It was all jaggedy contrasts and mood swings. Clearly this man's feelings had been hurt. But it wasn't all negative either. Toward the end of Cozzano's statement, the ex-autoworker's emotional state had swung sharply upward.
"Huh. That's interesting," Ogle said. "The appeal to pride seems to work. But it's not old-fashioned jingoism. It's a question of personal, individual pride. Core values."
On TV, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was explaining that the candidates could now rebut each other's statements.
McLane flashed up on the screen with a bit of a stunned, nervous, beady-eyed look, as if he wanted to stare at Cozzano but couldn't. "Well, it seems to me that, uh, the best ticket to self-esteem and dignity is to have a steady job. Everything else follows from that. Under my administration, I'll be pursuing policies that will stimulate the vigor of our free enterprise system and lead to job growth in general. After all, it's hard to be dignified when you're living on welfare."
The Eye of Cy pinkened briefly as the word "welfare" was spoken. "Cheap shot," Ogle mumbled.
"It's easy to scoff at the concept of the unlevel playing field when you have been born into an affluent family and haven't suffered from massive layoffs the way our auto workers have," McLane continued. "But for those people in Detroit-"
The Eye of Cy displayed a few brief flashes of green as several people took pleasure in McLane's personal attack on Cozzano. But most people didn't like it. They didn't like it at all.
Cozzano had turned slightly in McLane's direction. He looked like a great man, alone in his study, busy with important matters, who has to get up and discipline a puppy who has just piddled on the rug.
"My family is affluent because we love each other and we work hard," Cozzano said. "And I can promise you, Tip, that if you seek to gain the esteem of the American public by running my family into the ground, I will make you regret it on many levels. When a man makes cracks about my family, my natural response is to invite him to step outside. And I'm not above doing that here and now." Ogle rocketed half out of is chair and started screaming. "CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP!" Aaron could hardly see anything; the Eye of Cy had become blindingly intense, like a parabolic dish pointed directly into the sun. But the image in the middle changed and Tip came on the screen; his mouth was half open, his eyebrows somewhere up in the middle of his forehead, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The Eye of Cy turned blue (people who, as of three seconds ago, hated Tip McLane), with a few angry red screens (people who wanted Cozzano to punch McLane right here and now).
"Knockout punch," Ogle said. "Tip's out of the race." But just in case, he shoved the KIND/GENTLE-BELLIGERENT joystick toward KIND/GENTLE. Then he moved the MATERIAL-ETHEREAL joystick a lot closer to ETHEREAL.
It was almost possible to see the wheels turning in McLane's head. The look of surprise gradually faded, until he looked impassive, then calm and almost coldly defiant. "It wouldn't be the first time I had settled an argument that way," McLane said.
"Ouch," Ogle said.
"But one of the first things a president has to learn is to separate his personal feelings from the affairs of the nation, and-'
Colors shifted all over the Eye. "Damage control!" Ogle said, and slammed one of the buttons on the armrest.
"-as for the issue of the auto industry," Cozzano said, continuing his own sentence as if McLane had never opened his mouth, and blithely running him off the road, "it is simply wrong to say that people get jobs first and then feel good about themselves. That is a shallow view of human nature. Dignity can't be bought with a paycheck. Your student deferments kept you out of Vietnam, Tip, so you never saw what I saw: stooped peasants in the rice paddies who never made a dime in their lives but who had more dignity in the last joint of their little finger than a lot of highly paid lawyers and chief executives I can name. It goes the other way: if you have dignity, if you respect yourself, you will find a job. I don't care how bad the economy is. When my great-grandfather came to this part of the country, there weren't any jobs. So he came up with his own job. He had only been in America for a few weeks, but in that time he had become thoroughly American. He had come to believe that he could change his own life. That he could take charge of his own destiny."
"Very inspiring. But when my family came to California-" McLane began.
"Some think that unemployment hurts because of money," Cozzano said. "Because you can't afford to buy Nintendo games and fancy sneakers. That is shallow and cheap. Americans are not pure, money-grubbing materialists. Unemployment hurts people's feelings far more than their pocketbooks."
In the past few seconds all the graphs had veered downward, the colors turned bluish. "I fucked that up!" Ogle said, whacking keys and sliding joysticks furiously. "Bad move!"
Suddenly Tip McLane was on the screen. It was too late for Cozzano to dig himself out.
"Shit!" Ogle hissed. "Where does he get off saying that Americans are not shallow materialists?"
McLane was amused. He knew he had Cozzano. "Apparently the Governor of Illinois thinks that we'd all be happier being fully employed ... in rice paddies!"
The audience laughed. The Eye warmed suddenly to Tip McLane.
"Damn!" Ogle said. "Why'd he have to get profound on us?" He scratched his chin nervously, thinking hard, and fussed with the controls. "We have to suppress that urge to philosophize."
"Maybe the Governor hasn't been seeing a full cross section of the American public from his backyard in Tuscola," McLane said. "But I have, because I've visited all fifty states during the long primary campaign - even smaller states that my campaign manager begged me not to visit because he said they weren't important. I have talked to a lot of people. And over and over again, I get the impression that the people of America don't like being talked down to by politicians."
"That's for damn sure," Ogle said, punching a key that caused a hallucinatory bullet to whiz past Cozzano's head.
"They know what they want: jobs. Good jobs," McLane said. "What they don't need is vague talk about how to feel more dignified."
Ogle groaned. The PIPER 100 were showing strong support for McLane now. "They're killing us," he said, and slammed a big red button that said, simply, FLIP FLOP.
"When the forces of freedom and democracy stormed Hitler's Fortress Europe on D day," Cozzano said, "the elite spearhead of that invasion rained down out of the sky on parachutes. Parachutes made of nylon that was manufactured about half a mile away from my house in Tuscola, by my family. The nervous paratroopers, standing in the open doorways of those airplanes, looking down at the landscape of France thousands of feet below them, were putting a lot of trust in those folds of nylon."
"What does this have to do with anything?" Aaron said, mirroring the feelings displayed on the Eye of Cy: a state of chaotic flux.
"Shut up," Ogle mumbled. "This is good material. Reaganesque in its cloying nostalgia - with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perot before he went batshit."
"When you jump out of an airplane flying over a war zone, you need more than self-esteem to get you safely to the ground," Cozzano said. "You need a solid, well-made parachute. Young people leaving high school and college within the last few weeks have a lot in common with those troopers jumping out of that airplane. And if you think that William A. Cozzano intends to send them out that door with nothing more than some feel-good talk, you're dead wrong."
"But that's the opposite of what he just said," Aaron said.
"Just shut up," Ogle said. "I think he's got them going." As Cozzano's analogy started to become clearer, the monitor screens had stopped fluctuating and begun settling down into a dim greenish pattern. "We need to get Anecdote Development working on that D day thing."