The Rally
Hello, I hope that you are doing great on Labor Day!
The novel that I wrote with Stephen Marche – The Last Election - arrives next week! It’s about the campaign manager of a third-party presidential candidate, a journalist hunting a massive story, and the near future of American democracy. Here’s an excerpt below describing a campaign rally for Cooper Sherman, the Maverick Party presidential candidate. Hope you enjoy it!
February 7th, 7:43 pm, Target Center, 600 First Avenue North, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“Topeka bodega topeka bodega topeka bodega topeka bodega,” Cooper is saying over and over again. Mikey and Cooper have been chasing each other around the green room throwing and catching whiffle balls. Cooper just imbibed a cocktail of Nyquil, sugar and nutrients. Cooper is shirtless and Mikey can’t stop giggling. Above them, as random as thunder, comes the boom of twenty-five thousand strangers cheering.
The opening act was Stipe Miocic, UFC fighter and Cleveland firefighter. Now Jesse Ventura is talking about independents and Minnesota and Minnesota as a state for independents. The laughter is huge. The applause is even huger. Ventura is killing. He always does.
Nellie has been watching Mikey and Cooper roughhouse like an amused au pair. The message comes to her headset and she passes it on: “Showtime.”
Mikey towels down Cooper’s sweaty chest, and they throw on his shirt and jacket, pin the mic to his lapel and then tuck the cord into his jacket pocket, and they head up through the backstage area.
Cooper stops Mikey on the stairs. They embrace. Then there’s the hot first staccato beats of Call Ticketron from Run the Jewels, and the crowd is howling wildly by “Kumbaya” as Cooper strolls up beaming into the spotlight. Mikey goes down, underground, to the control center. Above him the roar of the crowd fills the air, the stomping of tens of thousands of feet. Just before Mikey plunges down the corridor, he hears the opening line: “They told me I’m not supposed to swear.” There’s a huge laugh, then he is alone. He makes his way underneath the stadium as secretive and determined as a Jesuit on a mission. The sounds of the wider world, the muffled ecstasies of the crowd, are distant. He is too far underground to hear them, climbing back and forth up stairs used to the heavy treads of tens of thousands of Minnesotans.
Sarah Ren is monitoring a bank of screens in the control booth. “How we doing?” Mikey asks.
“Look at this drone shot,” she says. Sarah is happy; Mikey’s never seen her happy.
The shot passes over a massive crowd all waving Maverick party signs towards Cooper’s beaming face. The cold made the air clearer, emptier, and he looks defined, imperturbable, feeding off and feeding into the great wave of mass love. It’s going to look great in ads.
Cooper’s speech is majestic, rapturous. “The reason I started down this path,” he is saying, “the reason we began the crazy adventure that is this campaign is that I see what you see. The system isn’t working. The country works but the system doesn’t. This great country, the most productive country in the world, a country built on openness and frankness, is turning into a country where only guys like me have a shot, where everyone wants to close down the other guy, where our words have been caged in shame. Enough. Enough. It’s time to take a risk, because in politics, just like in life, the real risk is not taking a risk.”
Thirty-six seconds of applause by Mikey’s watch.
“And let’s be real honest here. OK, we got one party that has stopped believing in democracy, and you got another party that will be pointing at the rulebook as the world burns. And you know as I used to say on television ‘Do the math.’”
The crowd begins to chat “Do the math. Do. The. Math. Do. The. Math.”
“This won’t do anymore, man. This isn’t going to work out.”
Sarah is holding Mikey’s hand, gripping it, twisting it.
“You feel it?” she asks.
“I feel it,” Mikey answers.
They are feeling the rush of the crowd’s ecstasy overtaking them, spreading through them from this stadium to the world. They can feel their reach extending. They can feel the onset of power.
“We need to be clear. We need to be clear about our successes as much as our failures. The problem isn’t the American people. The problem isn’t the American spirit. We are, today, as much as we ever were, a nation of strivers, a nation of liberty-lovers, of fighters for a cause. We’re the country of innovators. Why can’t we innovate our system of government? We’re riding into the twenty-first century on a dying horse-drawn carriage.”
The crowd laughs at this lame joke. They now await his cues.
“And I’m going to tell you something. The moment we get a system that works, we will be unstoppable.”
Cooper coughs. Somebody from the crowd shouts out: “Say it!” And Cooper looks at him, smiles. There’s enough time to throw a whiffle ball.
“You want me to say it?”
There are a few more shouts. “Nah, I can’t. There’s a fine.” He’s smiling now. The crowd is calling for him to say it. “All right, you know what? I’m going to say it. The time has come to unfuck America.”
The roar overtakes them all, and it overtakes Mikey and Ren in their booth. Maybe they’re going to win. Maybe the Republic isn’t going to end. Maybe they’re going to build a new America out of the Maverick Party. And there is nothing like American politics for a rush of tribalism, a crowd overwhelmed by a vision of themselves and their country, and by its neverending dream that a new world is possible.
