The Last Debate Read Online Free

Valley of Texas. She’s been cited for liquor-law and several health-department violations, but none were serious.”
    “Serving alcohol to minors and filthy food to anyone is always serious to ordinary people, Jack.”
    “I realize that. That’s why he is on the panel.”
    “Isn’t Howley also from Texas?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Two Texans on a panel of four. How come?”
    “A conspiracy, obviously, sir.”
    “Obviously. The black girl?”
    “Major insurance paydirt. First, her uncle is a Black Muslim, having moved to Chicago from a small town in Georgia some years ago. Two, she rooms with a woman member of the Paul L. Greene campaign staff.”
    “Are they lesbians?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Too bad.”
    “Yes, sir. But it’s still paydirt.”
    “You’re right,” said Meredith. He looked up and over at the woman at the table. She was Joanne Windsor, the campaign press secretary. “What do you think about this?”
    “I think she should not be on the panel,” said Joanne Windsor. “She’s a kid, a lightweight, a standard black, as well as a close friend of the enemy.”
    The three other men at the table either grunted or smiled their agreement.
    “I went for her, among the weakest of the blacks, because I believed we had to have one on the panel,” said Jack Turpin. “It would surely be leaked that we had kept off all blacks.”
    “How could that hurt us?” said Will Hodges, one of the other men. He was the campaign’s pollster. “The numbers show that we may not get more than two percent of the black vote anyhow. So we lose a few more?”
    Turpin shook his head. “No, I think we should look upon her as serious insurance. If something goes wrong for us during the debate, we then toss out the charge that we just discovered the panel was tainted by the fact that one of the panelists lived with an official of the Greene campaign. Insurance, insurance, insurance.”
    David Donald Meredith stopped reading the papers and smiled at Turpin, who went on with his self-praise.
    “I wanted as many vulnerabilities as possible as insurance on all of them. Naylor and her sister’s abortion. On the Mexican, there’s not only the mother and her dirt and drunks. Nelson’s check showed him to be too young, too ambitious. He thinks he’s a brown Donaldson or Wallace, and the chances are he’ll go too far trying to nail you and make a fool of himself.”
    Meredith said: “You are the best, Jack, you really are. Between you and Jesus I have the best campaign management in the history of American politics.”
    “We’ll all say amen to that,” Will Hodges said.
    “Howley? What about Howley?” Meredith asked. “Does he have insurance possibilities?”
    “Not really. He’s a widower, no girlfriend at present. He served and was honorably discharged from the navy in the fifties.”
    “Children with drug problems?”
    “No children of any kind.”
    “I see a reference to a bankruptcy. What is that all about?”
    “His uncle ran a Western Auto store in Van Alstyne, Texas, that went belly-up.”
    “Could be useful, who knows. Ordinary people don’t like people who file for bankruptcy. Why did you take him as moderator?”
    “He’s part of a deal I made with CNS News. They came to me through a deeply covered third-party intermediary asking if there was anything we could do to make sure one of their anchors was the moderator. Their news programs are running third, and it might give them some much needed visibility. I told them that there was no way we would ever agree to Don Beard.”
    “Amen, amen. He spits and fires with venom for me every evening. Every evening.”
    “Exactly. They offered Naylor as a backup. I said no, but maybe as a panelist. They said, fine, as long as no other network anchor moderated. So we had to go with a print guy. Howley seemed the safest of them because he’s about the only one left from the old school of journalism. He’s been as bad to them as he’s been to us.”
    “What do