CHAPTER THREE

“It might sound odd, but as a kid, I was fascinated with ants. I would watch
them for hours. It was amazing what they could accomplish working
together the way they did—under all those anthills were huge cities with
endless tunnels going in all directions. They could accomplish this with
brains no larger than the head of a pin. But I think what I really admired
was their marching. They’d crawl in single file lines, one after the
other, half way across the yard, all following a leader to some place
he alone knew existed”.
Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At The Zero Hour

“We live life as if were a carnival. We give our attention not to he who
has something to say, but to he who yells the loudest.
We listen not to those who can speak with authority,
but to those who tell us what we want to hear. We elect
not those most qualified to serve, but those who are most popular.”
Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus

The 2012 presidential election was pretty much typical in every way. The Republicans condemned the Democrats, with a great deal of truth, as the party of the tax and spend. Democrats, as is their knee jerk reaction, condemned the Republican Party as the mouthpiece of the rich and famous. Republicans reminded the populace over and over that “liberal” was a word that meant intellectual (not like you and me) agent of (malignant) change; below the Mason-Dixon line, it was synonymous with an odd-sounding New Yorker-type who doesn’t know shit about what life is really all about. Democrats called for an election of inclusion, one in which all people of all parties could come together, all the while casting the Republicans as those cold uncaring in-laws who could tell you everything you were doing wrong yet somehow could never stop to help you make things right.
Both parties played the old time-tested charges and arguments. But Samuel Parsons played the game on a level that made Richard Nixon and Karl Rove seem like touchy-feely California new agers sitting down to a spot of organic tea.
While many thought Parsons was an unthinking loose cannon, to Hal Simpson, it appeared that he had willfully taken a page from Spiro Agnew’s 1972 game book. Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” became Parsons’ “palpable pulse of piss-poor political palaver.” Just as Agnew was happiest serving as Nixon’s attack dog, Parsons found he relished his role as his party’s hit man—his shoot from the hip, take no prisoners attitude fit him like a glove. There were recurring rumors Romney and his staff were disenchanted with the name calling, the quoting of statistics that could not be found, and the presentation of truths that were, at best, deliberate fabrications, but no one would say so on the record. After all, it wasn’t like he was waving a paper in front of the cameras with the names of hundreds of subversives in the State Department.
But did the voters know that Obama had promised the ayatollahs in Iran enough uranium for six nuclear weapons so they could destroy Israel, thus drawing America into a war in order that Nancy Pelosi could be installed as the American Governor in Tehran? That Obama had secretly colluded with Yemeni pirates to board only vessels of companies that had refused to pay tribute to the Democratic National Committee? That the liberal media that had so punished Tiger Woods with stories of his indiscretions with white women refused to do the same to Barack Obama, even though the two of them had spent a weekend in Chicago with three of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends?
That the Democrats had included a secret provision in their Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 to create death panels in which doctors could decide who would live and who would die, even if you were sick with no more than a common cold? That if the Health Act were overturned, the government would be able to give $75,000 to every man, woman and child in the country between the ages of nine and ninety?
Or that the CIA had photographs of Obama’s mother in bed with Leonid Brezhnev? (Stories about Ann Dunham being in bed with the pope that first showed up on Facebook and then spread around the internet were apparently posted by a minor Republican office holder in North Carolina when he “sort of” got his facts wrong in his post.) That Mexican drug cartel thugs had crucified three Border Patrol agents when they attempted to arrest a drug runner from Juarez?
These and other such rantings were carried in daily news reports, were replayed dozens of times every day in paid political ads on televisions and radios, and were related and repeated thousands of times in internet blogs and postings. At first, the Obama campaign, against the advice of Secretary of State Kerry, ignored these ridiculous charges, discovering only too late one of the unalterable laws in the age of mass communication and questionable media coverage: many will think that if it’s in the paper and on TV, it must be true. Others might be dubious, but just as they are accustomed to think where there is smoke, there must be fire, so will many voters feel that behind each overstatement, there must be some element of truth. After all, if Obama and Bill Clinton smoked cigars in the Oval Office as they watched secret tapes of a tryst between Nancy Pelosi and Hillary, then something must have happened, right? By the time the Democrats began denying the silliness threatening their campaign, their denials were seen as admissions of guilt. After all, if nothing had happened (and by now many voters were convinced something had), why were they denying it?
In the end, as in so many recent elections, the victor came out on top by the narrowest of margins, a winner in name only. In the weeks following the election, many feared the real winner was Samuel Parsons. Though Obama had been re-elected President, the media credited Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate to Parsons’ coat tail. While exit polls showed he was shunned in the election by the better educated, by the more affluent, and by minorities across the nation, early December post-election polls revealed an astonishing level of support for him to be the Republican nominee for President in 2016.

CHAPTER TWO

“For months, the talk at our dinner table was all about what a mess the
world was in, how Washington didn’t seem to know what to do about
it, how we needed new blood in that stale capital. Newsmen all said
we needed to elect as President someone familiar with the world,
a senator or an ambassador perhaps. But we knew a governor would
make a darn good President. Growing up near Lubbock, I could almost
see Mexico. And as governor of Texas, a state with an international
border, I came to understand how governments act with one another.”
--Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At The Zero Hour

“Perhaps we in the media are to blame for the current dearth of
satisfactory Presidential candidates. We report the comings and
goings of reality show stars when the shows are not reality and
the participants are not stars and they themselves are
not really news. We give time to the fringe
believer equal to what we give the studied government official.
We have created a world in which mediocrity is something to which
our youth aspire and our learned accept.”
--Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus

As was his habit every day at 4:30, Hal Simpson was sitting in his office, his legs stretched out before him on his old mahogany desk, the backs of his brogans resting on a stack of wrinkled papers. He had a Landshark, his beer of the week, in his left hand and a half smoked cigar in his right. His chair creaked each time he leaned forward to set his beer down or pick it up.
Carlsbad, New Mexico, was a city of almost 22,000 inhabitants when Hal had moved there with his family in 1959. There were four of them then. His father, whom Hal worshipped, was a tall thin man whose hair had grayed in his early twenties. He had wanted to be a lawyer; in his youth, Hal had thought his father looked like a thin grayed Carl Betz in Judd For The Defense. He had met Hal’s mother while a sophomore in college in New Jersey; when she became pregnant in his junior year, he dropped out school and began what would be a succession of jobs—short order cook, record shop manager, trucker. He took college classes whenever he could and eventually became a successful paralegal. By the time Hal turned twelve, his father was the office manager of the largest law firm in Carlsbad. One day in July, returning to his office after securing a deposition, his father's car was struck by a drunk driving a company truck. Hal saw him after the accident only once; he had walked to the hospital and sneaked by the nurses to get into the room where his father lay in a coma. He sat for what seemed like hours, saying nothing, holding his father’s hand. He still remembered how cold and clammy his skin had felt, how shallow the breathing seemed, the constant beep-beep-beeps of the different monitors. He didn’t cry; he only sat there, staring at his father, somehow knowing he would not see him up and around again, trying to almost to breathe in the way his father looked, the way he smelled, the way he felt; knowing that those memories would stay with him forever and would be a sad substitute for the time he could never share, the attention he would never have. He remembered the prayers he whispered, the deals he offered if only God would make his father wake up. Did he whisper to his father that afternoon how much he loved him? To this day he wasn’t sure.
The managing partners of his father’s firm were only too happy to sue the company that owned the truck that collided with his father's car. Hal was never sure it was fair that they should pay for an errant employee over whom they had no control, but fair or not, the partners did and obtained for Hal, his mother and his younger brother a multi-million dollar judgment.
The settlement meant nothing to the remaining Simpsons. Hal’s mother saw no reason to change her lifestyle with blood money. Though she was quite possibly now the richest woman in Carlsbad, there was nothing to prove to anyone. She was dedicated to her children but saw to it that they would grow up without airs and develop into responsible adults unaffected by the wealth that had taken so much to obtain. Her pet name for Hal was Halbert. His brother didn’t seem be able to pronounce that and always called him Houseboat, a nickname that stuck.
Like his father, Hal saw himself as a lawyer. Throughout high school, he had rather grandiose schemes about graduating from law school, joining the ACLU, and proceeding to save the world from itself. Once in college, though, he found it was more fun to have fun than to study, and he realized law school would not be his future. He thought perhaps being a newspaper reporter might be to his liking--after all, he was good at English, could sort through people’s b.s., and liked to be at the center of all sorts of happenings, both large and small.
He was en route to an interview with the St. Louis Post Dispatch when he received a phone call that his mother had suffered a stroke. He turned his blue Ford Falcon around and managed getting three speeding tickets as he headed west on Interstate 40. From Amarillo, he headed toward Lubbock, from there to Hobbs, New Mexico, and then to Carlsbad.
He sped through town and west on Pierce Street to Memorial Hospital, a one story, red brick structure that always seemed to smell of sick people. At the nurses’ station, he identified himself to a portly redhead with a stethescope dangling around her neck that made an odd clanging sound each time it hit the countertop. The nurse did not look him in the eye, but she really didn’t seem to look away either when she told him his mother had passed away a few minutes before. She conveyed no warmth, no sorrow. Only a look that said death happens.
It seemed full circle as Hal sat by his mother’s bedside. The cold, clammy skin seemed too familiar to him as he sat and held her hand. He combed her hair, still dark, so much like his, but it was full of static electricity and would not obey the commands of his brush strokes. He finally just sat there. Should he say a prayer? He had not prayed since his father died. Why believe now that there would be anyone out there who would hear him? Where is the logic in the universe when the good are taken so early?
Now it all seemed so long ago. When the estate was settled, Hal decided to stay in Carlsbad. He quickly became the Current Argus’ star reporter. He was proud of his achievement, even though he knew the only other reporter never left his desk, ferreted out his news only by telephone, and made up as much information as he discovered. Late in his second year at the paper, irritated over an editorial change in the flavor of an article he had written (okay, it only took five minutes to write, but that wasn’t the point), he bought the paper. At age 23, he was owner, editor, and publisher of the largest newspaper in Carlsbad, New Mexico, albeit the only newspaper in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The city’s high and mighty and its lowdown and dirty all looked up to him. He wanted to say he could make or break people, but he really didn’t think he knew how.
Hal had discovered he had a deep, almost reverential, respect for news. News is facts. Facts is truth. Truth needs no blandishment, it needs no editorial gussying up. Yes, the Argus had an editorial page, and yes, he knew he was known around town for his often wordy editorials, frequently out of step with local opinion. But page one and all the other pages were for news. Hal knew that while a lot of people in town subscribed to area papers like the El Paso Times and the Albuquerque Journal, they still read the Argus. It was homey. It was truthful. It could be trusted.

Now it was 2016, and he had been editor of the Argus for 41 years; looking back, he’d say most of those years were good ones, both professionally and personally. Yes, there was that disastrous first marriage, but the second one had been a charm, more or less. True, he was a bit bored at home, but he had a wonderful child, a damn nice house, a brand new Camaro, a kick-ass AV system, and unknown to almost everyone, a special friend in whom he could confide, let his guard down, and be himself.
He took a deep puff on his cigar. He wasn’t really sure why. Cigar smoke is such a nasty taste. A nasty manly taste. Oh well, that’s why I’ve got the beer, he thought; it makes a great cigar chaser.
He tossed the empty beer bottle into the trash and turned to his credenza, in which he had a small refrigerator stocked with a couple dozen more bottles. He popped the top off another Landshark and asked the two men sitting in front of him if either wanted another. This is the life, he thought. Where else can you drink beer, talk politics, say whatever you want and not have to worry about who agrees with you and who doesn’t? Freedom to kick back, freedom to mouth off. What were the words of that CS&N song? “Find the cost of freedom, hiding . . .” Hiding where? He was trying to remember the next line when he heard,
“Yep, I woulda been damned if I'da thought Obama had a snowball’s chance in hell in ’12. I still don’t know how he pulled that election outta his ass.” The political commentator was Allen Jeffries, a friend of Hal’s since elementary school. He was a regular at these 4:30 smokefests. Four years younger than Hal, Allen had never married. He often talked about living la vida loca, but Hal and everyone else knew he hadn’t had a date in five years. Hal never thought of Allen as particularly articulate, but he gave him high marks for common sense. And while Allen’s reasoning may often have been somewhat circuitous, Hal found that the two of them agreed on most things.
“He won because this country isn’t ready for a Mormon President,” came the reply from Hal’s left. Somewhere behind a climbing waft of smoke sat Frank Greene. “He plays well in Utah and I guess Massachusetts, but there was no way this country would elect him. What’d he take in the Electoral College? Six states?” Hal liked Frank’s company, but he found him to sometimes be a bit of a bore. Like Allen, Frank kept abreast of news and happenings, but whereas Allen could explain both sides of an issue, Frank generally found his own to be the sole compelling argument.
Allen blew out a mouthful of cigar smoke. He always looks so ridiculous when he tries to blow those smoke rings, Hal thought. “Yeah, but six states don’t tell the story. Remember how close the popular vote was? What was the difference? Like 0.5% of the total? That’s a helluva lot of non-Mormons voting for the guy.”
“You know,” interjected Hal, “I truly think the Republicans could have won in ’12. I think the reason they lost was Parsons. He scared away the independents.”
“Where do you get that?” demanded Frank. “Parsons is the best damned governor Texas has ever had.”
“Well, compared to Bush . . .” began Allen.
“Don’t even go there,” said Frank. “Parsons turned that state around. Crime dropped . . .”
“Frank, crime dropped because under Parsons, Texas judges incarcerated more people than at any period in the state’s history. And early parole became almost non-existent. More people were in prison and people in prison were in there longer. Hell, there wasn’t anybody out on the street to commit any crimes,” Hal said. He knew he didn’t believe what he’d just said, but heck, he knew Frank would take the bait. And he wasn’t ready to go home yet.
“And you have a problem with that? Damn guilty people need damn longer sentencing. And besides, they built six new prisons under Parsons’ term. Lotta new jobs. More than your boy Obama can say for his policies.”
Hal and Allen exchanged glances, both rolling their eyes upward a bit. Frank always carried his arguments too far, Hal thought, but he was never really sure how much of what Frank said was real and how much of it was . . . well, bait.
“C’mon, Frank-o, get real.” Allen took another swig of beer. He liked these afternoon bull sessions, even if Hal’s taste in beer was a bit strange; Landshark this week, Red Label last week, what was it the week before? “The only reason Parsons was even tapped was because Texas has one helluva lotta electoral votes. Pure and simple. The guy’s a bozo. They didn’t even know each other before they met on the day of the announcement.”
“Al, buddy, think about it. Doesn’t matter if they knew each other. It’s all the staff guys that do the research and all anyway. Look at the facts. Parsons is one fine law-and-order man. Hell, every time I hear that theme music to Law & Order, I think Governor Parsons and get goose-bumps. Look how he shored up security at the border when the feds couldn’t do it. How he cut back on welfare and got the cheats off the rolls. Too damned many of those blasted welfare recipients driving Cadillacs.”
“Get real, Frank.” It was Hal’s turn again. “Next you’ll be telling me welfare mothers have all those babies just so they can get another $80 a month. I give credit to Parsons for firming up security at the border. Lord knows we needed it. But what about all those reports of shootings by state militia? These aren’t army guys. They’re not National Guard. They’re a bunch of trigger happy NRA guys concerned that someone from Mexico or Central America is going to come across the border and take their jobs. Parsons did nothing to keep those people in line.”
“There’s a song that reminds me of Parsons, too,” piped up Allen. “Theme from Sesame Street.” Both Hal and Frank looked him. “What? I missed the moment?”

Samuel Parsons was born in Post, Texas, where he was an indifferent student before he graduate from high school twenty-first in his class of thirty. Post was a small town of about 3500 people, dependent on agriculture and the vagaries of the weather. Voters elected Parsons mayor in 2008. Post mayors generally had little to do other than occasionally direct a letter to the state utility commission or attend a monthly council meeting. Fortunately for the future Presidential candidate, however, he was able to show his mettle when a crime spree occurred in his town. After car window was shattered by a rock and a motorcycle was stolen, Parsons ordered the sheriff to place anyone out after dark into jail for the night. He gained regional attention when it was reported in Dallas newspapers Post had no curfew hour and that 95% of the people jailed were either Hispanic or black. Within a year, he resigned his position and moved to Lubbock, a city of about a quarter-million people about forty miles west. Buying a percentage of a local television station (Hal thought it odd no one had ever explained where the funds had come from), Parsons gave himself prime time airplay, using his time to interview guests, the locally famous and the not-so-famous, extremists from both the left and the right. He patterned his interview style after Joe Pyne, one of his childhood heroes. He rarely subjected militia members, pro-life, pro-death penalty, or anti-immigration guests to any particularly deep questions. He reserved his grilling and name calling to those guests who were pro-choice, anti-death penalty, or just plain pinhead liberal Socialist Communist anti-American pink namby-pamby jackasses. He insisted he slipped when he called Howard Stern a motherfucker on the air, but he was quickly developing a reputation as the Texan Rush Limbaugh. Even Glenn Beck traveled to Lubbock to be on his program and call him “Lubbock’s answer to the sissified Obamafied politics that have taken over our country.” Parsons’ television exposure and his reputation for straight talk allowed him to stage an upset victory over incumbent governor Rick Perry to take the Republican nomination for governor of Texas in 2010.
The election pitted him against Democratic nominee Kinky Friedman, a relative newcomer to politics whose main claim to fame was a song titled, “They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” Parsons won a lopsided victory in November.
While governor, Parsons pursued a law and order agenda. (Hal saw this as right-speak for the whittling away of civil rights.) He spoke out against the ineffectiveness of the federal government’s domestic and international policies in the weekly television addresses he used as his pulpit. His detractors were “jackasses,” liberals were “dangerous morons,” pro-choice adherents were “cold blooded baby killers who would stick a vacuum cleaner hose in a women’s body for a few lousy dollars.” It was insinuated, though never quite said, that all Latinos (Parsons labeled everyone in this category as “Messican”) were thieves, Jews were bigger thieves, and blacks were murdering thieves.
And the public just ate it up. A year after his election as governor, Texas’ junior senator died when his plane crashed in Bermuda, where he was en route on a fact-finding tour. Samuel Parsons appointed himself to fill the now empty senate seat. When informed he was unable to do this by Texas law, Parsons resigned his gubernatorial seat. His successor’s first job in office was to appoint Samuel Parsons the new junior senator from Texas.
When the Republican National Committee helped cast about for a vice-presidential candidate in 2012, Parsons was regarded as a Texas hick, opinionated and quirky, a man who liked his alcohol (too much) and his women (dangerously young). But he was a populist in a state with big electoral votes and someone the powers that be thought they could control. For this he was crowned the nominee for vice-president.
He was off and running.

CHAPTER ONE

"Barry Goldwater said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
He said that in 1964. Many people scoffed at him, but now, fifty-plus
years later, I see the wisdom in his advice. Namby-pambies say to
me I must be careful what I wish for lest it come to pass. I say that
if we occasionally ignore the civil liberties of one or two of these
namby-pambies and throw them out with the bathwater, then at
the end of the day we will have saved both the baby and
democracy.”
Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At Ground Zero

“The true believer may see more than coincidence in words that
begin with the letter ‘D’: dialogue, decency, and democracy.
Without dialogue—the uninhibited exchange of thoughts, feelings,
and information--there can be no decency. Without decency—the
respect for the opinions of others, the willingness to listen open-
mindedly to ideas other than our own—there can be no
democracy. Dialogue, decency, and democracy are thus intertwined into
more than a one-letter alphabet soup. Without these three
important words, the other letters of the alphabet and the words
they form—extremism, fascism, and the like—become a true
threat to the American way of life. These threats, as Sinclair
Lewis so ably pointed out in 1935, can happen here.”
Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus


“What the hell were they thinking?” Hal Simpson thought to himself for at least the third time as he perused the news feeds in his office that morning. The night before, he and a relatively small number of Americans watched as the delegates to the Democratic national convention voted to name Hillary Clinton their 2016 nominee for the office of President of the United States.
Hillary. Hillary. She had become a one name product. While her supporters compared her to other one name leaders such as Moses or Cicero, her detractors (and Hal was among these) listed her with one namers with more style than substance—Cleopatra and Nero, for instance. What is it with the one namers, Hal wondered. Perhaps he was being too anal; maybe it was because people with full names better suited the columns in his newspaper. And yet, it wasn’t George. It was George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. John frickin’ Kennedy. Last names told you the family from which a person sprang. Family meant continuity with those who had come before you and those who would follow you later. Family meant community. Hal doubted that one name legends in their own minds felt the connection with those before them or even those around them. It wasn’t that Hillary hadn’t run a good campaign—it was certainly tighter and had fewer mistakes than her 2012 run when she had resigned as Secretary of State to challenge the incumbent President of her party for the nomination. That was a bloody contest, complete with the usual name calling and challenges to the seating of a few Southern delegates at the convention. Fights over the platform were particularly acrimonious, and as was the habit of the Democratic Party, these were fought in front of klieg lights and television cameras. The pundits said Obama suffered a few deep cuts, but no terminal wounds.
But to Hal, the cuts Hillary inflicted now suggested the weakness and the vanity of a candidate who had failed twice before to get her party’s nomination for President. How could Democrats forget what Hillary had almost cost them four years before? What were they thinking? All the polls showed she badly trailed Samuel Parsons, the presumptive Republican candidate—what were they thinking?
Of course, any Democrat would have problems in 2016. So much had happened to the country, both at home and abroad during the almost-eight year run of the Obama administration.
At home, an administration that inspired such an initial outpouring of support and good will worldwide had sunk ever faster, ever deeper into a course of ineffectiveness and inaction. The national health plan, for which the president had labored so hard in 2009, pleased no one. The poor still felt they were denied an adequate level of health care. Spiraling costs forced the government to slash reimbursement levels, not just angering doctors and hospitals, but forcing many to close their doors. Waiting lines for medical care grew ever larger and it was not long before people who had access to care felt they, too, were being denied what they deserved. Forced to tweak and re-tweak payment policies, the government turned to private business for assistance. After assigning $2.1 trillion in less than five years to Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna, and a small number of other insurance behemoths, the government found itself hard-pressed to explain why only $1.5 trillion had reached providers. Stories of insurance fat cats, CEOs and CFOs nailing down seven digit bonuses annually (while the typical American household saw its buying power shrink 12% annually) appeared to put yet another nail into the coffin holding Obama's dream for a new America. Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008 and a Fox analyst (Hal could never say “Fox” and “News” in the same sentence), drove home a message of “I told you so” to an American electorate increasingly disenchanted with Washington.
America's economy, crippled by Wall Street fat cats taking advantage of deregulation instituted by earlier administrations, defied all attempts at resuscitation. Massive infusions of government cash failed to create new jobs, failed to create demands for new goods, and failed to create new markets overseas for exports. Recession remained a worldwide problem; when the Wall Street Journal speculated that an implosion of Chinese markets would force that country to collect the huge debt owed it by the United States, stock markets worldwide went into a panic. It was as if an economy hobbling along on one good leg now discovered that last leg would soon be amputated.
And that was the good news.
Internationally, it appeared that the world had gone to hell in a hand bag. After brokering a shaky armistice between Pakistan and India when fighting over Kashmir again broke out, the Obama administration found itself powerless to defuse tensions between India and China along the border of the Indian state of Arunchal Pradesh. It was Vladamir Putin of Russia, diverting his attention from yet another uprising in Chechnya, who brought both sides back from a dispute that seemed to be spiraling toward nuclear confrontation. Many Americans could not understand how an oppressive Russian dictator could win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
The Mexican government of Felipe Calderon fell in 2013. Calderon had battled drug cartels for a number of years, committing government troops in ever increasing numbers as the cartels became ever more violent. In Juarez alone, the number of dead had risen from 2657 in 2009 to 5831 in 2012. The social and political vacuum created by the cartel’s targeting of police, lawyers, judges, government members and army troops allowed a flourishing of extortion, kidnappings, and murders by many lesser criminals. Increasingly, Mexican kidnappers and hit men crossed their country’s northern border; while murders of Mexican nationals and naturalized Hispanics in El Paso, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Los Angels and Portland caused little notice on Fox News, the murders of an Anglo police officer in Burbank, another in Charlotte, and a judge in Cleveland seemed to put many American communities along the border with Mexico on a war footing. Border crossings at San Diego and El Paso were shut down for months, and without the influx of American dollars, economies in towns like Tijuana and Juarez suffered severely. These towns, and many smaller towns and villages, disintegrated into little more than personal fiefdoms, where criminal militias made and enforced their own laws, where not only local citizens but the regular army was afraid to go.
And on top of all of this, the stakes in the West's confrontation with Islam continued to worsen. In 2011, when Obama's reelection campaign was unofficially begun, American troops remained on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Egyptian government remained weak following its prolonged conflict with Hamas and a half dozen coup attempts in 2010, forcing American troops to occupy the Suez Canal. Saudi Arabia, having committed its resources to bail out Dubai after its 2009 financial meltdown, found its economy in chaos when the continuing global recession lowered international demand for oil to 1960s levels. Unable to pump money into domestic programs, the House of Saud found itself more and more isolated from the populace, which itself was becoming increasingly militant, often expressing itself in violent outbursts against its leaders who were seen as too pro-western.
Around the globe, crowds of rioting Muslims burned straw effigies of Obama. Beheadings of American contractors and service personnel became near daily occurrences. Osama bin Laden and a host of lesser known terrorists continued to threaten a rain of fire on the United States. The president, reacting to one such threat, ordered the Air Force to shoot down a small plane entering Florida airspace. Recovery operations the next day revealed its occupants consisted of two families seeking asylum from Cuba; six children were among the dead. (Hal remembered the editorial he wrote noting the international condemnation of the President’s actions and his short-lived paradoxical rise in his domestic approval rating following the incident.)
The administration’s secret efforts to help foment a violent overthrow of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went nowhere. The Iranian president’s grip on the country tightened after its violent suppression of riots occurring though 2010. By the time Hossein Mousavi was shot 32 times at point blank range by Iranian secret police the following year, no crowds went to the streets to protest. The shooter, tried for murder, was acquitted when it was discovered his machine gun had only accidentally discharged.
American news outlets were unanimous in vilifying Barack Obama when news of Iran’s successful detonation of its first nuclear weapon became known. Obama, who had long counseled the value of the international community in applying economic sanctions to the Ahmadinejad regime, found himself increasingly isolated. When he lent only limited support to Israel’s carpet bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, military sites, and capital, he earned no respect either at home or abroad.
By mid-2011, Barack Obama’s smile seemed to remind people more and more of Jimmy Carter. Most man-on-the-street interviews began with high marks for his good intentions; they ended with bewilderment, frustration, or anger with an America where the middle class seemed to be vanishing and a world that seemed to be going to go mad.
Hillary sensed winds were changing and resigned as Secretary of State to free herself to challenge the President in the 2012 Democratic primary. All of Washington marveled at the strength Obama showed in trying to crush his opponent, yet all wondered where was this leadership and resolution in dealing with so many other issues of the day. The pundits all predicted the self-immolation of the Democratic Party.
At the time of the formal kick-off of his reelection campaign, the President seemed to appeal to no one. To many black activists, he was half white. To many white conservatives, he was all black. To conservatives of all colors, he represented tax and spend policies taken to a level they could never have imagined. To liberals, he was bluff and bluster, high on ideas but low on delivery. The industrial North saw an economy in shambles as factories closed; the inability of the government to bail General Motors out of a fourth bankruptcy in 2012 reinforced the perception of the President as an incompetent do-nothing. The rural South with its agricultural economy subject to the increasing vagaries of weather and faced with dwindling government support of its large numbers of poor citizens, saw no hope for any change in the second-term President. The West, where Hispanics and Anglos were growing ever more polarized, showed no interest re-electing a President under whom Phoenix had become first in the world in its number of per capita kidnappings.
Yet, even with the popular dissatisfaction with the sitting President, Clinton found it hard to reclaim the high ground she had tried to hold in the 2008 primaries. The public found her to vacillate on too many issues. She accepted too many large contributions from government contractors. When she and her husband clumsily suggested to a primarily black audience that Obama was not one of them because his mother was a white tramp, a pastor from Birmingham replied that “black coffee with cream is better than white bread covered with green.” Television crews were only too happy to record the name calling that ensued between her husband, the 42nd President of the United States, and the Birmingham pastor, soon to be a guest on an hour-long Oprah Winfrey special on race relations in the United States.
It was the typical Democratic National Convention held in Baltimore in August 2012. The Democrats, long a party of internecine battles and public blood lettings, showed a remarkable consistency in their ability to remain a party of internecine battles and public blood lettings. After all the impassioned speeches and inspired name calling, after the charges of back room deals and challenges of the legitimacy of various state delegations, after the platform fights, floor fights, and fights around the convention hall, neither Obama nor Clinton could claim enough of the 4418 delegates necessary to take the nomination.
After the third ballot, Democratic National Chairman Tim Keane informed the delegates that the doors would be locked and no one would go home until a candidate had been nominated. He allowed more speeches be made as the two candidates used the time to jockey for position, buy votes with promises, and predict victory on the next ballot to any newsperson who would listen.
But it was John Kerry, Clinton’s replacement as Secretary of State, who delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of Obama that finally carried the day. Invoking the spirits of Jefferson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, Kerry had the delegates on their feet crying out “Obama, We Want Ya” for almost twenty minutes.
Media commentators, Hal among them, all agreed on two things. The first was that they never thought they would use the words “impassioned” and “Kerry” in the same sentence. The second was that as the speech was delivered at 3:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, who the hell was awake in television land to hear it?
Barack Obama became the 2012 Democratic candidate for President on the fourth ballot. And now in 2016, Hal mused, like a spurned lover, the Democratic party had forgiven, forgotten, and given all of itself to Hillary. Hillary.

INTRODUCTION

If your wife thinks you've got the ability to write a book, how do you prove you can't? The answer to that is easy. You try to write a book, knowing she'll sooner or later roll her eyes and say, "yep, you were right."
But what to write about? Well, I happened upon a Sinclair Lewis story published around 1935 about a candidate elected President of the United States who abolishes freedom, creates concentration camps, and generally disproves the notion that "It Can't Happen Here."
Then you look around you and you see that, oh my God, it sure as hell could happen here.
So partly as homage, partly as warning, you use the broad strokes created by Lewis and bring the story up to date.
The main character in this updated story, I cannot deny, is inspired by my impressions of a certain contemporary political figure.
When I first posted this introduction, I had eight short chapters written. Now there are eighteen. I may not be able to write, but at least I now have a hobby.
To sort of quote Henny Youngman, if you don't like it, blame my wife. Please.