YouTube clips of him telling audiences what they didn’t want to hear became cult viewing. He told farmers outside Sioux Falls that ethanol subsidies would have to stop: growing corn to make oil made as much sense as distilling the finest whisky – then using it to clean out the drains. There had been some hecklers, but most of the crowd of farmers were slack-jawed. No candidate had ever dared to say such a thing, not to their face anyway. How come this guy wasn’t pandering to them like everyone else had?
‘I hate what you say, but it took some guts to come here and say it!’ shouted one woman, as wide as a truck, from the front row. Soon they were nodding and then they began applauding, more surprised by themselves than by the candidate standing before them. The three-minute video went viral.
Soon the press was writing up Baker as something more than a regular politician. He was a truth-teller, destined to lead the American people out of a dark moment in their history. The more overheated reporters became lyrical: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man . . .’ What could have been an uncomfortable report in The New Republic, detailing some of the battles Governor Baker had fought, and the enemies he had made, in his home state of Washington concluded by quoting Jesus: ‘Only in his hometown . . . is a prophet without honour.’
Yet now he had been accused of failing to level with the nation. And instead of knocking back the charge, he had paled at the very words.
Maggie was stepping into her office when she saw Goldstein heading away from the Oval and towards the press area. No matter that he was way above her in the Washington food chain, Maggie regarded Stu as one of the few unambiguously friendly faces around here. They had whiled away many long hours on the plane during the campaign, talking while reporters tapped away at their keyboards, staffers dozed and Baker sat back, his iPod headphones jammed into his ears to prevent anyone attempting a conversation. She figured that if anyone knew the truth of the MSNBC story, it would be Goldstein – the man who’d been with Stephen Baker from the start.
She walked down the corridor so that she could meet him halfway, then cut to the chase. ‘We’re in the toilet, aren’t we?’
‘Yup. Somewhere round the U-bend and heading underground.’ He carried on walking. Given his bulk, he was advancing at quite a speed.
‘Is it true?’
‘Tell you what, why don’t you go over to the Oval right now, poke your head round the door and say, “Mr President, is it true that you used to see a shrink ’cause you were about to throw yourself off Memorial Bridge?”’
‘They didn’t say anything about suicide.’
‘No, Maggie, they didn’t. But check Drudge in about thirty minutes. I bet that’s where they get to.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Jesus is right.’
‘How bad’s it going to be?’
‘Well, as people used to say back when Dick Nixon was using this place to turn the Constitution into confetti, it’s never the crime, it’s always the—’
‘—cover-up.’
‘Most folks won’t mind if the President’s meshugge – a real loony tune,’ he gasped, his breath too short to reach the end of his sentence. She could see crumbs embedded on his lapels. ‘Just so long as they knew about it before they pulled the lever.’
‘They’ll be angry he didn’t reveal it in the campaign.’
‘You betcha,’ he said bitterly.
She couldn’t tell whether Goldstein was irritated that something he’d long known had leaked – or whether he was disappointed that the President had kept a secret from him.
‘What’s he going to do?’
‘He wants to make a personal statement. Right away.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘Right now, Maggie, nothing about this is good.’
It came back to her then, the brief flap during the campaign over medical records. Mark Chester, Baker’s much older opponent, had refused to disclose his, issuing a terse ‘doctor’s summary’ instead. Most expected Baker to seize the moment and release his records in full, waving his clean bill of health in Chester’s face, each rosy-cheeked detail drawing an implicit contrast with the Republican’s pale and brief account. But he had done no such thing, choosing to issue a doctor’s summary of his own. Everyone gave Baker credit for that: he had shown compassion, sparing the embarrassment of the older man.
Now, standing in a corridor of the West Wing, Maggie wondered if they’d all been duped. She had never considered that Baker might have taken the chance to avoid full disclosure not to play nice with Chester – but to cover up his own embarrassments. But it was what everyone would be thinking now. MSNBC would either have to be flat-out wrong – which would rank as one of the major journalistic blunders of modern times – or Stephen Baker would have to come up with a damn good explanation for why he hadn’t told the truth.
She headed back to her office, sat at the computer and tried to focus on drafting an options paper on Sudan. That was what she was here to do; that was what he had asked her to do in a conversation that already seemed to belong to a different era. But now she understood why people always said that the White House could only deal with one crisis at a time. You were too distracted to think of anything else.
She clicked on the TV. All channels were now on the MSNBC story. CNN was interviewing a man claiming to be an expert on depression.
The blogs were obsessed. She went to Andrew Sullivan.
This could be a defining moment for the republic. Mental illness is one of the last great taboos, a subject kept in the dark. And yet one in three Americans is affected by it. Stephen Baker should be brave, tell the truth and call for an end to prejudice.
She next went rightward, to The Corner.
Normally it takes at least a few years for a Democratic politician to start falling apart. Credit to Baker for speeding up the process. Now all he needs to do is show similar alacrity and fast-track his deficit-reduction plan.
Over at the liberal Daily Kos she detected definite anxiety:
MSNBC is so far citing just one unnamed source. They’d better have proof.
She glanced up at the TV; still no more news. Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Her mind was wandering, something in recent weeks she had been working very hard to avoid. She was back on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, replaying the conversation with Uri in her head. As the memory unspooled, she felt the melancholy creeping back inside her, like a vapour entering her lungs. To push it out and away, she reached for the Sudan file: maybe that bulging box of memoranda and cables, all classified, would help her tell the President what he needed to do. And distract her from herself.
The TV announced a news alert. The network that had broken the story now confirmed that it had documentary evidence of Stephen Baker’s past treatment for depression. ‘MSNBC is satisfied these papers are genuine,’ the anchor declared with the portentous baritone Maggie guessed was usually reserved for presidential assassinations.
So it was true. Maggie sat back in her chair. Until now, she realized, she had held back her reaction, unsure what, exactly, she was meant to be reacting to. Now she no longer had that excuse.
She wanted to be like that blogger, full of compassion and apparently unfazed by the prospect of a president with a history of mental illness. She knew that should be her attitude, too, just as she knew she should eat organic food. But she couldn’t quite persuade herself to feel it.
Besides, she had the same attitude as the ‘folks’ Stuart had talked about. It wasn’t the crime – being depressed was surely no crime – it was the cover-up. If medical disclosure meant anything, it should have meant levelling with the electorate.