student. After a moment, he said, “Do you love this country?”
Rydell didn’t get the question’s relevance. “Excuse me?”
“Do you love this country?” Drucker repeated firmly.
“What kind of a question is that?”
Drucker opened his palms. “Indulge me.”
Rydell frowned. “Of course, I love my country. What does that have to do with anything?”
Drucker nodded, as if that was the right answer. “I love it too, Larry. I’ve devoted my whole life to serving it. And this used to be a great country. A world leader. The Japanese, the Chinese . . . they weren’t even a speck in our rearview mirror. We put a man on the moon fifty years ago. Fifty years ago. We used to be the standard bearers of modernity. We were the ones showing the rest of the world how it’s done, how science and technology and new ideas can help us live better lives. We were the ones exploring new visions of what a twenty-first-century society should look like. And where are we now? What have we become?”
“A lot poorer,” Rydell lamented.
“Poorer, meaner, fatter . . . and dumber. We’re moving backward. Everyone else is charging ahead and we’re backpedaling to the point where we’ve become a joke. We’ve lost our standing in the world. And you know why? Leadership,” he said, jabbing an angry finger at Rydell. “It’s all about leadership. We used to elect presidents who blew us away with their intelligence. With their knowledge of the world and their sharp wit and their dignity. Guys who used to inspire us, guys the rest of the world respected, guys who made us proud. Guys who had vision.”
“We have one of those now,” Rydell interjected.
“And you think we’re out of the woods?” Drucker shot back. “You think, hey presto, the country’s safe now? Think again. We just had eight years of an oil wildcatter I wouldn’t even hire to run a car wash, eight years of a guy who thought his instincts were manifestations of God’s will, eight years of criminal incompetence and unbridled arrogance that brought our country to its knees, and did we learn anything? Clearly not. Hell, it took the economic meltdown of the century to just barely manage to scrape through this victory. This was no landslide, Larry. Damn near half the country voted for more of the same—or worse. We actually came this close to putting someone who thinks The Flintstones is based on fact, someone who only got a passport a year before the election and who wouldn’t take an interview for a month while she was whisked away to be quietly educated about what’s happening in the real world, someone who actually thinks she’s going to see Jesus Christ again on this earth during her lifetime and who thinks our boys in Iraq are out there doing God’s work,” he raged, slamming his palm against the table. “We actually came this close to putting someone as risibly, absurdly unqualified as that within a seventy-two-year-old cancer-weakened heartbeat of the presidency. As ridiculous and insane as that sounds, it actually almost happened, Larry, and it could still happen. That’s how blinded we’ve become when it comes to choosing our leaders. And do you know why it almost happened? You know why they almost got away with it?”
Rydell thought about Father Jerome and started to see what Drucker was getting at. “Because God is on their side,” he said.
“Because God is on their side,” Drucker repeated solemnly.
“Or so they claim,” Rydell added with a slight, mocking shrug.
“That’s all it takes. We’ll elect any bumbling fool, any champion of mediocrity to the highest office in the land as long as they have God as their running mate. We’ll hand them responsibility for everything—the food we eat, the homes we live in, the air we breathe—we’ll give them the power to nuke other countries and destroy the planet, even when they can’t pronounce the world ‘nuclear’ properly. And we’ll do that proudly and with no hesitation at all just as long as they say the magic words: that they believe. That they have Jesus in their heart. That they seek the guidance of a higher father. That they can look into the heart of a Russian president instead of talking to the experts. We’ve got presidents making policy decisions based on faith, not reason. And I’m not talking about Iran here. I’m not talking about Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. I’m talking about us. I’m talking about America and this evangelical revival that’s sweeping