still to my ear. “She was a good communications director. Great person.”
“Sounds like she was more than that.”
“Listen this…”
“Don’t try to snow me,” Dwight said. “You and I both know where we’re headed from here.”
“Sometimes people lose. I lost.” It sounded so hollow, but I didn’t know how to respond. Nothing I could have said would have made it any better. “We can still move on to Super Tuesday, and Nevada is coming up.”
“Not good enough.” Dwight clicked his teeth. “I stuck my neck out for you. Believed in you. I thought I could overlook some of my misgivings, but I’ve got to be honest. You don’t have me going forward. I need to look out for my own seat. Facing a tough primary challenge this time around, and my staff needs to focus on that.”
I stopped pacing near the bathroom door. “I understand. Completely.” Disgust and sadness coursed through my body, but I knew I only had myself to blame. In the end, I hadn’t made the sale. I hadn’t done my job. I’d lost. After Dwight and I ended the call, I shuffled back into the main part of the suite.
“What a shame,” Kathryn said.
“Not the kind of conversation I wanted to have, I’ll admit that.”
Kathryn turned her attention back to the TV, and the brunette surrogate for Howard Sayers being interviewed by Darla Martin. The woman had a large, victorious smile on her face.
“You’ll never come back from this loss,” Kathryn said. “Momentum has shifted. Sayers came in second in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, and first here. The energy is with him, not us.” She walked over to the large mirror and examined her face as if she’d see some hint of her former life peeking out from underneath the pounds of makeup she wore. “Thank god we aren’t in too deep. I would have hated to get past Super Tuesday only to see this whole thing collapse.”
“Don’t act like you’re sad or anything.”
“I’m not.” She turned to me, and her face softened into something that resembled sympathy, but wasn’t. “I’m tired, Patrick. Exhausted.”
“Me, too.”
In the end, I gave one of those speeches to the small crowd that night, one that sounds like hope but is really just a bunch of bullshit. I do so with an annoyed and disappointed Kathryn by my side. We could have moved on, we could have tried for Super Tuesday, but everyone knew we wouldn’t. When I ended my campaign the next morning from the lobby of our hotel, no one seemed that surprised. Only one media outlet, MSNBC, bothered to carry it live. The others decided to focus on Sayers and his new position as the default Democratic nominee.
Sometimes in life, you lose. It’s not an easy lesson to learn—especially for someone as proud and sometimes arrogant as me. A lesson like that stings. It’s not something that a man forgets.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said to Kathryn as we got on the bus after my suspension speech. Only Doug and Heather planned to join us on the long trip back to DC. The other interns, volunteers, and die-hards planned to find their own ways back to their hometowns or to Washington. “I need a break from this. And from you.”
