"I'm really, really sorry about that," Ogle said, after they had been seated, menued, watered, and breadsticked by a swirl of efficient, white-aproned young Italian men. "I should have arranged to bring you in the rear entrance."

"It's okay," she said.

"Well, I'm embarrassed," Ogle said. "This is my business, you see. It was unprofessional on my part. But they had CNN going above the bar, and I didn't reckon on that footage being shown just before you got here."

"Powerful stuff," she said.

"It was unbelievable," Ogle said. He stared off into space. His face went slack and his eyes went out of focus. He sat motionless for a few seconds, moving his lips ever so slightly, gradually beginning to shake his head from side to side, playing the whole thing back on the videotape recorder of his mind.

Finally he blinked, came awake, and looked at her. "The kicker was Pete Ledger getting choked up. I never thought I'd see that in a million years."

"Me neither," she said. "He's usually too smart for that kind of thing."

"Well," Ogle said, "this is some powerful stuff that's going on right now."

That led them into small talk about the primary campaign, the misguided petition drives that were trying to put her father's name on the ballots in several states, and eventually into a discussion of Dad's stroke and its aftermath. Mary Catherine kept the whole thing quite vague, and Ogle seemed content with that; whenever the conversation wandered close to Dad's medical condition, or his political prospects, his face reddened slightly and he grew visibly uncomfortable, as if these topics were way beyond the bounds of southern gentility and he didn't know how to handle it.

She had only rarely gotten a chance to watch Dad doing business. But she knew that this was how Dad operated: lots of small talk. It was an Italian thing. It meshed pretty well with Ogle's low-key southern approach.

In fact, Ogle seemed to have no desire to talk business at all, as if the near riot at the bar had embarrassed him so deeply that he couldn't bring himself to return to that subject. So, after an opportune pause in the conversation, Mary Catherine decided to open fire. "You manage political campaigns for a living. My dad's not running for anything and neither am I. Why are you buying me lunch?"

Ogle folded his hands in his lap, broke eye contact, and glanced around at the food on the table for a few moments, as if this were the first time he'd ever thought about it. "There's a bunch of people in my business. Most of the important ones are busy running primary campaigns, for various candidates, right now. But not me. So far I have not committed my resources to any one candidate."

"Is that a deliberate strategy?"

"Sort of," Ogle said, shrugging. "Sometimes it pays not to commit too early. You may end up backing some loser. In the process, you antagonize the guy who ends up being the nominee, and then you can't get any work during the general election, which is where the big money gets spent."

"So you're holding back until you find out who's likely to get nominated. Then you try to get them as a client."

Ogle frowned and stared at the ceiling as if something was not quite right. "Well, there's more to it. I have been doing this for a number of years now. And frankly, I'm getting tired of it."

"You're getting tired of your business?"

"Certain aspects of it, yeah."

"Which aspects?"

"Dealing with campaigns."

"I don't understand," Mary Catherine said. "I thought you were the campaign."

"I would like to be the campaign. Instead, I'm the media consultant to the campaign."

"Oh."

"The campaign proper consists of the party's national committee and all of its hierarchy; the individual candidate's campaign manager and all of his hierarchy; and all of the pressure groups to which they are beholden, and their hierarchies."

"Sounds like a mess."

"It's a hell of a mess. If I can just make an analogy to your business, Ms. Cozzano, running a campaign is like doing a heart-lung transplant on the body politic. It is a massively difficult and complicated process that requires great precision. It cannot be done by a committee, much less by a committee of committees, most of whom hate and fear each other. The political nonsense that I have to go through in order to produce a single thirty-second advertising spot makes the succession of the average Byzantine emperor seem simple and elegant by comparison."

"I find that kind of surprising," Mary Catherine said. "People have known about the value of media since the Kennedy-Nixon debate."

"Long before that," Ogle said. "Teddy Roosevelt staged the charge up San Juan Hill so it would look good for the newsreel cameras."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. And FDR manipulated the media like crazy. He was even better at it than Reagan. So media's been important for a long time."

"Well, you'd think that the major political parties would have figured out how to deal with it more efficiently by now."

Ogle shrugged. "Dukakis riding in the tank."

Mary Catherine grinned, remembering the ludicrous image from 1988.

"The Democratic candidates in the '92 debate, sitting in those little desks like game show contestants while Brokaw strode around on his feet, like a hero."

"Yeah, that was pretty silly looking."

"The fact is," Ogle said, "the major parties haven't learned how to handle media yet. And they never will."

"Why not?"

"Because of their constitution. The parties were formed in the days when media didn't matter, and formed wrong. Now they are like big old dinosaurs after the comet struck, thrashing around weakly on the ground. Big and powerful but pathetic and doomed at the same time."

"You think the parties are doomed?"

"Sure they are," Ogle said. "Look at Ross Perot. If Bush's psy-ops people hadn't figured out how to push his buttons and make him act loony, he'd be president now. Your father has everything going for him that Perot did - but none of the negatives."

"You really think so?"

"After the reception you got when you came through that door," Cy Ogle said, nodding toward the entrance, "I'm surprised you would even ask me such a question. Heck, you dad's already on the ballot in Washington state."

She was appalled. "Are you joking?"

"Not at all. That's just about the easiest state to do it in. Only takes a few thousand people."

Mary Catherine didn't answer, just sat there silently, staring across the restaurant. She had been watching this political business for a while, but she still couldn't believe that a few thousand total strangers in Seattle had taken it upon themselves to put her father on the ballot.

"This is kind of interesting, as an abstract discussion," Mary Catherine said. "I mean, I'm enjoying it and I guess I'm learning something. But how it relates to my dad isn't clear to me."

"You're going to be hearing from a certain major political party," Ogle said. "Medical situation permitting, they're going to try to draft your father at the convention."

"And if that happens, you want me to use whatever influence I've got to get them to hire you?"

Ogle shook his head. "They won't hire me. They don't work that way. They always form their own in-house agency so that the political hacks, with all their little ambitions and intrigues, can exert more control over the ad people, whom they see as unprincipled vermin."

"So beyond having interesting conversations, what use are you to me? And what use am I to you?"

Once again, Ogle broke eye contact, put his silverware down, stared off into the distance, thinking.

"Let me just state one ground rule first," he said. "This conver­sation is not a business thing."

"It's not?"

"Nope. But it's not a social thing either, because we are total strangers."