"Before we go any further," Dunphy said, "I take it that you support the senator's candidacy for governor. The people who recommended you for this project said they assumed you 10
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would, but of course I have to ask. Otherwise, there's no point in our going on."
"Sure. I'll vote for McCloskey."
"You don't sound one hundred percent convinced."
"I don't agree with your guy on everything. He's too timid, I think, on getting redistricting out of the hands of the Legislature. And on public financing for campaigns he's as retrograde as everybody else. There are a couple of other things, too. But who else could I support? Louderbush is way out in right field, and in the general election it's likely to be Merle Ostwind. I'm trying to recall, but the last Republican I can think of who I might have voted for was Abraham Lincoln."
"Yeah, the other party peaked in 1865. It's a shame. A healthy democracy needs two parties both working for the common good. Not one dedicated to screwing the poor and the middle class and the other one busy screwing itself every chance it gets."
"And we get another chance to screw ourselves this fall."
"Ah, but that's where you come in, my friend." Dunphy forced a sour smile. "I'm sure you understand that if Assemblyman Louderbush wins the Democratic primary, we're all but fucked in November. The New York State electorate can be cranky, but it's not by and large clinically insane.
Voters don't at all mind placing Republicans in the governor's mansion—even mediocrities like George Pataki—if our party comes across as too arrogant or too uppity-smarmy or too indictable. Or—and this is why I have invited you here today—if we offer voters candidates like Kenyon Louderbush, 11
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who's too weirdly out of step with the generally mild and centrist thinking of most of the state.
"All the polling confirms it; Louderbush has an electorally formidable primary following. They are mostly deranged Tea Partiers who think the New York State GOP is a secret agent in the employ of European state socialism, and these folks would rather have a right-wing Dem than a Nelson Rockefeller-style commie-Republican in office. So they're reregistering Democratic—switching from Republican or independent—to get Louderbush the nomination in September. Then he'll of course lose to mild-mannered Mrs.
Ostwind, and it'll be four years of Pataki Lite.
"Which would be very lite indeed. The state will stagnate and our party will fall into disarray. Beelzebub will reign, in the form of more investment in prisons than in higher education, minimum-wage privatization of just about every civic function, and teachers being required to stay late and mow school lawns and shovel snow. Our generous friends the unions will have conniption fits. The Legislature, of course, will continue to lie on its back, its legs over its head, transfixed by its own butt hole. Within a period of just a few years, New York State will turn into Mississippi or Idaho or some such benighted bog—an international laughing stock, a pathetic sink. Don, just the thought of what will happen to this wonderful state if Shy McCloskey loses the primary in September almost makes me want to open this window—
notwithstanding the fact that these fucking things are unopenable even on a day as lovely as this one—and jump out. It's a hell almost beyond imagining."
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"And you're going to depend on me to change all that? I'm humbled."
"You can help. You can make a difference."
I knew enough about Tom Dunphy—Timothy Callahan's boss, state Assemblyman Myron Lipschutz, had filled me in—
to understand that even if the Democrats lost the governorship in November, Dunphy would not be jumping out of any windows. He'd go back to his Manhattan consulting firm and hire himself out to the highest center-left bidder running for office and would pop up periodically as an election-strategy nattering head on CNN and Morning Joe and even—Dunphy could both dish it out and take it—Fox News.
Armageddon only lasted as long as an election cycle, and The Liberal Rapture was always just around the corner.
I said, "I've never done opposition research before, and generally I disapprove of it."
"Uh-huh."
"From what I understand of the practice, it rarely produces information voters need to know about a candidate. Any news that somebody smoked pot in college or had a love child at seventeen who's now the Norwegian minister of fisheries is basically just a meaningless distraction. Unless, of course, the candidate has made a secret pact with Norway to have all the school children in his jurisdiction eating herring noodle surprise for breakfast and lunch."
A mild shrug. "The stuff you get from oppo's a meaningless distraction, yes, but it's a meaningless distraction that often matters. Elections, as I'm sure you know, are generally won or lost by a few percentage points. And if you can manipulate 13
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even a small fraction of voters into being turned off by your opponent's one-time or even current dropping-his-drawers problem, say, or by his having neglected to file his state tax return in a timely manner when he was nine years old, chances are you win. To the sensible folks you and I dine with at La Serre, these rude matters are an irritating distraction, of course. But to that always unhappy segment of the electorate that's eager to focus its inchoate resentments on a public figure who wants something from them—such as a vote—
these irrelevancies can reign supreme. Especially if the irrelevancies have to do with things these unhappy voters aren't getting enough of, such as sex or money."
I said, "I've never heard anybody use inchoate in conversation before. What were you, an English major?"
Dunphy laughed. "Why else would I end up in a job like this?"
"I know."
"Anyway," he went on, "opposition research can turn up information that's not merely ugly but does in fact bear on character, which is not irrelevant at all for public officials.
Example A is one of our own. It was almost certainly a hired investigator such as yourself who tracked down Eliot Spitzer's wayward peregrinations. I know, I know—a man hiring prostitutes. Ideally that ought to be between a man and his wife and his conscience, not for the readership of the New York Post to drool over. But our formerly revered crusading Democratic briefly-governor had cracked down on call-girl operations when he was AG, and it was the monumental hypocrisy that was so universally galling. It pains me to say 14
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it, but this was a legitimate call by the other side. And think of the closeted gay pols who scorn gay marriage and sexual-orientation job-protection laws, and so on, and then it comes out they've got wide-stance tendencies in airport restrooms.
No, matters of character do count—openness, honesty, actually being the person voters are led to think a candidate is. Which brings us, Don, to why I've asked you to come over here today."
"Good."
Dunphy's cell phone warbled, and he picked it up, checked the number and shut the phone off. "That'll wait."