And he also happened to be his uncle—the brother of Kingston’s mother—so it wasn’t like he could just cut ties with him if he wanted to.
So despite the electorate being heavily against America joining another conflict in the Middle East, Kingston promised to commit a full arsenal of US troops to a potential war, and to protect Israel at all cost. With Sterling his de-facto campaign manager, he had boxed himself into a political corner. By Halloween, Baer went from a novelty act to ten points up in the polls.
The door of the suite opened and Emil Leudke walked in—a lone friendly face in a sea of ass-kissing. Emil put his phone away and headed toward him, showing urgency in each step of his old legs. After yesterday’s incident, they no longer felt able to speak freely in front of the campaign staff. So Emil had gone into the adjoining suite to call him.
Baer smiled for the first time in days. Age had slowed his mentor’s body, but not his mind or his passion for the cause. And he was still the best-dressed and most debonair man in the room.
Emil handed him a piece of paper, which he looked quizzically at. “What’s this?”
“This is your first act of being presidential, Teddy. It’s called an apology—just look into the camera and try to look like you mean it. They’ve all done it—Nixon, Reagan, Clinton.”
“Not you, Emil—have they gotten to you, too?”
“You know as well as I do what an important moment in history this is. We can’t take any chances—losing this election is not an option.”
The words were not necessary—Emil had been preparing him for this moment since he was a teenager. He always believed he would be president one day.
“What happened to that great advice you’ve been giving me since Maine? About never apologizing to anyone for what I believe.”
Emil just pointed at the piece of paper—it wasn’t negotiable.
There was no time to debate. The show was one minute away. Baer sat behind the boom microphone with an enormous mural of a grizzly bear in the background, the symbol of The Baer Cave Show. The cameras were positioned for his simulcast on GNZ. Emil began counting down.
Being the first presidential candidate with a built-in media outlet was a unique circumstance. It gave Baer a daily pulpit from which to preach to the voters. But as his critics liked to point out, it could also serve as a noose to hang himself, and yesterday that’s exactly what he almost did.
The comments in question were in response to Kingston’s ad campaign that compared Baer’s isolationist strategy to that of those who appeased Hitler in the 1930s.
Baer responded on air that he believed Hitler’s one big mistake was not following a similar strategy as the Baer Plan for America. That he should have built on the successes he had in the economy, education, and the arts, which history had chosen to ignore. And by doing so, he would have let the Russians and the Western Allies fight to the death, as they eventually did in the Cold War, while Germany continued to thrive in its isolated existence.
Aligor Sterling, responded by going on the national news and reminding America that Hitler didn’t make just one mistake, he made six million mistakes, as in the number of murdered Jews. It was damaging.
Watching Sterling’s comments in his office, Baer angrily quipped that the other mistake Hitler made was not taking care of Sterling when he had the chance—Aligor Sterling had survived a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. One of Baer’s staffers, a Kingston spy, secretly taped the comment and leaked it to the media. It might have been unethical, but it worked. His lead shrunk by epic proportions.
A loud bear growl shook the room—the famed intro to The Baer Cave.
“I told you, I told you, I told you,” Baer began the show with his usual high-energy rant. “I told you the Kingston machine would pull out every dirty trick to win this election, so that they can keep you living in fear. So they can send your sons and daughters to bleed in a foreign desert.
“But the main difference between Jim Kingston and myself is that I don’t send a twenty-year-old kid with a tape recorder to do my dirty work, just like he wants to send your twenty-year-old son or daughter to do his dirty work in the Middle East. And here’s another thing—I meant every word of what I said yesterday. I do think