The Confirmation Read Online Free Page B

him like a human carpet, from the Capitol all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. The Capitol Police estimated the crowd at more than a half million, the largest gathering ever to attend a presidential inauguration.
    â€œMy fellow citizens, today begins a new era in America,” Long began. “It is a day in which there are no Republicans or Democrats, no liberals or conservatives, no blue states, red states, or green states. Today we are all Americans, and we stand united.” It was a safe beginning, and the crowd dutifully applauded. “I did not seek this office to deliver more of the same to the American people. I came to bring honest change to the federal government. The people have spoken; they have demanded that Washington change, and change we must.”
    Sitting behind Long, Salmon Stanley clapped his hands silently, a look of barely disguised disdain on this face. But Long could not see him. His eyes drank in the view of the sun-splashed Mall, with the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial directly in front of him, the Jefferson Memorial and reflecting pool to his left. He was on a roll now.
    â€œI assume this office beholden to no party or vested interest,” he proclaimed. “Today we do not exchange one party for the other. We replace a tired and failed partisanship with a new era of seeking common ground for the common good.” Members of the House and Senate sat impassively, their grey countenances decidedly unimpressed. Long knew they resented the fact that he had campaigned against them and everything they represented, denouncing business as usual in Washington. He was calling their bluff. Fight me, he seemed to say, and risk being drowned in a tidal wave of public disapproval. “The politics of the past, in which both parties vie for power while problems fester and people are disconnected from government, ends today. The founders’ gave ultimate sovereignty to the people, not the powerful. It is they who must rule here, not the special interests.”
    Then Long delivered the money line. “To those who say that we cannot change the ways of Washington, to those who insist that the system is broken beyond repair, to those who claim that we are too divided, I say: we can overcome the challenges before us, for we are Americans.” Loud and extended applause.
    Long’s speech, like most of the first inaugural addresses of his predecessors, focused on the domestic front, largely ignoring the world beyond America’s shores. But Long’s eloquence ignored a hard political reality: he had been elected by the smallest plurality of any president since Abraham Lincoln in 1860. A man without a party, he faced an openly hostile Democratic Senate and a skeptical Republican House. Could he succeed? Washington could be a petty and vicious place that took special pride in humbling those who rode into town on a white horse to tame it. Long was about to find that out the hard way.

THREE

    Over at the Madison Hotel at Fifteenth and M Streets, in a room near the grand ballroom, a seemingly endless click line of tuxedo and gowned donors stinking of loud perfume and cologne snaked into the hallway, down the stairs and into the lobby. The money crowd had paid $5,000 a couple to have their photo taken with two of the biggest celebrities of Red State America: Reverend Andy Stanton and former U.S. Senator Keith Golden, the new attorney general of the United States.
    Golden, a tall, earnest man with inviting eyes and a ready smile, sported a surplus of wavy brown hair, a fount of charisma and the political chops to help Long on the right. A graduate of the University of Virginia law school and a former U.S. Attorney, Golden had run for Congress sixteen years earlier against an entrenched Democrat and won, surprising everyone but himself. When the Democratic legislature carved him out of his district, he ran for the U.S. Senate, defeating another Democrat. After two terms, he lost a