Free The Candidate (Romantic Suspense) (The Candidate Series) by Josie Brown Page B

questioned her comings and goings.
    Instead, he tried hard not to think about her, not to wonder if she was going to be waiting for him when he got home from work. Needless to say he was glad when the Mansfield campaign hit the road again. He welcomed the chance to get out of town, to focus on something other than the fact that he was so obviously pussywhipped.
    Andy’s speech in Iowa, encouraging farmers to unite in their efforts to make biofuels, wave and wind resources the primary fuel source for the country, was a big hit. Newsweek showed up to cover it, calling his white paper on the issue “both user friendly and business friendly. Senator Mansfield will have the other candidates going green, too—with envy…” 
    Two days later, the latest NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll came out, showing the senator within spitting distance of Talbot.
    Ben and Andy got the news from Sukie while they were flying back from a stopover in Chicago, where three back-to-back fundraisers there were projected to net the campaign a tidy two million dollars. Abby was to rendezvous with them at the Four Seasons.
    They watched Brian Williams’ newscast about the poll from the satellite broadcast feed on the campaign’s private jet. Afterward, the anchorman segued into a biographical piece on Andy: the fact that Mansfield was the son of an itinerate farmer and a housewife; that he was orphaned at sixteen and raised himself, then enlisted as a Marine flight jock after high school; that as a pilot he had performed numerous acts of heroism; how, after leaving the Marines, Andy had gone onto law school and become a public defender; how he’d even won a case before the Supreme Court; a laundry list accounting of his accomplishments as a U.S. senator; and finally, his storybook marriage to a Vandergalen heiress. 
    It was a veritable love letter. “Some are already saying that this kind of enthusiasm for a candidate has not been seen since Barack Obama’s first term,” intoned Williams. “Early polls are showing that the senator is one of those rare candidates who attracts voters from across party lines.” 
    The staffers on the plane with Andy and Ben—Tess, Bess, and Jilly among them—showed their approval with hoots and high-fives. The handful of reporters who’d hitched a ride on the plane in order to cover the senator while he was on the campaign trail nodded and grinned as they scribbled copious notes. 
    That piece was followed by a pundit analysis of Mansfield’s campaign. Williams’ guests for the segment were the new Republican National Committee chairman James Orkin, and the conservative New York Times columnist, David Brooks. Williams asked Orkin point blank if the GOP’s leaders considered Mansfield’s surge in the polls “something that the party could get behind.”
    “Brian, we stand behind all our candidates,” Orkin chuckled. “But at this time, I think you’d agree with me that your question may be somewhat premature. Remember, there’s another twelve months to go before the first primary. No doubt about it, Andy’s a good man—but at this stage of his career, he lacks the gravitas of the frontrunner, Vice President Talbot.”
    Andy snorted loudly at that.  
    Brooks chimed in, “You know, in past presidential races, others have had impressive early leads. Remember Howard Dean in ’04? And Mike Huckabee in ’08? What’s going to matter now is whether or not Senator Mansfield can keep up the momentum. It will help him immensely if he has a good team around him. Unfortunately, I question whether that’s the case. Hiring campaign strategist Ben Brinker, if you ask me, was a somewhat questionable move.”
    Williams raised an eyebrow. “Why is that, David?” 
    Brooks shrugged. “Brinker’s past experience has been exclusively with Democratic candidates. That’s not to say that consultants can’t play both sides of the fence, but it does say something about Mansfield’s inability to attract a campaign