Free The Eighth Day by Tom Avitabile Page A

Hiccock, you can go back to your office.”
    Hiccock was about to say something but held his tongue.
    “Ray, I’ll get started on background so when, and if, the boss decides to share this we’ll be ready,” Spence said. She left, followed by the two men.
    Hiccock just sat there stewing, an argument raging in his head.
∞§∞
    The President’s Council on Physical Fitness would have to rewrite its bylaws if it saw what the president of the United States was doing in the White House gym. James Mitchell, a younger-looking man than his fifty-eight years, was working out on the rowing machine. A cigarette dangled from his mouth as he strained on the oars while receiving the report from Tate and Reynolds. The man’s own doctors had of course warned him about his smoking, but he had been a fighter pilot and an ace in both Vietnam and the first Gulf War. He was shot down deep in Indian Country in the former and managed to evade the enemy, in their own backyard, for a month, ultimately returning to America a true hero. A little thing like a cigarette wasn’t going to land him in Arlington National Cemetery.
    James Mitchell was probably the most surprised man in America on election night. Although he had been the popular favorite early in the campaign, he was nearly ground up in the political machinery. The party bigwigs thrust their will on America and limited the field of who could become president to two—and Mitchell wasn’t one of them. The millions of dollars in each party’s war chest were bequeathed to the two prep school boys who were groomed for presidential service since they were still shitting in their diapers.
    Failing to get his party’s nomination meant he was boxed out of the big money and the essential television time those dollars bought. He and Reynolds revised their goal to achieving a decent enough double-digit independent turnout in this election to possibly pave the way for another run in four years. Mitchell’s little fledgling campaign turned to grassroots town meetings and tried to make the most of the Internet, including a personal blog he hammered out every day between campaign stops. But gaining a ten to eleven percent foothold into the next election wasn’t the way it played out. Because a fourth candidate, a Democrat from way out left, siphoned off enough votes that when the counting was over, the scrappy little fighter pilot with no money became President elect of the United States.
    The big three networks spent all of election night reporting that the vote was too close to call between the Democrat and Republican, with Mitchell not even breaking into his vaunted double digits. Their prognostications came back to bite them in their collective rear ends, when the actual vote tally came up in Mitchell’s favor.
    A karmic retribution of sorts ensued as the whole affair sent tremors throughout the media elite who earlier cast their “big vote” pronouncing Mitchell’s campaign as “dead on arrival” in Iowa. The first shock was felt in cable where many a verbose and traditionally aligned pundit found himself now out of favor and out of work. A new political reality swept its way onto the deeply rooted, bipartisan American scene on President Mitchell’s independent coattails.
    The cable news channels reengineered themselves, practically overnight, as the suits in those cable network’s executive offices unceremoniously jettisoned the established, venerated pillars of the conservative and liberal status quo. They immediately embraced anyone who ever hesitated long enough to utter, “um” when asked, “Are you a liberal or conservative?” Big salaries and signing bonuses soon followed. This newly hatched brood of “indies,” realizing that their newfound wealth and fame were directly connected to James Mitchell’s success, cut him slack, running interference on his behalf whenever some righty or lefty tried to convince the American people that being politically ambidextrous was