Free Primary Colors by Joe Klein Page B

you're gonna do?" He stormed. "Why not throw down the gauntlet? Make it clear that this election is going to be a contest between the future and the past of the Democratic--"
    "Because it isn't, Arthur," I said. "The primaries may turn out to be. But the election is between us and the Republicans."
    "You're sounding like that jerk Sporken."
    "This is what we're doing, Arthur."
    We set up an open phone line from the microphone at UNH to anyone who wanted to hear it. We told Jerry Rosen, and several other New York types, that Stanton was going to have something interesting to say about Ozio. We told some of the Washington scorps they might want to listen in, too--though we weren't too specific on the Ozio part of the program. "You want me to listen to a welfare reform speech on the telephone?" A. P Caulley of The New York Times asked. He was smart, but better known for oenophilia than initiative. "Do you think this election is going to be about welfare reform?"
    "Well, that's part of it," I said. "The folks seem interested. What do you think it's going to be about?"
    "What it's always about," he said. "Sex and violence."
    And he was right: this was about violence.
    Stanton didn't say very much as we rode the van to Durham. He didn't even play any music. He flipped through the cards for the speech, noodling with this and that, crossing out and overwriting with his felt-tip. I couldn't tell what, if anything, he was doing to the Ozio card. And then he did something odd. He asked me something personal: "Henry, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?"
    It was two days away. We were heading back to Mammoth Falls right after the speech. I had thought about visiting Mother and her new husband, Arnie Nadouyan, in Bel Air--a Hollywood Thanksgiving: turkey and sprouts by the pool, starlets and equipment. (Arnie always had the latest in clients and electronics.) But I hadn't thought very hard about it, and now it was too late to make reservations. I'd figured I'd see what the muffins were doing.
    "Would you be able to join Susan, Jackie and me at the Mansion?" he asked.
    "Absolutely," I said.
    "You know," he said, suddenly deepening his voice and giving me his most intense look, "we've kinda come to think of you as family." "Yuh," I said, swallowing hard, hoping to gain control of my voice. "It would mean a lot to me, Governor."
    And then we were there, at UNH.
    And he whiffed on it.
    He skipped the Ozio card. He didn't mention Ozio at all. He delivered a standard welfare reform speech--badly. The kids snoozed. I paced the back of the hall, feeling dog-tired and slightly sick. Stanton did rally during the Q&A. He was absolutely brilliant on a question that came out of nowhere, about the similarities between the black underclass and the Irish underclass of the nineteenth century. His belated virtuosity pissed me off.
    I hadn't felt strongly about nuking Ozio. It was an irksome situation--the governor was, clearly, irked and that had to be respected--but it seemed a preseason game nonetheless, one of those peripheral dustups you get all tangled up in early on, before the real campaign begins. Some candidacies get lost in these distractions; others use them as a road test, a way to keep everybody occupied, see how the team reacts to stress, see what the pecking order will be; others ignore them completely. Usually they don't count for much. But we had decided to take it public. We had made the decision, told selected scorps (who would, no doubt, get the word back to Ozio). We had planned the thing, and then whiffed on it. It was not good. It smelled of weakness.
    Stanton knew it. He rushed out of there, stinting his usual ration of meaningful handshakes. He almost always took special pains with college kids, desperate to lure them aboard--the social and ideological dynamic of the Eugene McCarthy campaign was written into the fiber of his being: his candidacy wouldn't have legitimacy unless the kids were on board. But he wasn't seeing them that