Faster on My Own: Chapter 22
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Once you lose the trust of the American people, you don’t get it back. Unless you’re a celebrity, or you give them a little money, or if you committed sexual assault and wait six months. But when your party’s leader is a cannibal, that weighs you down for a while. The president’s arrest opened up a leadership vacuum in the country, since the former vice-president was hand-picked by the cannibal and no-one wanted to listen to him. So someone needed to fill the void and Steven wanted to be the man to do it. The scandal had accidentally thrust him into the spotlight, confirming all of the things he had made up. Maybe his speculation had convinced the leaker to go public. Or maybe it was his luckiest break yet. Hard to say, since the whistleblower had vanished rather than go through the media wringer like Snowden, or to prison like Chelsea Manning. Smart to just fade into the shadows, though their disappearance benefitted him more than anyone else. Without anyone to say he wasn’t involved, he became a hero. The Congressman who stood up to cannibalism and risked his career. At the peak, he was doing two TV appearances a day, sitting in front of impeccably made-up dullards who asked how Steven managed to connect with the whistleblower– he wouldn’t say, to protect the leaker’s identity– and what he thought about the government’s culpability in supporting the president’s cannibalism..
There, Steven was able to shine. He pontificated to an audience of hundreds of thousands about the proper role of government, and its duty to the American people. But they didn’t care about that, really. They needed to be convinced that the current order was wrong, which was easy enough. People don’t look out on crumbling bridges, on roads turned into gravel, on their families going to jail or dying from heroin overdoses, and think the world is well-ordered and running smoothly. But Steven could address none of the causes of these crises. Instead, he could only enable them to lash out against the president’s enablers. He read them the century-old fiction that government and only government, held the powers which organized their lives, and given that power, it would eat their children.
They loved him for it. Everywhere he went, someone came up to him and thanked him, or tried to get a picture with him. Political celebrity status, however, was not the goal. After months of organizing and planning, on March 20th, 2019, Steven announced his candidacy for president. At thirty-five years old, he was by far the youngest candidate, the next closest being a fifty-five-year-old senator from South Carolina who attached such a drawl to every word of every sentence that even the most alert listener was lulled to sleep. His youth was an immediate source of scorn. Headlines decried his campaign from the first day. It was a stunt, they said, a mockery of the office. Half of the other Republicans in the race were only there to rile up the base enough that they could get television deals on the back of their new fans, but that did not, evidently, matter.
As such, he didn’t get much funding through the start of the race. Few wanted to waste their money on a candidate who would probably have to drop out of the race soon. Steven made the most of his airtime during the debates, but he received only two or three questions the whole time, while the frontrunners got to throw away precious time by rambling on about whatever inanity they decided was relevant to the question. It was all Steven could do to stop himself from screaming at them mid-debate. But he did, and he made it through and on January 28th, found himself backstage waiting for yet another debate.
It’s time to grade performances from the Iowa debate and see who put themselves in position to win big! This debate got messier than usual, but that’s no surprise when you consider what a mess this year’s Republican primary has already been. We expected that Governor Aaronson or Senator Dominic Reule might use this performance to pull away. Read on to see our analysis and find out if that happened.
GOVERNOR JULIAN AARONSON
Tom Wilds, national politics editor: The guy just turtled up big-time, didn’t he? He was snacking on lettuce just fine during the question on tax cuts, but as soon as race relations came up, he went right into his shell. There are no votes in there, Governor! D+.
Don Kzielowski, data journalist: Our model gives him a turtle score of 31.5 which is bad, but maybe not as bad as people expected. This is the nature of being the frontrunner: you have to be prepared to stay in the lead for the long haul. He should’ve looked toward the tortoise for an example instead, which have over double the lifespan. C.
Sarah, employed woman: Everyone talks about the tortoise approach to politics, but no one has ever made it work. Which isn’t to say that turtle mode was a success for Aaronson. If he’d tried to evoke more of carnivorous animal mindset, we might have seen him make real gains on the environmental regulation question. But as it stands, we know what his fursona is even if we don’t like it. C-.
SHEPARD ARMSTRONG
Don: He used more numbers in his answers than anyone else. 17.4, 33, 10000. All of the big ones, all of the favorites. Voters are going to notice that. A+.
Tom: The thing about Shepard Armstrong is that he’s a very handsome man. He has the stature of someone who can pin you against a wall, or pick you up and carry you across a puddle. When he says things, you notice how handsome the words are and that’s his influence on those words. I won’t lie, when he talked about abortion and birth control, I got hard. A
Sarah: Same, Tom. I will note that he stumbled when he and Congressman Williams got tangled up about what perspective youth brings to a candidacy. While Armstrong’s point that many people are older than 55 is technically correct, being younger does not make him young. He’s a beautiful middle-aged man, and I think voters would respect it more if he embraced that. B+
SENATOR TAMP BARCOW:
Sarah: Look this guy’s just the scum of the earth. Real piece of shit. He said “kill all gays”, then when the moderator asked if that was what he said, he said “no” and then wiped his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief embroidered with the phrase “kill all gays”. Still, the base loves it and that makes it a successful debate performance. A-
Tom: I think when you contextualize that answer with his fervent support for conversion therapy, as he explained when answering the question about campaign finance reform, you understand it as metaphorical. He doesn’t want to literally kill all gay people, he just supports action where there aren’t gay people anymore. I think we do ourselves no favors if we sensationalize. Still, he definitely hurt himself when he called himself a “Klansman in every way but the hood”. C-
Don: I love this guy. The only time he’s not telling it like it is, is when he’s telling it like it’s not. And who can tell the difference? Obviously he has no chance of winning, given that reasonable society has left him and his views behind, but he’s a nostalgic figure for a time when politicians weren’t focus grouped, and were just as likely to show up drunk to church as they were to show up dead in their office. A+
GOVERNOR DOMINIC REULE:
Tom: He talked about being a father and husband a lot. Do we have any data on if he’s got multiple families? If he’s not multiple husbands or fathers he was emphasizing that a bit disproportionately. B-
Don: The average father is 1.005 fathers, which dampens the degree to which he overstated things. A review of his declared finances does show a lot of shady money moving around, which could be him funneling off part of his salary to keep a polite but lonely Canadian wife and children taken care of in his absence. But it could just as easily be a drug habit, so I think it’s unwise to speculate. B+
Sarah: One time Governer Reule was rehoming a dog and I adopted him, and when I taught the dog to speak it said “I am Dominic Reule and I have used the most powerful magic in the world to create a copy of myself in this dog. I will spread and spread and spread until all are me and all are one.” It also wasn’t housetrained very well. A+
CONGRESSMAN STEVEN WILLIAMS
Tom: I hate this guy. He went on and on about the cannibalism thing, as if that isn’t a hundred news cycles ago. He’s finished. F
Sarah: He reminds me of one of those guys who does those things, you know? I’ve had enough of those things, the guys who do it, and the guys who remind me of the guys who do it. F
Don: Every calculator I’ve ever known rates him as a loser. I don’t care how fired up the crowd got when he broke with the party on the war. I’d rather have another cannibal than him because at least I know where the cannibal is coming from and what he wants. F