karenika - books - trail fever

Trail Fever

But tonight Dole hits a new bottom. He steals Morry Taylor's trademark line.

"I'm a doer," he says. "Not a talker."

It's a sign, I decide. I disregard orders from above and set out to find Morry. At length I track him down in Des Moines, where I find him inside one of the Land Yachts shouting at Lenny, his piss-boy. That in itself isn't unusual. What is unusual is that he is shouting about the sort of thing an ordinary politician might shout about: some local journalist has dug into his past and found a story worth writing.

My first reaction, coming as this does on the heels of such devastating results for the Taylor campaign, id to be slightly saddened that this man who breaks all the rules of presidential politics obeys this one: Morry Taylor has something to hide. Sure enough, when he sees me, the candidate stops shouting and starts whispering. This, too, is unusual. All the other candidates and all the other political operatives are forever clustered together whispering their secrets. But with Morry and his piss-boys life is lived right out in the open. The Taylor campaign is not very good at this game of keeping the truth from the journalists, however, for the minute Morry storms out of the Land Yacht the secret comes tumbling out of the piss-boy. Here's Morry's secret:

A couple of years ago Morry was on a business trip in Des Moines when he came across a sad article in the local paper. A local black high school student - a football star and an honor student - had been shot while on vacation in Chicago. The bullet left him paralyzed from the waist down, and his family with financial problems. His parents remodeled their home to accommodate the boy's wheelchair but in the end came up short nineteen thousand dollars. The newspaper story Morry had read explained how the family was being forced to sell their home. Morry sent over the nineteen grand to the family the next day, anonymously, through a lawyer. Soon after that the newspapers wrote up the story about how and anonymous benefactor had come to the rescue.

And that was that, except that now Morry is running for president. He has become something of a public figure in Iowa, what with his name recognition running up around 80 percent. The newspaper has heard that he was the benefactor and is planning to expose his good deed. That was what I had walked in on: Morry had just been told that a local journalist was preparing to run with the story. Apparently, Morry feels that the last thing the family needs is to feel indebted to some rich guy who is now running for president; and that is why he's become so angry. He doesn't want to be exposed.

That's the skeleton in the candidate's closet. It bears the same relation to ordinary political skeletons as the candidate does to ordinary politicians. It is something worth thinking about on the way to New Hampshire.

Even though Trail Fever was not as funny as Liar's Poker, it gave an interesting sneak peek into the world of politics, Republican Party and the primaries. As always, Lewis's writing style is light, funny, and insightful.