school project. We can question the girl, but Ellen’s faculties had slipped greatly at the end. She couldn’t differentiate between the Apostles and aliens.”
A long silence ensued, before the Candidate said, “It’s time for the children to come home. I was the same age as Maggie when I was brought in. With the kingdom within our sights, I think the timing is ideal.”
With that, the Candidate hung up the phone.
Chapter 15
Theodore Baer ended his phone call, pondering the news he just heard. He looked around his penthouse suite, which served as both the studio for his syndicated radio show and his campaign headquarters. It was the first time he’d been alone since he began his shotgun candidacy for the presidency on Labor Day, just two months ago. It was both a relief and a surprise not to see any campaign managers, pollsters, or whoever else was trying to attach themselves to his backside.
He moved to the window and looked down at the city below, reflecting on how this all started, back at the University of Maine. A much simpler time in his life where he hosted his first radio show on a college station. It was called The Teddy Baer Show, but was anything but cute and snugly. His passionate opinions got him suspended from school on more than one occasion, including the infamous term paper he wrote that compared George Washington to Adolf Hitler, which he’d meant as a compliment to both men.
Following graduation, he moved to a small station in Portland, Maine. His communications professor, Emil Leudke—the one who pushed him to do the college radio show—was such a believer in Theodore that he left his professorship to become his producer. It was the late 1970s, fresh off the wound of Vietnam, and America was being held hostage—overseas by the Iranians and at home by a gas shortage. The nation was sick, and like any ailing soul, it desperately sought a cure.
His message resonated in a big way—rebuilding a self-sufficient America that wasn’t reliant on foreign oil or trade, and didn’t involve itself in international skirmishes that drained its blood and treasure like Vietnam. He shouted to anyone who would listen that America should once again claim independence from the rest of the world, even if his critics, the dreaded internationalists, called him a radical.
If he was, he figured he was in good company. George Washington had warned the nation in his Farewell Address about the dangers of permanent foreign alliances, and the current conflict in the Middle East was another example that his warning should have been heeded. Washington believed in building a self-sufficient America, and becoming unnecessarily entangled in the battles of others worked contradictory to this goal.
Adolf Hitler believed in this same concept of self-sufficiency, or what the Germans called autarky. He sought economic self-reliance, just like Washington, especially when it came to raw materials. Baer was convinced that the reason General Washington sat in the pantheon of history, while Hitler lay in the bowels of infamy, was that the German leader didn’t stick to the principles of autarky. Instead, he chose to seek world domination and all the pitfalls that went with such a strategy.
Baer peered down at the ants below. The same way the “unbeatable” Jim Kingston and his political machine once looked at him. But as the historic election approached, Theodore Baer owned a slight lead in the polls, even after yesterday’s controversial comments.
His independent candidacy was initially treated as a publicity stunt. And they were right—Baer knew he couldn’t beat the machine. Republican or Democrat didn’t matter to him—same disease, different doctor—but it was a chance for him to get his licks in, especially during the debates, and it sure wouldn’t hurt the ratings of his syndicated radio show The Baer Cave.
But then the Republican nominee was caught celebrating Labor Day weekend at his Florida estate with his pants down—literally—and that was only the half of it, as his partner in crime turned out to be his running-mate. This made them not only endless fodder for the late night television comics, but more importantly, unelectable. With the election only sixty days away, too late to contain the damage, Theodore Baer suddenly didn’t seem such a bad alternative for the anti-Kingston crowd.
Baer then received another dose of election magic, when tensions intensified in the Middle East, moving to the brink of war. Kingston’s biggest contributor and supporter was Aligor Sterling, head of the Sterling Center, the world’s biggest sponsor of Jewish causes.